Ecotopias. Exploring alternative ways of being in the world, living together, and designing

Ecotopias. Exploring alternative ways of being in the world, living together, and designing

We have entered an extremely critical era, marked by climate change, human conflicts, and the progressive weakening of our existential conditions. All the ecologies we participate in are affected: the environmental, the social, and the mental ecology.
There is an urgent need to question our models of development and, along with them, design itself. As one of the professions par excellence of industrial modernity, design has also fallen into crisis and must profoundly revise its principles and processes, so that it may cease to be a major cause of our unsustainability and instead collaborate in the necessary regeneration of ecologies.
The socio-environmental design laboratory at PUC-Rio, Ecotopias, emerges from these premises, questioning the design paths followed thus far, without, however, rejecting them a priori. With few methodological certainties, it nevertheless holds hope in the imaginative and creative potential of design and the arts to envision alternative ways of being in the world and living together.
The purpose of Ecotopias thus becomes the elaboration of utopias, but also of ecological dystopias or heterotopias, as well as any scenaristic elaboration that allows experience to explore, imagine, socialize, and rehearse, while calling for ecological action.
Among the design paths envisioned by Ecotopias is convivial design, offered as an example of the laboratory’s imaginative and creative practice. Inspired by the work of Ivan Illich, convivial design is proposed as a design ethos that values people’s creative autonomy, i.e., their ability to express creativity based on their own inclinations and with their own tools, which forms the foundation of community and social life.