Affective Bodies: Intimate Design Practices to Reinvent the Everyday

Abstract

This article investigates some of the implications of intimate design practices by presenting two academic projects carried out within the context of an uncertain present. It argues that design practices have the capacity to foster intimacy and affect through the lens of the politics of care. Drawing on the notion of affective bodies, the authors claim that design can explore new paths to reinvent the everyday, focusing on recent crisis-ridden contexts. The article examines how intimate practices that reformulate everyday politics can reclaim temporality, active citizenship and radical affectivity as infrastructural needs in contemporary urban habitats.

The two case studies date from March 2020 through December 2021 under the climate of crisis brought about by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Europe and the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis. Given the escalation of the blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, it is especially relevant to explore intimacy as a means of enacting politically empowered action through design. Both case studies aim to temporarily interrupt conventional uses of collective urban spaces in order to generate pockets of resistance that explore the subliminal potentials of urban spaces and allow us to imagine, and even experience, different ways of living through an updated lens of care. These irruptions of intersubjective appropriations of urban spaces not only have an emblematic impact, but also a cumulative effect by generating a growing network of affective bodies in action. This emergent affective network offers relevant opportunities for the transformation of crisis-ridden urban contexts through dynamic interactions between sociality and spatiality.