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Public talk by @entreprecariat , titled ‘The Design and The Plan: On Power’, in partnership with @maatmuseum, 27 September 2021 at 17h30. 
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Many theorists, critics and designers agree: “Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives”. But does this statement tell us enough about the power held (or not) by designers? Why do many of them demand a “seat at the table”? In this presentation, Silvio Lorusso will examine several ways in which designers have conceptualized, expressed and exerted their power. Furthermore, he will look at how such power overlaps notions of authority, hierarchy, prestige, responsibility and ethics. The goal is to provide a specific set of categories to realistically map the power relationships in which the field of design operates.
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Silvio Lorusso is an Assistant Professor and Vice-director of the Centre for Other Worlds at the Lusófona University in Lisbon, a creative coding tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag and a lecturer at the Design Department of the @sandberginstituut. He is a member of Varia, the Centre for Everyday Technology, as well as part of the editorial board of Italian graphic design magazine Progetto Grafico. Lorusso has written for several magazines and publications, including Volume, Real Life Magazine, Not, and Modes of Criticism. In 2018, he published his first book entitled Entreprecariat (@onomatopeenet).

A pre-summer special issue of OW is out! Silvio Lorusso (@entreprecariat) interviews the admin of @wdka.teachermemes, a meme page unofficially linked to the Willem De Kooning Academie of Rotterdam. They talk about the Dutch art and design scene, the role of extra-institutional amplification, the relationship between design and meme culture, as well as decentralized loyalty, bloodletting, cultural remittance and much more.

The second issue of Other Worlds is out. Here, French designer @anaelle_bei tackles the notion of obsolescence, showing how it is not an “essential” feature of a device, but a relational quality involving societal and technical expectations.

The first issue of Other Worlds is out. In this excerpt from his new book CAPS LOCK (@valiz_books_projects), @unlisted_roots retraces the capitalist and colonialist origins of branding.

The COW team is thrilled to launch Other Worlds, a shapeshifting journal for design research, criticism and transformation. Other Worlds (OW) aims at making the social, political, cultural and technical complexities surrounding design practices legible and, thus, mutable.

What other worlds, exactly? Those that have been traditionally ignored, neglected or silenced in the past, as well as those that are overlooked today: non-Western communities negotiating their own set of values through practice; alternative rationalities emerged in the West but overshadowed by the instrumental reason; technosocial environments blossoming at the periphery of platform empires, semi-visible modes of organization that oppose or sustain official institutions.

OW hosts articles, interviews, short essays and all the cultural production that doesn’t fit neither the fast-paced, volatile design media promotional machine nor the necessarily slow and lengthy process of scholarly publishing. In this way, we hope to address urgent issues, without sacrificing rigor and depth.

Partnership established between The Center for Other Worlds/ Lusófona University and the Municipality of Óbidos, focused on a multi-year interdisciplinary project using design and culture for systemic intervention in the village and region, implementing a variety of participatory, collaborative and pedagogical programmes across various municipal infrastructures. Projects to be announced soon.

COW is contributing to the programming of the upcoming conference on the New European Bauhaus building upon the vision of the ‘Bauhaus of the Seas’, with Vice-director @m.pestana taking part in 2 panels. The conference will take place at @maatmuseum, on the 20 May. Info: https://bauhaus-seas.eu/en/conference/

In the context of the @2021portugaleu, COW’s Vice-director @m.pestana and researcher Mafalda Dâmaso will participate in the conference ‘Culture, Cohesion and Social Impact’, to be held at the @fundacao_serralves, Porto, Portugal, on the 5–6 May 2021. Info and registration: https://360digital.pt/eventos/conference_culturesocialcohesion_pt/

The Center for Other Worlds (COW) is an interdisciplinary research centre for design and art, based at Lusófona University. It focuses on the development of perspectives that are not dominant nor imposed by the design discipline—through criticism, speculation and collaboration with various disciplines such as curating, architecture, visual arts, ecology and political theory—having in design an unifying element but rejecting hierarchies between them. The centre’s name makes a reference to the concept of otherness, thereby aiming at challenging universal visions of design and art. The centre’s core mission is therefore inscribed in its name.