Studio Technogeographies - Martina Muzi
The starting point of each semester is a theme which looks at site-specific case studies to develop a reflection of reality. Themes can be broad, looking at politics and policies, sometimes themes explore social aspects or monitoring systems like meteorology. We keep the curriculum updated through changing themes. From there, a project, a research with the tools of design, is developed. We consider research as something that is part of design methodology. For us, research is a way of engaging with contexts, but it's also a way of engaging with different technologies–which challenge how and through which lens we look at something. When we talk about technologies, we extend from the technological body, which involves not only machines and sensors, but also our own bodies. So the voice, for example, can also be a technology.
Generally, the studio works with systems, which shape societies and even nature. We believe that things don't happen in isolation. We encourage students to connect and explore systems on different scales and geographies, to design within the system, not outside of it. The curriculum of our studio is composed of several disciplines that correlate to the different levels of study. The course is designed in a way that, from the first year to the third year, students always work with visualisations, which could be graphic design, cartography methods, 3D renders and photography. In this context, we also touch upon media archeology, questioning the politics of certain media. This approach to visual research is combined with a second pillar of our curriculum, a materialisation class, which approaches our topics through making, e.g. working with wood, metal or other materials such as moving images. A third pillar of the studio is system thinking which reflects on methods of inquiry.
Our tutors are multidisciplinary. In my own teaching, I focus on the formats of projects. Our students’ work might engage with and be positioned in reality, we can call this ‘social design.’ It could also be publications that are developed through questioning publishing methods, physical installations or objects, a service or a critical action. The difficult and exciting part is always: How do we bring our critique into the world? Our students find responses in the construction of a new archive or presenting work performatively in a specific context or working with sound.
At the end of each semester, we invite students to a feedback session which we use as preparation for the following semester. This means that one semester might have more lectures, another might have more study trips or workshops by external tutors such as lawyers, biologists or geologists, which brings new energy to the studio. We might do exhibitions or work on online publishing. Every semester is different. This flexibility allows us to upgrade our method of teaching, because, in truth, the studio is quite small and, indeed, we don’t have time to confront our students with all the things that we would like to teach as tutors, which means that we have to be selective with our curriculum.
Our students work on different scales, from the scale of the individual to the scale of the collective to the scale of the system, and that's what differentiates our studio within the nine studios of the bachelor program. Our vision for the future for the studio is to continue building on its methodology, building on inquiry as a tool of agency and bringing it back into contexts of applied research.
