Cumulus Bogotá: The Design After closure.

Round tables
The morning begins with different parallel sessions focused on the conference tracks: Sensing the city, sensing the rural; Somewhere, nowhere, anyone, everyone; Fiction and de-innovation; Design and counterculture and Biodiversity-Driven Design. Some of the most relevant topics were:

“ABRACEMOS LO NUESTRO”
This paper presentation showed the studies of a traditional Paraguayan textiles that underline the culture of the country. The proposal was to use the textiles to create different prototypes that could be applicable in sustainable products.

FICTIONS FOR THE REAL WORLD
This spectacular round table can be explained in the participants’ words:
“Speculative design as an approach to problem solving must face the complex challenge of overcoming people’s natural state” Veneta Stefanova A.
“We need to put more tools in the hands of the public, we need to act fast as the future is coming fast” Rafael Vesga.
“From governmental and entrepreneurial perspective, experimenting can be more responsible or not when it’s applied in a complex context by generating, testing and structured learning” Javier Guillot

DESIGN SERVICE GROUP
Design service group is all about empathizing with the actors that play a part in people’s situations in order to reach social innovation.

The fourth keynote speaker
The fourth keynote was Daniel Grushkin, founder and Executive Director of the Biodesign Challenge. In his speech, he talked about the biodesign application in different industries such as cosmetic, fashion, engineering and architecture. In that way scientist and designers can manipulate materials using biotechnology. Considering this, biodesign should be seen as an interdisciplinary work where the challenge is how different actors work together. On the other hand, Daniel talked about the Biodesign Challenge, an education program and competition that is shaping the first generation of biodesigners. This year, Universidad de los Andes won the challenge with Pseudofreeze a backpack prototype design that contains a modified protein which creates ice at high temperatures allowing the conservation of vaccines in a good state without using energy.

The fifth keynote speaker
The last keynote speech was in charge of Eva de Klerk, Dutch artist and independent professional in participatory city development. The main ideas taken from Eva de Klerk’s Keynote speech are the following five statements:

Putting people as main characters. We design for and with human beings by exploring the maximum capacities of human creativity through art, design and architecture.
Focus less on consuming, more on producing. Historically, cities have been more focused on spaces for consuming art (galleries, museums) but have left behind the spaces for producing and creating.
Collaborative design process. Big things are never the product of individualism. Collaboration is necessary for the exploration and result of creative design.
Self-trust as an instigator for creativity. You can do anything if you love what you do and trust yourself.

The closing conference focused on the next Cumulus events: Rome, Italy (cumulusroma2020.org) and St. Petersburg, Russia.