ABOUT | LAB FOR NETWORK COMMUNITIES 互联共同体实验室

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From the educational field to corporate ranks of operation, notions of ‘design thinking’, ‘user-centred design’, ‘social design’ are used to tackle the urgency and need for creative thinking to build responsive, user-specific tooling with the capacity to preserve balance amidst the increasingly fragmented and uneven forces that inhabit everyday life – design is ever more asked to perform as a connective agent among different forms of knowledge, demographic groups, physical and digital realms of experience.

Connectivity nowadays is no longer the single purview of high-tech companies eager to capitalize on the social desire to ‘be there, be present’, but a condition of existence – connectedness is predicated on the imperative of the network - ‘be linked, or never be whole’.

The implications of this condition are complex and multifarious – to be sure they are so in relation to whom and how detains control over the very means and outcomes of its social production. While networked technologies have produced uplifting impacts over the course of the past 20 years and the coming of age of the ‘sharing economy’, they also present urgent challenges for our subjective understanding and articulation of what it means to ‘belong’ to this new and future ‘whole’ beyond partaking to communities of interest, nuclear preservation and ‘self’-centred economies of consumption.

Can we alter, redirect or redraw systemic dependences of social, economic and cultural nature into new configurations that can truly restore a sense of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘mutuality’ into the contemporary condition of ‘’connectedness’’? That is to empower or re-enable the making of communities around empathetic networks of value, proximity and care?

For designers this means to think through and ‘build’ actionable blueprints of change across both real and speculative scenarios: mediating between the fast-paced simulations of technological augmentation and the real-world resilience of human predicaments, that is the habitudinal systems of co-dependence and trust that historically have sustained offline social networks. 

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This research environment aims at exploring the contemporary condition of NETWORK COMMUNITIES by devising practical and speculative scenarios implicating ACCESSIBILITY, IMPACT and COLLABORATION in a radically interdisciplinary context spanning the social sciences, technological research, spatial, visual and material studies, entrepreneurship and economics.

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The program aims at building long-term perspectives for the establishment of a permanent research entity within The School of Arts & Design at BIFT dedicated to design research and development concerned with the positive edification of systems of extreme proximities among today’s network communities.

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从教育领域到企业运营层，“设计思维”、“以用户为中心的设计”、“社会设计”的概念被用来处理创意思维的紧急需求并建立具有在日益破碎的情况下保持平衡能力的，具有响应性的、用户特定的工具。分裂与不平衡导致在日常生活中，设计越来越被要求作为不同形式的知识、人口群体、物理和数字体验领域之间的连接媒介。

如今，连接性已不再是高科技公司渴望利用“be there, be present”的社会愿望的单一权限，而是一种存在条件——连接性基于网络——“被连接，或永远不连接”。

这种状况意味着未来的复杂性和多样性，可以确定的是这与谁以及如何控制社会生产的手段和结果有关。虽然网络技术在过去20年以及“共享经济”时代中造成了令人振奋的影响，同时，也给我们理解和阐明“属于”这个新的和未来的“整体”意味着什么提出了挑战，而不仅仅是让人们停留在参与利益共同体、核保护以及“以自我为中心”的消费经济中。

我们是否能够改变、重定向或重塑社会、经济和文化的系统依赖性，使之成为新的形态，从而真正将 reciprocity and mutuality的感觉恢复到“联系”的状态？

对于设计者来说，这意味着要仔细思考并“建立”跨越真实和猜测场景的可操作的变化蓝图：在技术增强的快速模拟和人类困境的真实世界之间进行调解。在依赖和信任的基础上，过去人们一直保持离线社交网络。

这个研究环境旨在探索网络社区的条件，通过设计一个跨社会科学、技术研究、空间和虚拟空间的跨学科的、包含可访问性、影响力和协作性的实际和思辨的场景。

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这里提出的三位一体计划旨在为北京服装学院艺术与设计学院建立永久性教育计划，并建立长期远景，该教育计划致力于设计研究与开发，关注当今网络社区之间极端接近系统和其积极启迪。