Kowork: Socially Engaged Codesign Project

This paper is an exploratory reflection on a socially engaged and participatory activity developed within the project KOWORK E5G and the collaboration between Grupo de Estudos Socio-territoriais Urbanos e de Acção Local (GESTUAL/CIAUD), a research group engaged with social, urban and local action studies from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon (FAUL), and Gabinete de Apoio ao Emprego e Empreendedorismo (GIP), the department for employment inclusion of Associação Cultural Moinho da Juventude (ACMJ), a local institution developing social work with the community of the neighbourhood Alto da Cova da Moura. Located in Amadora Commune, Greater Lisbon. Cova da Moura is a self-built neighbourhood mainly inhabited by immigrants from Portuguese-speaking African countries and respective descendants. Just as many other informal settlements in Lisbon's periphery, the sustained lack of support from public institutions and precarious access to means and resources for its development and/or qualification, has been perpetuating social exclusion, conditions of poverty, and the neighbourhood's controversial criminal reputation. KOWORK E5G is a social and employment inclusion project funded by Programa Escolhas Pontual of Alto Comissariado para as Migrações, created by GIP/ACMJ to empower young people living in Cova da Moura expand individual and collective employment opportunities and/or build their own business ideas. Through the arrangement of a diverse partners consortium, the project provided a wide curriculum of activities to young participants. From learning how to build résumés, preparing for interviews and working on the topics of citizenship and entrepreneurship, practice wall painting techniques, build 3D printers, print objects and work in the newly furnished workshop with rapid-prototyping and laser-cut machines. The Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, was invited too, through the group studies GESTUAL, proposed an activity that promoted the use of the workshop as well as harnessed carpentry, building and design interest and skills in participants. In light of this, four design PhD researchers from GESTUAL developed a codesign process with youngsters to build local and concrete solutions for and with the community of Cova da Moura neighbourhood. The following sessions are a thorough account of this process. From the educational approach to the collaborative understandings of the field, swot analysis, ideation, prototyping and implementation – it aims to reflect and explore four fundamental aspects of social design (which correspond to the four researcher's perspectives): (1) the notion of social sustainability, (2) social design methods, tools and methodologies, (3) its political and ethical dimensions, and (4) the activist role of communication of such kinds of participatory and designerly acts and actions. To further support the questioning of what and how sustainable and meaningful principles and practices of design can be activated, constructed and communicated in society.