3. AutoCostruzione-SelbstBau: Design as a Practical Knowledge Translation Process

Two key concepts can open a theoretical investigation about the fields of design and commons: practice, understood as acting together, and knowledge, or the activity of communicating practical information. These terms are also referred to as praxis communis and practical knowledge. This chapter aims to develop a design thinking approach able to shift the concept of a design project from its traditional self-referential definition towards its interpretation as activity of collaboratively producing specific knowledge about the designed object’s physicality, use and production process and to translate it to a broader community of actors involved in the production process. The adopted methodology is to be considered as an in-the-making design thinking and building process, strictly connected to the experience gained through its application to the case-study, a small building for workshops and material storage, shared by a small Italian community of friends. The approach proposes three phases: self-production, as common knowledge producing, co-production, as common knowledge translating and re-production, as common knowledge growing. As a result, the study presents the opportunity to start both a theoretical investigation and a design process based on the possibility of producing, communicating and growing a common knowledge by defining: a common praxis of self-building a design typology; a collaborative co-designing process; and a resilient social system able to grow both a collective sense of identity and technical knowledge.