Precarity Pilot

Within the framework of Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative

What
Precarity Pilot will be an assemblage of short-to-long-term workshops, tools and small publications that aims at addressing issues around the precarious work of designers in inventive and experimental ways.

While all over Europe cuts to welfare systems and unfair working conditions are making it difficult to confidently imagine the course of one’s working life, we believe it is time to direct our efforts and everyday activities to construct our environment differently. Shaken by the issues that emerged from our former investigation Designers’ Inquiry, Precarity Pilot wants to support designers in re-shaping, re-orienting and taking ownership of the course their working lives can take.

Precarity Pilot aims at making design practices resilient in ways that do not only allow for financial stability but that also allow for space to experiment with how design – and design processes – can meaningfully face and transform today’s multiple crises. How to work in times of economic turmoil? How to create practices that thrive while also engaging in important social, economic and environmental issues? What collective organizational strategies can we mobilize for sustaining our practices?

How
Precarity Pilot will work both through a website – conceived as a multifunctional toolbox that makes accessible a series of practical tools, theoretical texts and workshop outcomes – and through the activation of workshops for designers and design students in institutional and extra-institutional contexts around Europe.

The workshops will engage in issues around work in ways that open up possibilities for creating design practices that respond both in content and ways of organising to contemporary matters. Issues explored are collected within four categories: Transition from university to work; Redefining career models; Organising your individual/collective practice; Cooperation and support structures. Within these four categories, specific topics range from conducting fruitful internships to dealing with stereotyped and gendered working lives; from pricing one’s work and managing contracts to the construction of peer-to-peer support structures and the macro- and micro-politics of working collaboratively.

Workshops can face different topics and can last from 1 to 3 hours, from 1 to 5 consecutive days, or they can be distributed over a longer period of time.

Check this or the other site for updates on Precarity Pilot. Whether you are working in a design school or another institution and would like to host a workshop, or you have suggestions of who could be a valid contact to organise a workshop, please don’t hesitate to get in touch via pratichenonaffermative (at) gmail.com.