Framing designing practices from the margins. The case of Off Campus San Vittore

This chapter discusses the original contribution coming out of the research activities we, as part of the ImagisLab research group, are conducting in dialogue between prison and society, proposing designing as a collaborative generative practice towards the shaping and sharing of brand-new language out of the pluriverse pushing calls from the margins of society. According to Hannah Arendt 1958 , storytelling paves the way to the construction of the public space, considered as a space of inquiry, of identification of common interests, and of (public) discourse building. This practice-based contribution offers both a phenomenological and theoretical framework to the ethical design dimension for public and social systems, and it represents a prototype of designing that does not aim to resolve, but to make sense of, critical, pluriverse and transactional perspectives. It highlights key issues and potentialities in an increasingly polarized society of which prison is a reflection. We aim here to provide further meanings to support design agonism (DiSalvo, 2015 and social transformation by design, overturning marginalization as a problem to marginality as a site of resistance (hooks, 1984 ,and showing how design can help generate new narratives, informed by the courage and contradictions of human conditions emerging from the margins of society.