PAST

Living Room: Multispecies Design

Collaborator:
Melissa Ingaruca
Jöran Manduki (Floating University)

May 24, 2026

Living Room: Multispecies Design gathers a small group around a question that increasingly shapes how we understand design: what changes when the human is no longer placed at its center?

Western thought has long separated culture from nature, positioning the human as distinct from—and often above—the environments and other forms of life it inhabits. Multispecies thinking offers another position: that we exist as one species among many, embedded within networks of interdependence, responsibility, and coexistence. From this perspective, design becomes less about producing for human needs alone and more about negotiating relationships between bodies, environments, technologies, and other forms of life.

Hosted at COMMON AIR with Melissa Ingaruca, whose research moves across multispecies sustainability, design, and experimental futures, the conversation considered what it might mean to design with rather than simply for: How might we recognize nonhuman agency? What forms of ecological reciprocity can design enable? And how does the role of the designer shift when authorship itself becomes distributed?

The gathering took place through Living Room, a conversational format initiated by Jöran Manduki from Floating University that deliberately brings different disciplines and perspectives into the same room. Rather than an audience gathered around an expert, the format creates a temporary community around a shared inquiry—one conversation at a time.

For COMMON AIR, hosting Living Room reflects an understanding of the space as a place where knowledge does not need to arrive fully formed. Ideas can be encountered through conversation, disagreement, proximity, and collective attention. The space becomes less a backdrop for programming than an active condition for exchange: a room in which different practices can meet, linger, and begin to influence one another.

PASTCOMMON AIR BOOK FAIR EDITION #1

Collaborator:
Arxipelag Magazine — Milan, Italy
TableTimes — Palma de Mallorca / Logroño, Spain
51 Personae — Shanghai, China
Club del Prado — Barcelona / Buenos Aires
Handshake — Valencia, Spain
ASIAN FOOD DESIGN — Tokyo, Japan
Jumbo Press — Barcelona, Spain
Off-Menu — Barcelona / New York
Elisava Master in Editorial Design — Barcelona, Spain
Sitio — Barcelona, Spain
Ejemplar — Valencia, Spain
ARTT Captured — Barcelona, Spain
We Are One Publishing / نحن واحد للنشر — Cairo / Boston / Jeddah
Kamila Solarz — Barcelona, Spain
Ilhéu Magazine — São Miguel, Azores
Dial In Magazine — Manchester, UK
Tinaja — Berlin, Germany
Sandweegies Magazine — Glasgow, UK
Coastal Lines Press — Gaza, Palestine

April 17-19, 2026

COMMON AIR Book Fair brings together independent publishing projects from around the world in Barcelona — a city with a long history of creativity, cultural exchange, and making. The fair exists to connect international voices with a local context rich in talent, curiosity, and experimentation.

We see publishing as a shared cultural practice, not simply a finished product. Printed matter is the residue of collective thinking — a record of how culture is practiced, questioned, and sustained over time. COMMON AIR Book Fair s not a manifesto for the future of print, but an invitation to stay with the present long enough to notice what is already being made, and why it matters.

We are drawn to publishing projects that resist immediacy, rooted in a cause, an idea, or a specific cultural inquiry, developed with depth and intention. We support independent and self-organized initiatives — small print runs, handmade processes, etc, all the slow production methods that value thought over speed. To print is to choose slowness, reflection, and commitment.

COMMON AIR Book Fair gathers those who make and imagine. It is a space to share work, exchange ideas, and experience print beyond the page — through conversation, sound, and collective presence.

COMMON AIR Book Fair is an initiative by COMMON AIR in collaboration with the residency programs OFF-MENU and NAKED SPACE.

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