“Matters of Care” in Spaces of Commoning: Designing In, Against and Beyond Capitalism

Abstract

This chapter explores the potentials and possibilities which a commons perspective offers to design practices by drawing on various threads of feminist and Marxist scholarship on commoning, care, and new materialism. As a basis for discussion, the first part of this chapter outlines an expanded definition of design as a transformative and research-based practice, which has emerged over the past years in response to ongoing ecological, economic, and societal upheavals. The second part examines the relationship between designing and commoning as an activity of care and creation of common space, followed by an engagement with, amongst others, María Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of “matters of care” (Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) as a speculative ethics to nourish new narratives which help reconfigure our relationships to the planet and all of its companions. These theoretical frameworks are then reflected through a “situated” practice research, the neighborhood project Common(s)Lab in Berlin-Neukölln, and three of its ongoing formats – a series of do-it-together (DIT) furniture building workshops, a seasonal gift market, and regular reading groups – in order to investigate the emancipatory potential of such spaces of commons as an “infrastructure for agency” (Petrescu. Being in Relation and Re-inventing the Commons. In Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, ed. Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé, 101–9. Baunach: AADR Art Architecture Design Research, 2017; Moebus and Harrison. Caring For the Common and Caring In Common: Towards an Expanded Architecture/Design Practice. 8th Biannual Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) Conference, 2–4 June 2019, Aalto University, Helsinki, 2019). The chapter concludes with a critical reflection on design’s own political economy to emancipate itself from coercions set by the market – and liberate its potentials for transformative commoning practices – using J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework.