Speculating with Care: Learning from an Experimental Educational Program in the West Bank

Bianca Elzenbaumer

In 2012, I was involved in the experimental study program, Campus in Camps, which is located in the West Bank and which brought together 15 third-generation refugees to study the contemporary condition of Palestinian refugee camps and to speculate about their potential futures. In this article, I draw on my experience at Campus in Camps in order to reflect on how design and speculation can be activated by designers and non-designers to speculate with care about the matters of their own lives. To explore the potential held by the design speculations produced at Campus in Camps, I draw on the work of feminist philosopher Marìa Puig de la Bellacasa around " matters of care ". To think about the aspects of care and speculation activated throughout the different phases of the educational program, I mobilise Alfred North Whitehead's metaphor that compares speculation to the flight of an airplane.

Suggested citation

Elzenbaumer, Bianca. 2018. ‘Speculating with Care: Learning from an Experimental Educational Program in the West Bank’. Architectural Theory Review, February. https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2018.1412330.