PROJECTS
Current
2023-. The city of shades (PI)
This research line on heat and shade grew out of a collaboration agreement (2023-2025) together with Barcelona City Council’s Office of Climate Change and Sustainability and Barcelona Institute of Technology for the Habitat, to study the architectural contest and prototyping process on ephemeral shading in public space. As part of this project, I have been curating the Department of Umbrology (DoU, https://umbrology.org): a fictional division of study and intervention on the urban life of shades, exploring artistic research, multimodal anthropology and environmental media approaches. The DoU started its operations with the 2024 workshop The city of shades: Ethnography of urban habitability in times of climate mutation, funded by the Architectural Weeks of Barcelona.
Throughout 2025 I have been collaborating with Arquitectura de Contacte and Nusos in the project Communities in the shade, undertaking a collaborative mapping project and intervention to provoke into being shade communities in the district of Sant Andreu (Barcelona). As a result we’ve published a guide called ‘The city of shades’ to learn to appreciate shadows and their transformative power to redesign our cities.
From December 2025 to November 2027, the Department of Umbrology has been awarded dedicated funding by theDaniel & Nina Carasso Foundation’s ‘Composing knowledges to imagine and construct sustainable futures’ call. This will help us unfold a public program of research-creation umbrological activities and debates, as well as a ‘festival of shades’ through which we will test its hypothesis as a speculative institution to describe and intervene in overheated urban arenas. This project’s consortium comprises researchers from UOC’s CareNet and DARTS groups, as well as the collaborative architectural practitioners of Arquitectura de Contacte, the science communicators of Nusos Coop, and the speculative artistic practioners of Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico.
2025-2028. FUTURNAT (research team member) – Abrir el Futuro: Imaginarios Emergentes de Naturaleza ante la Crisis Climática y Medioambiental / Unlocking the Future: Emerging Imaginaries of Nature amid Climate and Environmental Crisis. Funded by the Spanish National R&D Programme (PID2024-159564NB-I00). PI: Elisenda Ardèvol, UOC.
FUTURNAT investigates cultural imaginaries about the relationship between humanity and nature in media, activism, and environmental communication. It seeks to understand emerging narratives that foster cultural change toward sustainable futures, with an interdisciplinary approach and attention to the sociocultural diversity of the Ibero-American region and the North-South Global dialogue.
2024-2026. CIUDEN – Ciudades que envejecen: Los futuros del urbanismo de la edad avanzada en el litoral español / Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism in the Spanish Coast (PI). Leonardo Grant of the BBVA Foundation (Beca Leonardo de Investigación Científica y Creación Cultural 2024 de la Fundación BBVA). Team: Daniel López + Carmen Lozano Bright + Alexandre Molina Sourdat
Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism on the Spanish coast wishes to study the Spanish Mediterranean coast as a present and future laboratory of versions of the ‘good life’ under the sun, at a peculiar moment when housing, demographic and environmental crises are coalescing into the perfect storm. For more than fifty years, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, one of the main hotspots of ‘retirement migration’ in the continent, has developed a signature approach to late life urbanism: with a great investment in urban infrastructures of care and urban accessibility transforming dwellings, as well as urban equipment, such as public transports, parks and beaches. In this critical context of urban forms of aging the project has two main objectives: (i) studying the genealogy of late life urbanism (undertaking fieldwork and archival research) in one of the following enclaves: Costa Blanca (Alicante), Costa del Sol (Málaga), Maresme (Barcelona) or Mallorca; and (ii) eliciting the imagination around the futures of late life urbanism (by means of immersive speculative workshops) within planetary boundaries.
The project will run from October 2024 to July 2026.
2023-2027. The Body and the City (PI)
Research line funded by a Ramón y Cajal fellowship (RYC2021-033410-I, Spanish National Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research Programme 2021-2023) at the Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet group.
2018-ongoing. The Possible City: Embodied Plurality and the Activation of Urban Design (book project)
Urban accessibility is caught in a paradox: while designers have successfully dismantled physical barriers through a rollout of technical interventions, the result is often a form of ‘petrified inclusion.’ By translating moral problems into infrastructural standards, urban accessibility relies on an assimilationist legibility of the body that fails to represent the multisensory reality of bodies—turning what once was a bodily segregation into an epistemic one. The Possible City intervenes in this domain of technical solutionism to argue that what urban design suffers from is not a lack of access, but a failure of epistemic sensitivity. Drawing on field and archival work with independent-living and disability rights movements in Barcelona, and the design of pedagogical situations in both Munich and Barcelona, The Possible City is an ethnography of a range of versions of urban design that refuse the safety of calcified standards and engage with care in the sense provided by Isabelle Stengers, that is, as ‘an activation of the possible.’ In describing activations of infrastructures, prototypes, and pedagogies, The Possible City makes a plea for urban design practices where embodied plurality is not a problem yet fully known. Offering stories of how urban designers situate in the radical vicinity of plural embodiments, The Possible City extends a hopeful invitation to design cities alongside those divergent bodies, even at the hinges of unrelatability. Hence pushing for an agenda uncommoning urban practice, re-learning the very pre-conditions of design from the plural iridescence of emergent bodies, already inhabiting or yet to come.
Past
2023-2025: Multimodal appreciation: Prototypes for the evaluation and institutionalisation of more-than-textual ethnography (co-PIs: Ignacio Farías, Tomás Criado, Andrew Gilbert), Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung‘s Open Up programme)
This project takes on an impossible problem. Ethnographers from across the humanities and social sciences have recently experimented with multimodal forms of description, analysis and intervention in order to grasp slippery research objects that otherwise remain outside of the apprehensible. This multimodal turn has resulted in a proliferation of more-than-textual forms that are impossible to classify and at odds with institutionalised modes of disciplinary knowledge production. Despite the important openings created by multimodal works, they are rarely seen as of equal value when compared to articles and monographs. The current situation is problematic but to a certain extent understandable, as peers, reviewers and supervisors are confronted with a complex conundrum: What criteria should be employed to evaluate such multimodal singularities? This project responds to this conundrum through two experimental moments that correspond to the two challenges producing the current impasse, those of evaluation and institutionalisation. The first moment is constituted by a set of immersive exercises designed to describe and compare the affordances of selected more-than-textual or multimodal research artefacts. The second moment is a set of prototyping exercises designed to produce and test a toolkit to facilitate the evaluation and institutionalisation of future multimodal research.
Team: Judith Albrecht, Tomás Criado, Ignacio Farías, Andrew Gilbert, Carla J. Maicher and Karina Piersig.
2021-2022. Trash Games — Playing with the Circular Economy Transition at the Haus der Materialisierung (PI: Vera S. Rotter, Recycling engineering, TU Berlin; Co-PI: Tomás Criado, Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology, HU Berlin – Funded by the Berlin University Alliance 2021-2022 call for Experimental Science Communication Laboratories)
The project “Trash Games: Playing with the Circular Economy Transition at the HdM” has brought together the Chair of Circular Economy and Recycling Technologies (CERT, Technische Universität Berlin) and the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) to develop and explore games and game design as formats of public engagement with the Circular Economy (CE). The idea of a circular economy goes beyond current top-down efforts to achieve sustainable development by extending the life of products and the materials they contain through their reuse, repair, remanufacturing and recycling. In this project we have experimented with games as a special form of science communication enabling accessible, speculative and interactive forms of participation of non-homogeneous publics in complex topics. In cooperation with actors of the civic platform “Haus der Materialisierung” – part of the Haus der Statistik, flagship project for community-oriented neighborhood development in Berlin –, as well as other circular economy initiatives from Berlin, we undertook a several months-long research process, resulting in the prototyping of a game that explores potentials and conflicts in the social transition to a collaboratively managed circular economy.
Stadtlabor’s anthropological research and game design team: Petra Beck, Sebastian Quack, Ignacio Farías & Tomás Criado.
Main result: WASTE WHAT? An open-source game on the many ways to reuse stuff!
2015-2018: Accessibility Values: Disability rights movements, political regulations and market devices in the design of urban democracy in Europe (Individual research project)
An ethnographic research project (involving fieldwork, interviews, and archival work) on inclusive urbanism struggles and the creation, implementation, maintenance and supervision of sidewalk democracy projects in Europe, with a focus on Barcelona and Spain. Funded by Assistant Professorship of Participatory Technology Design, Munich Center for Technology in Society & Deparment of Architecture, Technical University of Munich .
2012-2014. Participatory experiences in the design of independent living technologies & services (Postdoctoral project at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
An ethnographic research project on different practices of participatory & collaborative design for ‘independent living’ and urban accessibility, taking part as a member of the “En torno a la silla” design collective. Funded by: An Alliance 4 Universities postdoctoral fellowship; and the Spanish National R&D programme 2011-2014 “Political Action of Groups Concerned with the Promotion of Independent Living in Spain (EXPDEM)” (CSO2011-29749-C02-02) research project.
2007-2012. The logics of telecare: The fabrication of ‘connected autonomy’ in telecare for older people (PhD in Social Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid).
The result of an ethnographic project on home telecare devices for older people in the region of Madrid (Spain), in which I focused on the practices of implementation and use of such devices & services through which certain articulations of ‘users’ as well as care relations and spaces emerged out. Funded by: FPU-UAM 2007-2011 PhD fellowship; FP7 project 2007-2010 “Ethical Frameworks for Telecare Technologies for older people at home (EFORTT)“; and Spanish National R&D programme 2008-2011 research project “Technology and attention to dependence: An analysis of the psychosocial effects of telecare’s implementation” (CSO2008-06308-C02-01/SOCI).
COLLECTIVE VENUES
2024-ongoing: Department of Umbrology (co-curator)
A division of study and artistic intervention founded on the principles of an Urbanthropocenic Anthropology, whose self-appointed task is the creation of devices to equip future professionals of umbrology for a context of scorching heat, with a particular interest in shade analysis and the politics of shadows. Its main objective is to re-enliven shade knowledges and practices, working «on shadows, from shadows.»
The Department of Umbrology is a joint production of xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory & Tarde, a handbook of minimal and irrelevant urban entanglements.
Curatorial team: Tomás Criado & Santiago Orrego.
2020-ongoing: xcol. An Ethnographic Inventory (co-curator)
A digital inventory—co-curated with Adolfo Estalella (Complutense University of Madrid)—for the documentation of inventive forms of ethnographic inquiry, which seeks to intervene in current forms of anthropological practice and learning.
Its initial development was funded by the Laboratory of Experimental Visual Anthropology (LAAV) of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Castilla y León, Spain (MUSAC). PIs: Adolfo Estalella & Tomás Criado.
The project received the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) ‘Making and Doing‘ Award 2021.
Curated by Adolfo Estalella and Tomás Criado. Research assistant & web producer: Carmen Lozano. Web development & maintenance: Alfonso Sánchez Uzabal (Montera34)
2016-ongoing: Collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation — #Colleex (founder & co-convenor, 2016-2021)
#Colleex /kɒli:ɡz/ — An EASA network that aims to open a space for debate and intervention around experimental forms of ethnographic fieldwork. It seeks to explore novel forms of knowledge production for anthropology.