PhD project This PhD project explores how participatory design can be reoriented through practices of unlearning, care, celebration, and relational engagement in contexts marked by social, ecological, and epistemic complexity. Drawing on Latin American critical and decolonial thought, feminist epistemologies, and participatory design traditions, the research investigates how design might contribute to more pluriversal and regenerative ways of living together.
The project develops a series of Situated Practical Explorations (SPEs): participatory and research-through-design inquiries that create spaces for collective encounter, celebration, making, and reflection. Rather than treating design as a problem-solving activity, these explorations approach design as a relational practice through which people can cultivate attention, affective attunement, and new ways of perceiving and responding to the relationships that sustain life.
Through explorations involving shared cooking, ritual remembrance, embodied practices for collective celebrations, and engagements with human and earth beings, the research examines how celebration can function as a mode of inquiry and a way of knowing. These explorations have gradually shifted the focus of the project from participation and collaboration toward questions of relationality, porosity, affect, and responsibility.
The dissertation contributes to ongoing conversations in participatory and decolonial design by proposing celebration as a methodological and epistemological orientation for designing otherwise, one that foregrounds embodied, collective, and affective ways of knowing while opening possibilities for the emancipation and unlearning of design.
