Pablo Calderón Salazar
I am a designer, educator and researcher living in Brussels.
I studied Industrial Design (bachelor level) at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, Colombia (2008) and Social Design (Master in Design) at the Design Academy Eindhoven (June 2013). I recently defended my doctoral dissertation (April 2021), a PhD in the Arts with the Catholic University of Leuven, in the wider context of the project TRADERS (Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space).
The essence of my practice lies in collaboration with local partners in the different contexts where my projects take place where I empathically interpret the interests of different constituents, using dialogue as my main tool. Giving great attention to the political, economical, social and cultural conditions under which my projects take place, I produce texts, installations, graphics, videos, interventions and objects that provoke reflection around relevant issues in society; but this critical stance is always accompanied by a propositive one, which tries to hint into better ways of living together.
My current creative and research interests circle around the concept of 'rearguard designing' as a (new) framework for social design from a perspective of situated creative practices.
Supervisors: Nancy Vansieleghem, Burak Pak, and Veerle van Der Sluys
I studied Industrial Design (bachelor level) at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University of Bogotá, Colombia (2008) and Social Design (Master in Design) at the Design Academy Eindhoven (June 2013). I recently defended my doctoral dissertation (April 2021), a PhD in the Arts with the Catholic University of Leuven, in the wider context of the project TRADERS (Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space).
The essence of my practice lies in collaboration with local partners in the different contexts where my projects take place where I empathically interpret the interests of different constituents, using dialogue as my main tool. Giving great attention to the political, economical, social and cultural conditions under which my projects take place, I produce texts, installations, graphics, videos, interventions and objects that provoke reflection around relevant issues in society; but this critical stance is always accompanied by a propositive one, which tries to hint into better ways of living together.
My current creative and research interests circle around the concept of 'rearguard designing' as a (new) framework for social design from a perspective of situated creative practices.
Supervisors: Nancy Vansieleghem, Burak Pak, and Veerle van Der Sluys
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Master Thesis by Pablo Calderón Salazar
The Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells (in the documentary from VPRo Time For Change) states that people accept capitalism, not because they agree with it, but because it is the only system that they know; this condition is perpetuated by governments, banks and corporations who, with the help of the media, benefit from it. As David Orrel warns in his book Economyths: "this economic system may have lived for 150 years, which signifies a triumph of some kind, yet if it would live for ten more years, it would be catastrophic".
These thoughts from eminent thinkers, together with the undeniable consequences of a global financial crisis, evidence the urge of building alternative types of value that do not rely on the existing financial and monetary system, but on trust. Parallel systems should be built, fostered and up-scaled in order to out-weigh capitalism and free market; and it is precisely the space of the marketplaces (where the structures of the actual system lie) the most relevant context to intervene. But there is also a personal motivation behind this decision, which lies in my own interest on informal markets around the world, which I consider should stop being under-looked and, even, serve as examples of how organic systems (like the System D) can have a higher resilience than rigid structures like neo-classical economics.
Now, in order to address this complex issue, it is important to frame my position as a designer and a field of practice, which I do in the first booklet, Occupying Borders. In my case, I frame my position as a border practitioner, standing at the edge of the discipline and connecting with other professionals, as well as amateurs. This I am able to do by using something that is essential to my practice, which is evidenced throughout the project: dialogue. To clear this, I do an argumentation that ranges from art and design references like Jeanne van Heeswijk, who built her own practice, to interventions I made on different issues, and which attempted to make things public like disassembling my bike in the centre of Eindhoven and asking for people’s help to assemble it back. This border practice requires addressing border-contexts, and the marketplace is, possibly, one of the spaces most caught in between the tension of the borders. Trying to position myself in-between, "it is what it is" attempts to avoid romanticizing or taking a pittiful attitude towards the phenomenon studied, and regarding them as they are, thus the name.
A market at the border between formality and informality, materialized in a pushcart, serves as a platform for making alternative economic practices public, thus building and fostering alternative types of value. The way the cart itself is built (embracing spontaneity, adaptive re-use and organic growth), the products and services, and the ways these are traded & exchanged; these three aspects come together in public dialogues and represent my stake in the issue. As a designer, one cannot be held fully responsible of building alternative systems; therefore, this is but a humble attempt to trigger reflection around the topic, yet suggesting different ways of conceiving economic, social, cultural & political relations.
Articles by Pablo Calderón Salazar
The field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today's cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues-foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition-play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. 'infrastructuring') and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.
Resumo
O campo do design estratégico apoia o trabalho de designers que pesquisam e projetam para a complexidade das cidades de hoje. De fato, ao abraçar a ideia do diálogo estratégico, os designers se alinham com diferentes atores e seus interesses. Neste artigo, discutimos como diálogos democráticos-que estão em primeiro plano na tradição do Design Participativo (PD)-são relevantes em processos complexos de design ur-bano (ou seja, de "infraestruturação") e implicam diferentes tipos de diálogos, entre os quais o diálogo estratégico é ape-nas um. Depois de enquadrar Design Estratégico e PD, des-crevemos cinco papéis do designer e seus relativos diálogos. Esta descrição constitui a base de uma tipologia exploratória de diálogos democráticos que foi aplicada e exemplificada em um estudo de caso sobre um Living Lab, no bairro de Genk. O Lab tenta projetar futuros alternativos para o trabalho na cidade, juntamente com os cidadãos, organizações públicas e privadas. Afirmamos que se envolver com esta tipologia permite que os designers entendam e projetem processos de infraestruturação no contexto urbano e se abram para dife-rentes diálogos de design e papéis para a discussão. Palavras-chave: diálogos democráticos, living lab, contexto urbano, papéis do designer, infraestruturação.
Defining the role of the designer (for social innovation) as a storyteller is a very attractive position nowadays, in a time when design is driving away from purely material or aesthetic concerns to a more socially engaged and relational practice. But this position may have some direct implications on how he or she deals with other narratives other than his or her own. Should the designer hold the power to decide which narratives or stories are told and how are they represented? Drawing on a lecture by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie, recent video footage of news channel analysing recent Paris attack and the ideas of 'design of the south' of Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero (inspired, in turn, by Boaventura de Sousa's epistemologies of the south), I argue on the importance of critically evaluating the role of designer as storyteller, and consider instead a role of stories (in plural) enabler.
a esta discusión tienen su origen en el proyecto de investigación DoSIS iniciado en el programa de Diseño Industrial de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, cuya primera fase se ha llevado a cabo a lo largo de 2014 y 2015. Con base en resultados de la investigación, así como preguntas surgidas de la misma, pretendemos problematizar los siguientes asuntos: (1) el estado actual de la innovación social en Colombia, (2) el papel que diseñadores y practicantes de disciplinas creativas pueden jugar en este tipo de proyectos y (3) la sostenibilidad
(perennidad) de los mismos. Así mismo, concluimos con unas reflexiones que buscan abrir paso a posteriores fases del proyecto, dónde podamos generar nuevas herramientas, discursos y recursos pertinentes al problema estudiado.
Conference Presentations by Pablo Calderón Salazar
Design as ‘infrastructuring’ approaches design as a long-term process of anticipation or envisioning of potential design (Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012), often via the development of tools, techniques and processes that allow actors to deal with uncertainties that they encounter in participatory ways (DiSalvo, Clement & Pipek, 2013). Although ‘long-term participation’ and ‘intervention’ may appear to be contradictory, this article describes how interventions contribute to infrastructuring processes that address public space and public issues. Interventions in public space are often driven by a wish to reclaim the common right to it and regularly use a ‘hit-and-run tactic’ (Markussen, 2013). This article discusses the role that these (short-term and often disruptive) interventions can play in long-term participation (O’Neill & Doherty, 2010) and specifically their ways of making uncertainties tangible.
We analyse an infrastructuring process defined by on-going participatory interventions in Genk (BE). We discuss three series of interventions that explicitly shaped our ways of working in the infrastructuring processes, being (1) ‘Hack-a-thing’, (2) ‘FanLab’ (see: Figure 1) and (3) ‘The Other Market’. Using Latour’s framing of uncertainties (Huybrechts, Dreessen & Schepers, 2015), we illustrate how the interventions made uncertainties related to actors, actions and objects/matters tangible and how (long-term) participation was enhanced or obstructed in the process (cfr. the above-mentioned approach).
Our contribution takes on the form of an extended article and a live, participatory presentation of visualisations of the process, documenting how diverse constellations of actors, actions and matters of concern (Latour, 2005) take form and shift through the interventions over time. We specifically focus on the uncertainties that are associated with these constellations to gain an understanding of how interventions enhance or obstruct the infrastructuring process.
*The epistolary article was presented at NORDES 2017, which took place in Oslo, Norway, from the 15th to the 17th of June of 2017.
analysis of historical and current references that contextualise the issues surrounding ‘smart cities’; the second voice -dealing with the personal story of an individual and therefore referred to as micro- interacts and makes use of the first voice as a frame in which an alternative future is illustrated. The relational and speculative nature of the two voices attempts to break the
aforementioned deadlock, by building on existing realities to propose alternative imaginaries for the ‘smart city’.
Papers by Pablo Calderón Salazar
The Catalonian sociologist Manuel Castells (in the documentary from VPRo Time For Change) states that people accept capitalism, not because they agree with it, but because it is the only system that they know; this condition is perpetuated by governments, banks and corporations who, with the help of the media, benefit from it. As David Orrel warns in his book Economyths: "this economic system may have lived for 150 years, which signifies a triumph of some kind, yet if it would live for ten more years, it would be catastrophic".
These thoughts from eminent thinkers, together with the undeniable consequences of a global financial crisis, evidence the urge of building alternative types of value that do not rely on the existing financial and monetary system, but on trust. Parallel systems should be built, fostered and up-scaled in order to out-weigh capitalism and free market; and it is precisely the space of the marketplaces (where the structures of the actual system lie) the most relevant context to intervene. But there is also a personal motivation behind this decision, which lies in my own interest on informal markets around the world, which I consider should stop being under-looked and, even, serve as examples of how organic systems (like the System D) can have a higher resilience than rigid structures like neo-classical economics.
Now, in order to address this complex issue, it is important to frame my position as a designer and a field of practice, which I do in the first booklet, Occupying Borders. In my case, I frame my position as a border practitioner, standing at the edge of the discipline and connecting with other professionals, as well as amateurs. This I am able to do by using something that is essential to my practice, which is evidenced throughout the project: dialogue. To clear this, I do an argumentation that ranges from art and design references like Jeanne van Heeswijk, who built her own practice, to interventions I made on different issues, and which attempted to make things public like disassembling my bike in the centre of Eindhoven and asking for people’s help to assemble it back. This border practice requires addressing border-contexts, and the marketplace is, possibly, one of the spaces most caught in between the tension of the borders. Trying to position myself in-between, "it is what it is" attempts to avoid romanticizing or taking a pittiful attitude towards the phenomenon studied, and regarding them as they are, thus the name.
A market at the border between formality and informality, materialized in a pushcart, serves as a platform for making alternative economic practices public, thus building and fostering alternative types of value. The way the cart itself is built (embracing spontaneity, adaptive re-use and organic growth), the products and services, and the ways these are traded & exchanged; these three aspects come together in public dialogues and represent my stake in the issue. As a designer, one cannot be held fully responsible of building alternative systems; therefore, this is but a humble attempt to trigger reflection around the topic, yet suggesting different ways of conceiving economic, social, cultural & political relations.
The field of Strategic Design supports designers in researching and designing for the complexity of today's cities by embracing the idea of strategic dialogue, in which designers align with different actors and their interests. In this article, we discuss how democratic dialogues-foregrounded in the Participatory Design (PD) tradition-play a role in complex urban design processes (i.e. 'infrastructuring') and entail different types of dialogues of which strategic dialogue is merely one. After framing Strategic Design and PD, we describe five designer roles and their associated dialogues. This description forms the basis of an exploratory typology of democratic dialogues that was applied and exemplified in a case study about a Living Lab in the neighbourhood of Genk. The Lab attempts to design alternative futures for work in the city together with citizens, public and private organisations. We claim that engaging with this typology allows designers to understand and design infrastructuring processes in the urban context and to open up different design dialogues and roles for discussion.
Resumo
O campo do design estratégico apoia o trabalho de designers que pesquisam e projetam para a complexidade das cidades de hoje. De fato, ao abraçar a ideia do diálogo estratégico, os designers se alinham com diferentes atores e seus interesses. Neste artigo, discutimos como diálogos democráticos-que estão em primeiro plano na tradição do Design Participativo (PD)-são relevantes em processos complexos de design ur-bano (ou seja, de "infraestruturação") e implicam diferentes tipos de diálogos, entre os quais o diálogo estratégico é ape-nas um. Depois de enquadrar Design Estratégico e PD, des-crevemos cinco papéis do designer e seus relativos diálogos. Esta descrição constitui a base de uma tipologia exploratória de diálogos democráticos que foi aplicada e exemplificada em um estudo de caso sobre um Living Lab, no bairro de Genk. O Lab tenta projetar futuros alternativos para o trabalho na cidade, juntamente com os cidadãos, organizações públicas e privadas. Afirmamos que se envolver com esta tipologia permite que os designers entendam e projetem processos de infraestruturação no contexto urbano e se abram para dife-rentes diálogos de design e papéis para a discussão. Palavras-chave: diálogos democráticos, living lab, contexto urbano, papéis do designer, infraestruturação.
Defining the role of the designer (for social innovation) as a storyteller is a very attractive position nowadays, in a time when design is driving away from purely material or aesthetic concerns to a more socially engaged and relational practice. But this position may have some direct implications on how he or she deals with other narratives other than his or her own. Should the designer hold the power to decide which narratives or stories are told and how are they represented? Drawing on a lecture by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie, recent video footage of news channel analysing recent Paris attack and the ideas of 'design of the south' of Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero (inspired, in turn, by Boaventura de Sousa's epistemologies of the south), I argue on the importance of critically evaluating the role of designer as storyteller, and consider instead a role of stories (in plural) enabler.
a esta discusión tienen su origen en el proyecto de investigación DoSIS iniciado en el programa de Diseño Industrial de la Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, cuya primera fase se ha llevado a cabo a lo largo de 2014 y 2015. Con base en resultados de la investigación, así como preguntas surgidas de la misma, pretendemos problematizar los siguientes asuntos: (1) el estado actual de la innovación social en Colombia, (2) el papel que diseñadores y practicantes de disciplinas creativas pueden jugar en este tipo de proyectos y (3) la sostenibilidad
(perennidad) de los mismos. Así mismo, concluimos con unas reflexiones que buscan abrir paso a posteriores fases del proyecto, dónde podamos generar nuevas herramientas, discursos y recursos pertinentes al problema estudiado.
Design as ‘infrastructuring’ approaches design as a long-term process of anticipation or envisioning of potential design (Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2012), often via the development of tools, techniques and processes that allow actors to deal with uncertainties that they encounter in participatory ways (DiSalvo, Clement & Pipek, 2013). Although ‘long-term participation’ and ‘intervention’ may appear to be contradictory, this article describes how interventions contribute to infrastructuring processes that address public space and public issues. Interventions in public space are often driven by a wish to reclaim the common right to it and regularly use a ‘hit-and-run tactic’ (Markussen, 2013). This article discusses the role that these (short-term and often disruptive) interventions can play in long-term participation (O’Neill & Doherty, 2010) and specifically their ways of making uncertainties tangible.
We analyse an infrastructuring process defined by on-going participatory interventions in Genk (BE). We discuss three series of interventions that explicitly shaped our ways of working in the infrastructuring processes, being (1) ‘Hack-a-thing’, (2) ‘FanLab’ (see: Figure 1) and (3) ‘The Other Market’. Using Latour’s framing of uncertainties (Huybrechts, Dreessen & Schepers, 2015), we illustrate how the interventions made uncertainties related to actors, actions and objects/matters tangible and how (long-term) participation was enhanced or obstructed in the process (cfr. the above-mentioned approach).
Our contribution takes on the form of an extended article and a live, participatory presentation of visualisations of the process, documenting how diverse constellations of actors, actions and matters of concern (Latour, 2005) take form and shift through the interventions over time. We specifically focus on the uncertainties that are associated with these constellations to gain an understanding of how interventions enhance or obstruct the infrastructuring process.
*The epistolary article was presented at NORDES 2017, which took place in Oslo, Norway, from the 15th to the 17th of June of 2017.
analysis of historical and current references that contextualise the issues surrounding ‘smart cities’; the second voice -dealing with the personal story of an individual and therefore referred to as micro- interacts and makes use of the first voice as a frame in which an alternative future is illustrated. The relational and speculative nature of the two voices attempts to break the
aforementioned deadlock, by building on existing realities to propose alternative imaginaries for the ‘smart city’.