Open Arms School Boat.
Other modes of co-production of knowledge and direct action
Can design and transpedagogy, as an action-practice, repair regimes of truth damaged by hegemonic visions and foster students’ and teachers’ agency for possible socio-political transformation? By questioning hierarchies and disciplinarity in the academy through the co-production of knowledge among students, teachers, and NGOs, transpedagogical environments proliferate everyday practices as a direct claim for social, political and spatial justice through design. In this text, we revisit an academic curricular project based on four design proposals to transform a rescue boat into a school, together with the Open Arms Foundation, with a special focus on emancipatory pedagogical models that seek to repair and broaden the vision committed to non-violent activist practice.
A reformulation of pedagogy as an action practice during socio-political crises
In February 2022, one of the ships of the NGO Open Arms was about to end its activity after more than 70 humanitarian missions and 6500 people saved. A group of professors were faced with the need to rethink the transformation of the ship, its uses, and all the social and political value it has gained over the years. This need gave rise to the research project described below. As a transdisciplinary team of designers, architects and artists actively engaged in practice, research and academia, we decided to introduce the project into the academic curriculum in a multidirectional and transversal search for new reformulations of the Open Arms ship that could respond to the main purpose that Oscar Camps[1] asked us for: How can we turn the Open Arms rescue boat into a communication tool that generates proactive engagement, critical attitude and social and civic awareness about the migratory phenomenon primarily in young people?
[1] Oscar Camps’s career has been recognised with the Encomienda de Número of the Civil Merit Order, awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Spain. Read his words here
Over ten weeks, 175 design students and 11 teachers from Elisava developed a school ship project for Generation Z, positioning design pedagogy as a non-violent activist practice beyond traditional education (Freire, 2009). The nomadic school hypothesis holds that sharing knowledge creates opportunities to challenge socio-political paradigms and question regimes of truth (Foucault, 1997). An ecology of learning embraces conflict and dissonance through interactions among organisms, functions, and powers (Sendra, 2020). In this context, pedagogy aims to repair regimes of truth damaged by hegemonic visions that silence and invisibilise the Other.
We chose to work with the Open Arms ship as a nomadic pedagogical unit for Gen Z, developing it as a curricular project to create a learning environment beyond traditional academia. The goal was to test socially active political practices in students’ daily lives through design. Pedagogy aims to foster intimate, subjective processes in youth, encouraging new attitudes beyond academic results. Design pedagogy can help repair knowledge regimes and enhance human agency as agents of socio-political change.
Furthermore, in words of Keller Easterling design is considered as “an inclusive mixing chamber–an especially potent carrier of overlapping political, financial, and environmental ecologies that graphically models some of the world’s most intractable dilemmas” (Esterling, 2021, xi). For this reason, we are interested in working with design as a medium, where resilience is built in the interim, without seeking definite answers, but triggering multiple and intersubjective processes of asking, unbuilding, reworking, ungrowing and articulating (Esterling, 2021). Like this, the strategic intersection between design and pedagogy presents an opportunity to channel awareness-raising and citizen emancipation strategies, which go beyond the finite result and design object, but grow as everyday critical attitudes. The customary focus on the finite design result gets inverted over the idea of design as a field to negotiate with complex and transversal issues with direct implication in the global socio-political crisis of forced migration, which is one of the main aims of this project.
It is considered that “educating is learning to live together and learning together to live”, triggering diverse opportunities “ to open directions, shift gazes, link desires, combat oppressions and liberate unplanned paths” (Garcés, 2020). In this sense, we start from the hypothesis that the design academy, including its own methodologies, methods, and tools, have the potential to proliferate spaces of emancipation and collective intelligence by developing a de-hierarchised creative environment that boosts critical capacity through action and personal commitment. Repairing the everyday democratic attitude has become urgent in the current crisis of values.
In this case, we are particularly interested in the potential of pedagogy to “constitute a set of knowledge that invites us to risk our epistemological certainties and to enhance the multiplicity of our bodies, to establish disturbing dialogues” (Bello, 2018), which, in Pablo Helguera’s terms, builds a field of unhierarchical and multidisciplinary pedagogical action, defined as transpedagogical (Helguera et al., 2011). According to his definition, “transpedagogy responds through experimental multidisciplinary approaches, occupying the empty spaces between disciplines, between people and longings (...) through performative experiences that do not seek ethnographic objectivity but the collective narrative, through the collective authorship that corresponds to the mixture between community and catalyst/activator/designer”. In this sense, within the approach of the Open Arms School project, transpedagogy becomes one of the main strategies of seeking and creating, through design, ways of repairing human agency in the construction of autonomous spaces of critical thought and action.
Our context is built on the tension between the spectacle of forced migration and the rise of the extreme and populist right in Europe (Lo Presti, 2019). The spectacle involves mediatised, sensationalist images of humanitarian collapse, creating a desensitised public (Lo Presti, 2020). Amid this desensitisation, there’s a need to move beyond palliative hospitality, which only mitigates effects without addressing roots (Paez & Valtchanova, 2022). The key research question is how to foster a daily critical attitude through active socio-political engagement and direct action to challenge hegemonic truths.
In the need to answer this question, three key issues are articulated:
· How to repair the relationship with the “irreducible otherness of the other” (Ganis 2011, 5) or how to introduce dynamics that suspend the hierarchical distances inherent in the judgement of the invisible, or in Rancière’s words, the ochlos (Rancière, 2010)
· How to repair the agonistic models of democracy (Mouffe, 2013) where consensual diversity is suspended to proliferate new forms of active citizenship that go beyond the salvage paradigm (Dominguez, 1987)
· How to repair the human agency for direct action and generate situated practices in everyday life that become a direct claim for social, cultural, and spatial justice (Paez and Valtchanova, 2021)
These three axes lead us to the need to reinvent and reformulate design pedagogy as a critical environment in which practices that seek to suspend pre-existing power structures and reimagine them through everyday engagement are collaboratively developed. For this reason, in the Open Arms School project, we began with a critical and plural review of the current political context at local and global levels to explore connections with design practice and academia, offering alternatives alongside social movements and activist methodologies. We find ourselves in a state of emergency in which a design approach is needed that focuses on creating a world “where many worlds fit together” (Escobar, 2018). In this temporal context, designers are rediscovering human agency to shape their own world through collaborative and relational tools and solutions, reinforcing the need to develop increasingly research-based approaches to address biases in teaching (Costanza-Chock, 2014).
We believe developing repair strategies through design and learning to create communities of action is necessary, as Jean Lave describes, “groups of people sharing concern and learning together’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). We explore how to function as a collective, create shared spaces, and foster care and community building (Krúpskaya, 1963), viewing design education as “a tool for transforming society” and social relations based on collectivity, individuality, and mutual aid (Krúpskaya, 1971).
Within this conceptual and theoretical framework, in the specific case we review here, we decided to develop the Open Arms School project as a transpedagogical environment that creates spaces for action among intimacy, transversal design, transmedia communication, and politics, in the search for protest design tools with Generation Z. In the frontline of our research, we posited a series of questions like: Are there other physical and/or digital pedagogical models that can help us bridge the gap with the other and build learning spaces, formal or informal, for the repair of knowledge and action regimes? Can we co-produce knowledge regarding activism and protest between teachers and students? Can we create new places of learning by linking spaces inside and outside the university which harness both Gen Z’s ideology and everyday habits? Can we provide tools to the students for greater autonomy and capacity for self-management and self-organisation?
Open Arms School, a transpedagogical environment in defence of human rights
In a ten-week course at the Elisava Faculty of Design, University of Vic, Barcelona, 4th-year Design and Innovation students explored four hypotheses for adapting a rescue ship, focusing on themes like play, exploration, adaptation, eating, learning, and communication. Students and teachers collaborated on the Open Arms School ship, replacing leadership with teamwork and creating collective learning environments. Everyone served as a co-researcher, blending Generation Z's voice with those of other agents involved in the design process. To co-produce knowledge (Fedyuk & Zentai, 2018), semi-structured interviews were conducted with the pedagogical director, NGO leader, and ship captain. The process was kept open to students and teachers, reconfiguring authorship to foster community discourse grounded in honesty, vulnerability, and proactivity. After ten weeks, four proposals with different pedagogical approaches were presented, each demonstrating the restorative capacity of transpedagogy through practice, using four strategies described below.
StoryTeller: transmedia strategies as an active practice of knowledge co-production and the questioning of hegemonic truths.
A discursive school proposal develops a transmedia platform turning the boat into a nomadic media unit that writes, edits, and disseminates a newspaper at each port. This creates a pluriversal environment for voices of migrants, NGOs, the city, and silenced groups. It also produces a pedagogical declaration shared across educational levels, outlining how to use pedagogy and knowledge production as a human rights struggle. Based on Benjamin et al.’s idea that “from narratives emanates a salutary force,” the transmedia school opposes society’s palliative model (Han & Steuer, 2021) and aims to actively repair truth regimes through new communication networks outside instrumental media. By using language as action, students engage with Illich’s “cultural programme of overcoming pain” (1975). They challenge privilege and work to deconstruct and repair information logic, creating space for the invisibilised to share content via multiplatform strategies and participate in media production (Srivastava, 2009).
Minecraft Open Arms School: Play and interaction as new hybrid spaces for learning and protest action.
This proposal concerns a ship that does not exist in physical form but uses digital tools and gaming to create an activist world within the Minecraft video game, thereby articulating other spaces for protest, the dissemination of information, and open tools for activism. The platform contains several games that employ different hybrid formats. For example, a first-person game is developed that reconstructs the experience of young migrants imprisoned in the detention centre for foreigners (CIE) in Barcelona, reproducing all the spaces according to real plans and opening them for the first time to an uncensored view and visit. Another arcade-mode mini-game avoids the paternalistic and sensationalist view we have of migrants and, through digital volunteering, creates an immersive experience of rescuing in a digital sea, where the player is instructed through the game on how to act in all the phases of a rescue process. Minecraft functions as a digital environment for activism and training. The action space is configured as a tool to direct the viewer’s attention towards the root of the migration problem, where rescuing shipwrecked people at sea is only a consequence of a much more complex geopolitical problem (Thompson, 2016). In this case, through the hybrid interactive game, the aim is to repair human agency and its capacity for active transformation of its physical and digital environment. The transpedagogical experience channelled through the playful format and the immediate interaction with other human beings seeks a direct interweaving between Gen Z, socio-political problematics, and the personal context of each person. To generate knowledge through a hybrid networking game is to generate an intuitive context that stimulates direct action and active commitment outside the spatiotemporal framework of the game itself, with the aim of promoting a critical and politically committed daily attitude.
Spread the bread: Baking bread as a protest and a practice in the construction of subversive communities.
The proposal turns the Open Arms rescue ship into a culinary protest project. In each city the ship arrives, a manual for the self-construction of ephemeral, replicable bread ovens is disseminated, and the ship itself becomes a storage and supply point for all the raw materials needed to implement and activate the temporary ovens. Thus, self-management, free appropriation of urban space, and free distribution of food in areas of protest or need become strategies that seek to activate citizenship and repair situated knowledge (Haraway, 1995). When we choose what to eat, whether consciously or not, we make a political act and actively defend white supremacy (Bürgel, 2022). This case reinforces the potential of transpedagogical strategies to foster unstructured processes of unexpected creativity and change through the dissemination of an instruction manual that teaches citizens how to activate their socio-political environment through the act of cooking and eating. The self-managed political ecosystem articulated around the ephemeral communal oven undermines the fundamental role that cooking has played in the historical definition of the idea of home and family; consequently, the collective act of cooking and eating regains its political agency. The occupation of public space with ovens triggers a direct action with a high capacity for multiplication and propagation that immediately activates citizenship. This reinforces Puigjaner’s hypothesis that “following extraordinarily different casuistry and motivations, with this expansion of the domestic beyond the home, the private becomes public and that which until now had been limited to the immediate sphere, to the family, accentuates its political and potentially transformative character” (Puigjaner, 2014).
Make your own salt: A peaceful protest for human rights that democratises salt production and knowledge sharing.
This project advocates a non-violent protest by transforming a ship into a salt mine extracting salt from waters that have cost over 53,000[1] lives since 2014. It develops infrastructure for salt collection and a system for sharing the produced salt linked to an uncensored digital database. The project activates salt’s political agency, revealing social injustices in extractive chains that sustain human life. Historically, salt has symbolized social injustice and driven major social movements like India’s independence, where producing salt was an act of defiance led by Gandhi, empowering women and fostering national freedom. Salt from the ship, distributed in cities, becomes a symbol to challenge extractive practices. Each packet has a QR code to access and contribute to an open database on extraction politics, emphasizing nonviolence as a powerful alternative to ongoing oppression (Hasak-Lowy, 2020).
[2] See https://missingmigrants.iom.int/
Can universities serve as a medium and messenger of alternative realities?
By dismantling the stipulated logics of the disciplinary and vertical pedagogical approach, where format, method, and authorship entangle in an experimental process of constant mutation, directly related to the context and to the students’ and teachers’ subjectivity, without hierarchies. In the instability of this new process of continuous search, multiple opportunities arise to repair and reinvent our ways of learning, but at the same time states of indeterminacy and uncertainty are generated by questioning ordinary logics of knowledge production. For this reason, we consider it important to emphasise that the Open Arms School Ship’s project is an open process of collective questioning of the boundaries between pedagogy, politics, and everyday life, and that it does not pretend to propose a new methodological paradigm. For us, this project is the beginning of a process of experimentation explicitly grounded in the active engagement with the political agency of both students and teachers, within the context of high socio-political emergence at global, local, and intimate levels.
In this sense, we believe it is important to continue researching and questioning pedagogical paradigms with the aim of pollinating the institution with other decolonised, de-hierarchised, autonomous spaces through a transdisciplinary, antagonistic design committed to the other.
This essay shows how the use of transpedagogical environments in design can help build a collective intelligence actively engaged in conflict resolution. We understand these emancipatory spaces for students and teachers as generators of critical consciousness and platforms for intergenerational dialogue. We aim to address the crisis of borders, the violation of human rights and the Eurocentric thinking of dominant and privileged groups from a perspective based on participation, co-research, co-creation, and co-production of knowledge. These new spaces of action are physical and digital, inside and outside the academy, they bridge the gaps between disciplines, between people, and pretend to establish a dialogue between the institutional and the autonomous, which makes the proposals meaningful in critical and social terms. In these spaces, direct action challenges society, fostering affective relationships in which learning is communal and power relations or authoritarianism are absent. The Open Arms School Ship seeks to open the doors to other ways of understanding pedagogical processes, to infect society with design as a tool for doing and knowing together, and to open the way for the designer with agency, which is rather a facilitator, community-oriented and collaborative.
Our future work as designers, teachers, and researchers will continue to explore other spaces and tools for learning together with students, Foundations, Cultural Centres, and interest groups, through design and mutual respect. It is not about replacing the university structures of neoliberal education; it is about interrupting, nurturing and caring for them through multiple processes of co-responsibility with the socio-political reality we inhabit. These critical interruptions generate instability within rigid knowledge, which, at the same time, become opportunities to repair from the roots and open new ways of learning, acting and coexisting. For this reason, we believe it is time to revolutionise, decolonise and transform, starting on a small scale, understanding the university as a medium and message of other possible realities that are more coherent with the yearnings for social justice for all.
Written together with Manuela Valtchanova at Elisava Research, Barcelona.
The initial version of this text appears in the Book of Abstracts for the Design Commit - 1st International Conference on Design & Industry 2024.
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