Indisciplined by Learning - Baltan Laboratories - Marlou van der Cruijsen and Lorenzo Gerbi

Ciclo di seminari del Corso di Advanced Design dei Servizi

Indisciplined by Learning - Baltan Laboratories - Marlou van der Cruijsen and Lorenzo Gerbi

08 Marzo 2023

ore 13.00 - 17.00

Aula 2.7B

Baltan Laboratories is a cultural indisciplinary lab based in Eindhoven (NL). They focus on societal issues through a relational approach, creating spaces to rehearse living otherwise.

Lorenzo and Marlou (from Baltan Laboratories) propose a rupture in the broad discourse around inter-, trans-, and multi-disciplinarity by disengaging from the methodological trap of the self- referential academic discussion around disciplinarity. The latter is too detached, in their opinion, from the concrete experiences and existing non-disciplinary practices. Therefore, starting from their personal practice and struggles inside an interdisciplinary cultural institution, they decided to sketch an alternative approach that relies on temporarily removing disciplines to help develop a better collaboration attitude between them, not in an interdisciplinary project but by having people from different disciplines learning together. In this way, learners become aware of how people with diverse backgrounds think and grasp reality, challenging the assumptions and hierarchies that normally originate from stereotyped images of specific characters (the nerd scientist, the greedy economist, the eccentric artist...). They called this approach indisciplinarity, a concept already briefly introduced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière, that they expanded to oppose both the discipline – that students bear within a traditional teaching environment – and disciplines – the way they divide knowledge and who can contribute to it from who cannot. They will bring a concrete case study, developed following their approach: an indisciplinary online learning community called Make Economy Yours Again (MEYA), whose aim was to co-create a new knowledge base for developing alternative economic narratives. Participants were diverse in age, nationality, background and level of education, united only by their interest in economic activism. Through two editions of MEYA, they tested different pedagogical devices and de- disciplinarizing strategies to translate the approach of indisciplinarity into a concrete case study. The learning community became a space to practice economic change, a weekly 3-hour training session to exercise other ways of being in the current economic system, while questioning some of the assumptions and ideologies that dominate our understanding and action in a complex world. We will spend the afternoon engaging in some exercises derived from the indisciplinary approach.

Workshop: Differently Relating - We will focus on how we, as designers, can deeply engage with the contexts in which we design: how can we differently relate to those? Through embodied, deep listening and observation practices, we will explore how we can feel the context and our relationship with it, rather than just understand it. From making sense to making senses, as a strategy to grasp the complexities of the environments we design in/for.