Learning from with Experts - Zine (2026)

Transmissions — Practices of Learning, Sharing & Caring in Eco-Social Design

Edited by Flora Mammana

EDITORIAL DETAILS

Collaborative zine produced during a three-day seminar in the Master in Eco-Social Design at the Free University of Bozen–Bolzano.

Contributors:
Eco-Social Design Practitioners: Andrea Dieck, Carolina Ongaro, Carlotta Novella, Eva Gonçalves, Gaia Crocella, Gaja Mežnarić Osole, Laïsa Cordes, Lenn Cox, Raphael Volkmer, Silvia Gioberti, Tabea Glahs

Eco-Social Design short seminar team: Adriana Maria Sotomayor Espinoza, Alessia Piscioli, Alessia Zanotti, Alice Yorke, Ana Belén Pérez González, Anaël Arthur (Eliot), Anna Pitton, Aparna Gomathi Nataraja Pandian, Beatrice Guerra, Elena Galvani, Elisa Di Rocco, Ella Stauber, Flora Mammana, Franziska Fröstl, Greta Cazzanelli, Giulia Galli, Laura Kalser, Luca Toscano, Paula Götz, Shirin Kiefer, Shreya Deshpande, Vanessa Wahls, Wentao Lu (Matteo)

ISBN: 9791257130169

TECHNICAL DETAILS

– first edition, 70 copies
– 50 double-pages, A4, printed black on colored paper
– includes interviews, conversations and illustrations
– language: English

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks are extended to La Foresta – Accademia di comunità and Brave New Alps for their long-term commitment to community-based practices, which have shaped many of the networks and conversations reflected in this publication.

A heartfelt acknowledgment is also extended to all the practitioners who generously contributed their time and knowledge, despite the absence of financial compensation.

ABOUT THIS ZINE

This zine is part of Learning from with Experts, a seminar within the Master in Eco-Social Design at the Free University of Bozen–Bolzano (Academic Year 2026). It emerges from a shared attempt to think design beyond its familiar borders—towards practices that engage with post-anthropocentric and post-growth futures, and that work through care, repair, reorientation, regeneration, decolonisation, and more-than-human entanglements.

Between March and April 2026, Flora Mammana held a series of online conversations with ten practitioners and collectives based across Europe. Many of these connections have grown over years through her work with La Foresta – Accademia di Comunità in Rovereto. Guided by two questions—what creative practitioners are doing right now to bring more sustainable futures into being, and how we can engage with expert knowledge in ways that are reciprocal rather than extractive—these conversations became the material ground of both the seminar and this publication.

Rather than treating the conversations as content to be consumed, the seminar worked with them as relations to be continued. What appears here is not a transcript, nor a summary, but a set of situated interpretations produced by the participants of the seminar through notes, drawings, mappings, reflections, and collective translations. The zine is both a record of shared learning and a method for learning with and from others, asking what methods guide transformative design practice, what frictions and contradictions shape this work, and how we might situate ourselves amid ecological breakdown, social fragmentation, and political uncertainty.