In this episode of Commoning Design & Designing Commons, Giacomo and Joanna host a conversation with Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal, authors and editors of "Design and Solidarity - Conversation on collective futures" (Columbia University Press, 2023).

Marisa (https://www.marisajahn.com/) is an artist, filmmaker, and Sundance Fellow who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, and Parsons/The New School, where she is the director of integrated design. Artforum has praised her work as “exemplifying the possibilities of art as social practice.”

Rafi (https://rafisegal.com/) is an architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current work focuses on how emerging forms of sharing and collectivity affect the design of buildings and cities.

In this special episode, we reflect upon an online workshop at the Participatory Design Conference 2022, which explored the intersection between relationality, commoning, and designing. The workshop explored temporally, embodied, and geographically distributed ways of relating to others. The episode invites participant voices recorded during the workshop to talk about their affective experience of being together in a collective body, the PD Commoners' body.

The theme of this 4th episode of the Commoning Design & Designing Commons podcast is urban commons, and together with Anna Seravalli we discuss co-designing and commoning in the context of urban environments. The city space, and especially public space, is a crucial setting for our social life and sustainable living. During the last decade the framework of the “urban commons” has gained popularity as a way to address and tackle contemporary urban challenges varying from urban housing to urban inequality, but also as a matter of responding to the challenge of how to support and maintain public welfare in face of economic cuts, and shrinking economic resources within the public sector.

Anna Seravalli works as a senior lecturer and design researcher at The School of Arts and Communication Malmö University. Anna has a background as a product and service designer and holds a PhD in Design and Social Innovation. In her work she engages with citizens, NGO, civil servants and local entrepreneurs in: developing concrete initiatives to foster sustainable transitions within NGOs and public sector organizations.