TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common

How many times have we heard “I didn't have time”? 
It is common knowledge that time today is the only form of luxury to which many of us can aspire, yet we complain that we never have any.

From a philosophical point of view, this simple observation has deep roots and represents one of the great paradoxes of contemporary life. The compression and compartmentalisation of time according to the laws of efficiency, production, and turbo-capitalism are directly linked to the condition of planetary depletion of bodies, resources, and the Earth — all unpacked in their utilitarian functions.

In the past, the 8-hour working day was designed to regulate the time to work and the time to leisure and rest, whilst today, despite the loss of that separation, we have not lost the imperative of quantifying time. For philosopher Pascal Chabot, the culture of quantity (Chronos) acts as a disqualification of quality (Kairos). In a word, Modern Time has been objectified.

In objectifying the world through time, its sensible qualities have been set aside, and in addition all activities that do not produce capital, i.e. everything that concerns care — for people, for other species, for the environment, for simply the world we would like to live in — is perceived as an activity located outside of that ‘valuable’ time, creating a feeling of anxiety and non-futurability, leaving apart Kairos, that qualitative time connected to a sense of occasionality and informed by the emergence of meaning.

TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common is the title chosen for the 4th Porto Design Biennale edition and it invites for a shift in our daily perspective: instead of critically tackling the anxiety of modern temporality, it suggests to observe the potential of qualitative time. The present is not seen as a crisis to overcome, rather as a gift filled with collective possibilities waiting to be activated. This perspective fully inhabits the now rather than projecting into speculative futures. In the current accelerated world where time is increasingly commodified, fragmented, and extracted, it suggests the importance of reclaiming time as a common resource — a gift that belongs to all, a condition for belonging, a present of presence.

Therefore, in the upcoming edition of the Porto Design Biennale, the design discipline is not intended as a future-oriented or problem-solving practice, but rather as an active, ongoing, down-to-earth engagement with the materiality of the present, where the collective capacity to shape systemic relations becomes both medium and subject.

The seeds of all this are already all around us, and particularly in recent years — as a social and economic effect of the pandemic condition — there has been an expansion of associationism that can be read as a bottom-up attempt to find valid and shared alternatives to growing inequalities by groups of people with shared goals, based on mutual solidarity and autonomy. 

The subtitle Designing the Common extends this vision by framing design as collective world-building. Here, "the common" goes beyond shared resources to embrace a fundamental dimension of social production that includes material elements alongside language, knowledge, affects, relationships, and of course, trust. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their work Commonwealth, broadened the understanding of the commons to include not only material but also immaterial processes like social interactions, which they termed 'the common'. They posited that every cultural practice, from the arts to simple daily greetings, cultural codes, emotions or affects contributes to the creation of common-wealth. This perspective invites us to consider cultural practices as part of a larger ecosystem of shared social wealth, deepening our appreciation of the cultural commons as dynamic processes that continuously shape and are shaped by the patterns of our interactions.

Assuming time as a shared resource and design as a political practice, the biennale moves beyond functioning as an institution and operates instead as a constitution — a living process that actively produces new social relations, forms of organization, and modes of collaboration. 

Outside the museum space, the Porto Design Biennale intervenes on the typical temporariness of these events to favour the structured establishment of projects that can be consolidated as a real, permanent, and co-participated offer to citizens with particular attention to the new generations, and both people giving and receiving support in care-related services.  

Therefore, starting from the selection of local projects of municipalities and associations, cooperatives, and circles (such as civic, play, educational, inclusive and assistance centres) in the areas of Porto and Matoshinos, and as a consequence of a moment of knowledge and listening, the Biennale curatorial team started a process of mediation to then facilitate the formation of transdisciplinary project teams with international and local designers for the co-design and realisation of places, activities, processes able to vitalise these realities, guaranteeing them long-term agency thanks to the belief that design is oriented towards the shared well-being of living beings in relation to their environment and vice versa. 

Design interventions that structure space differently inevitably restructure time differently, and they do so by deconstructing a prevailing logic that reduces urban environments to sites of extraction and overconsumption.

The Biennale supports and brings together practices of spatial justice by facilitating occasions and places where being-in-common can flourish thanks to convivial, positive gatherings between citizens, their organizations, and their institutions.

Current projects range from interventions that seek to reclaim public space for children by developing participatory actions with them to understand their needs and desires in urban playground projects; to the incorporation of design strategies that enhance sensorial interactions between people affected by mental disabilities and their care-givers; from the creation of opportunities for social gathering and care for vulnerable communities by fostering conditions of choice within solidarity-driven initiatives, spontaneously supported by a significant part of the Portuguese population, to the activation of spaces and practices for sound and music recording specifically designed for younger generations, stimulating creativity, collective sharing, and knowledge exchange.

In addition, the Biennale outside projects will be the subjects of the a publication curated by Andreia Faria, gathering together a collection of short-stories, essays, and illustrations, with the potential for resistance and joy: through storytelling, fabulation, and speculative fiction, the authors immerse themselves in and reimagine the social and structural dynamics of the complex webs of relations that compose each situation.

Inside the spaces of the Casa do Design in Matosinhos and as the cultural representations of a prevailing design attitude that needs to be represented, the exhibition TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common takes shape as a collection of national and international projects that intervene on a systemic level on the current socio-economic dynamics of the context and the community they cooperate in, underlying a crescendo of design protocols that bring about qualitative transformations on different scales. 

The approach of the exhibition positions design not only as object-making discipline, but also as a constitutive activity that gives agency to the systemic ways imagined by designers to revitalise the connection between citizens and the shared environment as vital spaces meant to practice alternatives within changing realities, their implications and their needs in light of current climatic, political and social changes.

The exhibition will also feature works selected through an open call specifically addressed to designers whose practices align with these principles. Essential to this selection is that projects must have been developed in active collaboration with a community, association, or municipality — emphasizing design as an inherently social and political practice rather than an individual pursuit, offering tangible manifestations of how design can create new temporal and spatial qualities to the Common. The exhibition engages with the audience’s experience to encounter time for rest and leisure; time to construct and enjoy a multitude of inter-and intragenerational relations of intimacy and sociality; and time for pleasure, politics, and the creation of new ways of living and new modes of subjectivity.

The Biennale's public program, conceived by designer, editor and publisher Nina Paim, emerges from a profound recognition: in an era of burnout and political defeat, where acceleration and exhaustion smother imagination, we must create spaces to rethink, reorganize, and refuse. Rooted in the belief that mobilizing and healing are not opposites but intertwined communal practices, the program offers conversations, workshops, tea gatherings, stitching circles, guided meditations, and live podcasts — embodied practices of restoration that allow us to slow down and reconnect. "Because although the world is full of separations, struggles and scarcities," as Escobar reminds us, "our bet is that it does not have to be that way."

Let’s practice the very world we wish to inhabit. 

Good Morning!