We are excited to announce the finale in our three-part series of online talks and workshops with La Maraña from Puerto Rico.

La Maraña will facilitate a presentation Participatory Design Tools, Monday, August 31st at:

9:00am ‘pacific time’
11:00 am central time (i.e. Chicago)
12:00 pm eastern time (i.e. NYC)
13:00 pm atlantic time (l.e. Puerto Rico)
18:00 pm cest (i.e. Barcelona)
19:00 pm palestine time

The talk will be offered via Zoom and folks are invited to register with this link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/ViN6MuIGQ2CjgZA3sksoJQ

The presentation will be given in Spanish. With a simultaneous Spanish to English language interpreter. Communication Access Realtime Transcription (CART) will also be provided in English.

We encourage folks to please take some time checking out https://www.lamarana.org/ ahead of the talk. Their programs offer a lot of inspiration for designers interested in examples of community-led design in practice.

Participatory Design with La Maraña

A table with different colored paper, scissors, craft supplies, and books are centered in a shot, with someone’s arms over the table as they actively work on an imaginative layout for designing a space.

In this expansive talk, La Maraña will introduce their organization, their work, and their design manifesto. As we hear stories of their approach to community led design, La Maraña will also graciously share tools for participatory design.

Somebody is holding a small booklet with their back to the camera. The booklet is in focus, with text and images referring to some of the participatory design work that La Maraña supports through La Cartuchera.

La Cartuchera is a kit and booklet developed by La Maraña. It is used in educational, methodological ways to facilitate participatory processes and to develop collaborative projects that communities lead. Through the kit, people can ideate: Community Mapping, Imagining Workshops, Collaborative Projects, Community Processes, and Narrative Justice. This resource is especially impactful for folks looking to imagine, co-design, and bring to action changes they want to see in their communities. More info on this kit can be found here: https://www.lamarana.org/en/store/p/la-cartuchera

¿WHO'S LA MARAÑA?

La Maraña is a Puerto Rican nonprofit organization dedicated to participatory design and planning, founded in 2014 with the vision of strengthening and advancing the transition of our communities toward more livable, equitable, participatory, and sustainable environments.

We engage communities in the creative processes that are essential to visionary planning, planting the seeds for long-term community power through tangible projects, replicable tools, and principles of self-determination. We work to decentralize resource governance by developing new models of participatory governance that provide people with direct power to imagine, plan, and build the future they want for their communities.

MISSION

To promote imagination and participatory design as tools for the sustainable development of our communities.

VISION

We dream of a Puerto Rico where communities lead the design processes and stewardship of the spaces we co-inhabit.

ALIGNMENTS

La Maraña focuses its work methods on the principles of “right to the city”. Our projects begin with the understanding that the people who inhabit a place have the right to inhabit, use, occupy, produce, transform, govern, and enjoy cities, towns, and urban settlements that are just, inclusive, safe, sustainable, and democratic—recognized as common goods that support a dignified life (UN, 2020). We believe that the social and economic development of a place is realized through the social production of habitat.

Knowledge, lived experiences, and collective wisdom of communities hold the answers to the challenges of inhabiting and caring for a territory. Through this approach, we promote participatory governance and shared leadership in decision-making, recognizing that communities are built collectively by everyone who lives in them. Our processes are rooted in active listening and openness to the diversity of stakeholders involved in our collaborations, including community leaders, government agencies, and institutions.

Through these co-managed processes we ensure that projects are sustainable from their earliest stages and remain effective over the long term, placing the encounter of knowledge between community intelligence and empathetic, rigorous technical expertise at the core.