Diseña (Jan 2018)
Learning Design with Social Insects: The ANT, the SPIDER, and the WASP
Abstract
I discuss the Architecture Design Studio Course held in 2014/15 and in 2016/17 around the topic of lifestyle migration in the changing coastal landscapes of the Mediterranean. Starting with my own experience as a student, influenced by STS concepts and the debates in the School of Architecture in Alicante, Spain, I show the limits of ANT’s (actor-network theory) extensive descriptions as a tools for teaching and learning design and, at the same time, the role they can have in stretching what architecture can be once it is connected to contemporary issues. These courses have allowed us to re-imagine, together, the many types of architects students can become. We have done it by enriching ANT with two other anthropological and philosophical concepts: anthropologist Tim Ingold’s SPIDER, whose ’Skilled Practice Involves Developmentally Embodied Responsiveness’, and places the architecture student, as a practitioner, in the center of a concrete material web that, as Spuyborek’s sympathetic WASP, is able to abstract the environment beyond the felt encounters between things and people as they shape each other.
