[Open Design + Hardware] Open Design School Matera

Tue Dec 8 10:44:19 UTC 2015

Hi everyone,

I wanted to draw the members of this list’s attention to an open call for participants in a workshop in Matera that was just launched:

http://www.matera-basilicata2019.it/en/archivi/news/672-workshop-open-design-school-open-call.html

This workshop is the first incarnation of a future Open Design School in Matera, one of the key initiatives of Matera’s successful candidacy to EU capital of culture in 2019. After a period of political stall, it looks like it might actually go ahead now.

As in any major international cultural event, Matera2019 will require significant infrastructure of all kinds and on all scales. The Open Design School is an attempt to use this built-in market as an opportunity for the exchange of knowledge in the context of real-world design projects. It is also an attempt to explore, on a practical level, the dynamics of a learning environment in which there are no teachers and no students - or rather everyone is both a teacher and a student.

Participants in the workshop will work both on the strategic design of a major work of cultural infrastructure to be built in Matera and the executive design of the future laboratories of the Open Design School. We really hope the school itself will materialize by the end of 2016 (although in situations like this one is always in part hostage to political will, but for now things look promising).

It would be great to involve members of this list who are interested in contributing knowledge, experience or even participation in the Open Design School project. Massimo wrote a great text for Domus when I was editor there a while back - would be really good to pick up that conversation again. I have no doubt that many mistakes will be made, and that failures of all kinds await us, but the dream that the most progressive design learning environment in Europe could be born in the heart of Italy's most illiterate region, in the deep South, is a worthwhile thing to take a risk for!

Feel free to reach out to me with any comments, suggestions, criticisms, contributions etc. - 

best, Joseph