It is an open inquiry and there are no right or wrong answers. The information you are sending us (anonymously) will be included in the analysis as well as in the presentation of the results.

For our research it is important to also gather personal voices, so please feel free to comment questions throughout the questionnaire.

The inquiry will remain open until the 20th June 2012 and takes about 20 minutes to compile.

Go to the on-line survey (English)

Please help us spread this survey as much as possible by sending it on to your contacts. Thank you.

Designers’ Inquiry is an initiative by the Construction site for non-affirmative practice .

Cantieroteca is the (growing) archive of the Construction site for non-affirmative practice . It wants to be a point of reference and connection for a collective practice-led research on alternative values within design in order to reconsider designerly approaches to contemporary questions. One section of the archive is dedicated to self-publishing initiatives that focus on social, political, economic and environmental issues.

Cantieroteca is hosted by Careof , via Procaccini 4, Milan. It is open to the public from Tuesday to Saturday from 3pm to 7pm.

During this year’s Salone del Mobile (Milan, 17-22 April 2012), the collective Construction site for non-affirmative practice inaugurates the project “Archivio del Cantiere” (archive of the construction site) at – and in collaboration with – Careof, a non profit organization for the promotion of contemporary artistic research situated at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan.

The “Archivio del Cantiere” wants to be a point of reference and connection for a collective practice-led research on alternative values within design, in order to reconsider designerly approaches to contemporary questions.
One section of the archive will be dedicated to self-publishing initiatives that focus on social, economic and environmental issues like precarity, alternative economics, the concept of the commons, collective and militant research, alternative design practices, etc.
The project develops from the desire of creating a repository for non-commercial editorial productions, where a wide audience can access the materials and where producers and readers can get in touch with each other.

We thus invite all those who have self-published materials related to the issues cited above to contribute to the archive.
The collected materials will be catalogued and made accessible to the public. For the purposes of cataloguing we ask you to compile the bibliographic form you find at the end of this post.

The self-published materials can be send or handed in at the following address until the 13th of April:
Careof – Fabbrica del Vapore, Via Procaccini 4, 20154 Milano.
Please specify on the package “materials for the “Archivio del Cantiere”.

For a direct delivery you can meet us in:
Bozen-Bolzano, Latina, London, Rome, Rotterdam, Rovereto, Trieste, Venice.

For more information please contact us at:
pratichenonaffermative (at) gmail.com

The collections of materials will also continue throughout the week of the Salone del Mobile directly at the “Archivio del Cantiere” at the Fabbrica del Vapore.

Download the pdf with the open call.

Download the bibliographic form.

Next Wednesday, together with Paul Thompson , Richard Gerver and Teal Triggs , we’ll join the discussion “Our Future: Education & Creativity” , organised by students of the Visual Communication programme at the Royal College of Art as part of the series Red Tape .

2:30 pm – 4:30 pm, 14th March 2012
ArtBar, Darwin Building
Kensington Gore SW7 2EU London

On the 27th February, at 1pm, Bianca and some more people from Department 21 will be guests of the exhibition Into the Fold , organised by Camberwell Press .

Camberwell Press seeks to create and ideal and interactive studio within a public space for two and half weeks. The exhibition will culminate in a publication formed from material generated with collaborators via a series of talks, workshops, design & publishing projects.

Next Friday, Bianca will be talking about Designing Economic Cultures at public works’ studio, during one of their beloved Friday Sessions . The evening, titled “Sunday soup and other ways to feed culture”, is organised and curated by Matilde Martinetti, who is currently collaborating with public works.

Friday 24 February, 7pm
public works studio
1-5 Vyner Street
London E2

An interview with us by Brooklyn-based curator Yulia Tikhonova was published on the website of the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability , a think tank dedicated to developing cultural strategies for the 21st Century.

Tomorrow Bianca and Caterina Giuliani will give a talk at the Designing and Transforming Capitalism conference at Aarhus University (DK) titled “Construction site for non-affirmative practice: building collective support structures for critically-engaged designers”.

Recently we were invited by Kathrin Böhm (myvillages.org / public works ) to participate in a three day (6-8 January 2012) workshop in Brezoi (Romania), as part of the project ECO-Nomadic School (ENS).

ENS is based on a partnership between Atelier d’architecture autogérée (AAA), AGENCY , myvillages.org and Fundatia Communitara de Dezvoltare Local (FCDL), and it is supported by the European network RHYZOM , in which all these partners are involved. The project is a “nomadic and temporary school for mutual learning and teaching of eco-civic practices in different regions of Europe”.

Amongst other modalities, the school is activated through a series of four civic seminars, each organised by one of the partner institutions, which involve local residents and organisations. In a few words, this part of ENS could be described as a loosely organised group of practitioners from different fields – ranging from art to architecture to gardening – who gather periodically in order to research and discuss on different situations and case-studies. During these gatherings ideas for site-specific projects and initiatives are generated that draw on the diverse experiences the participants bring into the group.

The gathering we participated in took place in Brezoi, a post-industrial Romanian town of 7.000 inhabitants located in the Carpathian Mountains, about three hours drive from Bucharest. The meeting was hosted by FCDL, the Community Foundation for Local Development from Brezoi, which started operating in 1996 in order to counteract the negative effects produced by the closure of the local sawmill in 1995, which represented the economic base of the town by employing thousands of people. In the early 90ies, 80% of the population of Brezoi was officially unemployed. Today there exist a number of informal economies in the area and every family has at least one of its members working abroad.

What is particular about Brezoi is that “self-sustainability was the traditional way of living in the rural community: from traditional building with local materials to providing food locally. From grass mowing and animals keeping to procurement of materials and building of houses, the work used to be done in common. During the last 50 years, all these practices/activities started to fade away, being replaced by easier, more efficient (or not) and globally accepted ways of living. Only few traditional practices have resisted, including the obste, which are forms of collective managing of land, pastures and forests.”

FCDL, together with other local organisations and institutions, believes that the social and economic decline Brezoi experiences could be brought to a halt be the reviving of local agriculture and pastoral economy in combination with the development of small-scale alternative tourism centred around local traditions.

The three-day workshop represented a first step in this direction. It mainly revolved around the sharing and discussing of relevant personal experiences by the participants, doing walks around the area, learning about local history and pastoral economy as well as collecting first ideas that will lead to the second, more hands-on phase of the workshop in summer 2012.

Central to the three days were the case studies of the so-called odaia. The term odaia indicates a micro-system made of a piece of land in the mountains (about three hectares), a one room house built on it, a ‘water hole’ fed by a nearby spring that serves several odaia, the plants that are cultivated on the land (for example fruit trees, potatoes, etc.) and the animals (mainly sheep) that are brought to the odaia by the shepherds in summer, the season during which the odaia are mostly used. The odaia in the mountains around Brezoi – there are about 900 of them – are family-owned and they are several hundred years old. In the present, most of them are run-down and only a few are still in use.

The idea from the side of FCDL would be to start working with a few of these still working odaia located 8 to 10 Km from Brezoi and to imagine possible future developments for them. For this reason, the last day of the workshop was dedicated to sketching out first ideas of how the pastoral economy of these places could be revived – potentially being integrated with a soft and culturally involved tourism. The group’s ideas where especially concerned with how this process of revival could benefit the whole community of Brezoi and not only a restricted number of odaia-owners. Hence, the workshop participants considered what kind of communication could be thought of to go with this endeavour, in order to keep the project open and accessible for everyone in the local community.

In summer 2012 a summer camp will take place in Brezoi in order to start working on the first concrete steps towards the revival of a sustainable local economy.

Thanks to Alex, Erini and Sam for the beautiful photos

We’re pleased to announce that the website for Designing Economic Cultures is finally live and growing.

www.designingeconomiccultures.net

Giorgio Camuffo invited the Construction site for non-affirmative practice to give a talk tomorrow evening at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as part of the series Werkstattgespräche.

Poster by Stefano Capodieci / illustration inspired by J.K. Gibson-Graham

We were totally surprised and pleased this morning, when we got our copy of Next Nature , a book edited by Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink, in which Brave New Winter is featured on two double spreads together with a ton of essays and visual contributions. Thanks.

On the 13th December at 4pm we’ll give a short lecture with the people from the Construction site for non-affirmative practice at Stefano Maffei’s class Factory@everywhere at Politecnico di Milano .

A small visual contribution to the project Jederland – Symbolic Actions for Our Present , we have been involved with over the past year, and which has now come to an end.

Not translated. See Italian version.