It is time to act, take risks, and embrace mistakes
Can students and teachers learn from and work with the challenges that microplastics pose to our shared global resources? How do we project environmental issues within the realm of design? Can we create spaces for learning, whether formal or informal, to promote environmental activism through design? In this context, the European project Plastic Justice was born, a pan-European educational collaboration among five art and design academies in The Hague, Reykjavík, Barcelona, London, and Vilnius. Together with NGOs and scientists committed to the environment, the educational programme included various outreach and activism actions that formed the digital platform Plastic Justice, focused on the long-term impact of invisible microplastics on the human body. Its aim is to generate new knowledge through inter-academic exchange and field research to promote conscious design education for the next generation of designers.
This new learning space has been established as an ideal place for activism, co-producing knowledge among professionals and students who employ progressive teaching strategies that foster social change and introduce activist practices capable of challenging the standardising educational system, which develops uniform skills that oppose diversity. In these processes, the subject matter and methods are transformed without the need to conform to pre-existing models or use them as paradigms, thus liberating academia and activating education as a self-selecting process that avoids elitist tendencies.
Microplastics and Visual Communication.
In 2019, awareness about microplastics was limited. The earliest articles and scientific studies from that period focused on their presence in the still-developing human foetus. The notion that these tiny plastic particles could contaminate our food, water, and even enter our bloodstream is both terrifying and hard to grasp. This nearly invisible and ubiquitous environmental issue spurred a significant and urgently needed push for young students, researchers, and storytellers to give it more attention in education. The challenge remains substantial, demanding physical engagement, but can materials possess a voice and agency? Can design serve as a tool for critical social reflection that citizens can use to communicate and protest within society?
Visual communication is a tool for transforming reality that enables us to shape denunciation and critique of a specific situation. It is part of the process, not the end. In Plastic Justice, awareness-raising actions were carried out to sensibilise and generate debates about the issues that led to specific actions. These actions were formalised through a manual for teachers, published as “A Teachers Guide,” along with talks, workshops, an exhibition of student projects, and various counter-information and guerrilla actions. The motivation behind these actions aims to build visual tools for social debates in an attempt to make causes visible and tangible. Power becomes the capacity to do something, and design empowers, makes visible, gives voice, enables proposals, and generates controversy, providing a channel for personal and group concerns. This potential set of knowledge invites us to risk our epistemological certainties, to establish unsettling dialogues through differences, and to generate a political ethics capable of creating connection and recognition. By involving actors in political and social struggles, we build bridges within communities and help individuals process their experiences in a more positive and affirming way. In this way, the primary function of activist communication is to activate levers, mobilise, and pressure industry, corporations, governments, or any type of powerful institution to change their agendas and educational programmes.
A Souvenir From The Colombian Coast.
An example of projects undertaken by the students is Natalia Soto’s proposal: The local community collects their own raw material, microplastics, from the beaches of Santa Marta, Colombia, transforms it, and gives it new life in the form of a reinterpretation of the iconic Paco Rabanne dress, now handcrafted and created from modular pieces, thus forming the new garment (Fig. 1). With this scalable prototype, the ecosystem is restored and the economy is revitalised by offering the local community a job opportunity throughout the entire production process.
Little learnings
Thus, Plastic Justice is a reflection on other pedagogical systems based on a new creative paradigm that stimulates evolution (1) towards educational cooperation, as a response to counteract the competitive forms of education in late capitalism; (2) as an ecocentric and creative perspective of education, in response to an anthropocentric definition; (3) as a non-reductionist form of learning, in response to the outdated reductionist educational.
The materialised and shared research allows for the construction of artefacts of thought or question-asking machines in contrast to the idea of the designer as author or producer linked to industry. This idea is one of the main learnings of Plastic Justice. The designer linked to ego, virtuosity, versus the mediating designer who speaks of strategies, tactics, field tests, and the shift from producer to mediator, facilitator, and from the individual to the collective (Fig. 2). Design positions itself as a crucial agent for renewing the world to materialise processes and practices that transform it into a new form of sensitive knowledge, where methodologies and methods are as vital as communicating findings with conceptual, analytical, and aesthetic rigour. Protest is bearing witness. Idealism is the new realism. It is time to act, take risks, and embrace mistakes.
You are welcome to visit the permanent exhibition “Matter Matters. Designing the world,” curated by Olga Subirós, at the Design Museum in Barcelona. The initial version of this text appears in the exhibition catalogue and was written at Elisava Research, Barcelona.