In a short retrospective manner, Escuela Análoga was a project on experiential pedagogy to create, connect and produce knowledge for design in the context of design education, social transformation, authorship, and interdisciplinary workflows. The objective was to increase value in the personal, social, and economic arena and to navigate broadly among a few touch-points of knowledge production and creative scenarios for socially healthy and common wellbeing.

Forgotten long ago was the classic/modernist maxim: knowledge-for-its-own-sake, what in the words of John Henry Newman, knowledge was: “worth possessing for what it is and not merely for what it does”. Higher or lower, artificially distinguished and over-specialized servile carriers, give birth to hygienic scenarios for classes, where education doesn’t cross-pollinate, and knowledge lost the relational dimension. Knowledge then becomes unhinged, disengaged from parallel disciplines, and hypothetical educational frameworks give birth to futility and social disconnection. The classic ideals that give coherence to knowledge bodies, such as beauty, truth, and goodness tend to conform themselves to a marginal role at best in this pragmatism shift. Or as Christopher Dawson argues, that educational institutions tend to be inclined to the “utilitarian vocationalism” altar.​ As global threats in nature and social tensions start to rise to the level of normalcy Escuela Analoga prove to be an experiment in design for hope and the future.

My next step is to keep observing, learning, and collaborating with institutions, projects and designers that promote socially engaged design.