Pedagogical Impugnation: Interspecies Prototyping and Cosmopolitical Encounters

Abstract

In this article we will analyze the epistemological displacements experienced in the Interaction Design Workshop of the Design School of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile during an intervention carried out in the first semester of 2016 at the National Zoo of Chile (NZC). First, we describe the process of transformation of the pedagogical practices raised in the Design School at the beginning of the 21st Century and the adoption of the ethnographic turn; then, we show how the intervention in the NZC became an impugnation to the epistemological and methodological frameworks of user-centered design and problem-solving design. Through the notion of ’cosmopolitical encounters’, inspired by the work of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, and the interspecies experience in the NZC, we conclude that prototyping is a pedagogical tool that allows us to question epistemologies and hegemonic methods, encouraging the possibility of developing a ’cosmopolitical design’.