Designing Spaces for Radical Conservation

Through the laboratory, students will develop an understanding of spatial transformation as a design practice. They will learn to view it as a critical, relational and interpretive tool that can be used to understand the complexity of urban and territorial contexts, and to initiate situated processes of change.
Students will particularly develop skills in analysing and understanding the spatial, social, and symbolic dynamics that characterise complex and marginal contexts through observation, listening, and collective practices.
By the end of the course, students will be able to develop design proposals that use spatial transformation as a relational tool to engage with reality, revealing its potential for change and contributing to shared, context-responsive transformation processes.

The course is designed to strengthen students' abilities and competences in:
· understanding spatial transformation as a critical, relational and cognitive tool capable of interpreting the complexity of urban and territorial contexts, as well as acting as a device for revealing and activating possibilities for change within situated processes;
· undertaking contextual inquiry to inform design processes, through practices of fieldwork, listening, mapping, and interpretation of the spatial, social, and symbolic dimensions of territories;
· constructing transformation scenarios that are conceived as narrative and spatial devices, which are capable of interpreting the present, imagining possible futures and activating conversations and processes of exchange among diverse actors;
· designing and testing spatial prototypes as operational tools for building relationships and producing knowledge. These prototypes are able to test design hypotheses and generate feedback through direct experience;
· communicating and disseminating the project through methods and tools that can convey the design process, build shared narratives and expand the project's scope within its contextual frameworks.