TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common

How many times have we heard the phrase “I don’t have time”? Assuming that time exists, saying that we don’t have any means that, qualitatively speaking, time does not belong to us. In our current historical moment, a culture of quantity, efficiency and production has reduced time to such an extent that its sensitive qualities are disregarded. But what about caring for people, other species and the shared environment, where a sense of civic responsibility is cultivated? When the dominant logics of measurement and capital become the only benchmarks, ontological fractures open up, provoking a crisis of what it means to be human, affecting the very foundations of dignity and relationships. Wars erase cities, ecosystems collapse and millions of people are displaced. These crises are currently converging simultaneously, and it is an acknowledgement of the interplay between these fractures that other ways of living, relating and organising become a matter of urgency.

What has been lost by losing time? Spatially, conceptually, ethically: the very potential of Kairos. The ancient Greek understanding of time as the ideal moment in which something decisive, transformative and poetic can happen. It’s now, in the wound itself, when people fill town squares to protest, sing, dance and mourn. And yet, what does it really mean to take the notion and power of present time into consideration?

A few months ago, Carlo Rovelli’s work in quantum physics offered up a surprising perspective: time is not actually what we think it is. What is this separation between the past, present and future? It is primarily a construction of our perception. Meanwhile, on a deeply physical level, only a network of interconnected events exists. Events, not things. Kisses, not stones. This scientific perspective resonates powerfully with the main theme of the Biennale: time is present, not as a point between past and future, but as the only dimension in which we can effectively act and build. But acting and building require more than individual intention – they demand collective infrastructure.

It’s on these premises that TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common invites a shift in perspective to fully inhabit the here and now rather than projecting into speculative futures. The statement ‘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. In their work Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri broadened the understanding of the commons to include not only material but also immaterial processes, positing 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 broader ecosystem of shared social wealth, deepening our appreciation of the cultural commons as dynamic processes that continuously shape and in turn are shaped by the patterns of our interactions.

By assuming time as a shared resource and design as a political practice, the fourth edition of the Porto Design Biennale experimented on its own institution to operate instead as a constitution, becoming a living process and actively generating new social relations, forms of organisation and modes of collaboration. This means all the actors involved devoted a great deal of their time, acknowledging together that all kinds of experimentation, collaboration and deliberation demand care, listening, patience and the deployment of trust throughout the process.

This is why the discipline of design is not presented as a future-oriented or problem-solving practice nor as a critical lab, but rather as an active, ongoing and concrete engagement with the materiality of the present, where the collective capacity to shape systemic relationships becomes both medium and subject.

What you encounter in the exhibition hosted by Casa do Design is not things; together, they constitute contributions to designing the Common – a condition of belonging that rejects evasion of the everyday by speculating on impossible futures and refuses to present itself as the solution to all problems. Instead, design constitutes a regenerative practice for social ecosystems, ensuring that the present becomes the place where the collective value of everyday life can flourish.

In the space orchestrated by Diogo Passarinho Studio (Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds) that unfolds through the experience of changing daylight – temporalities familiar to us diurnal animals – over sixty projects intervene at a systemic level around current socio-economic dynamics, proposing qualitative transformations on various scales, some political and others poetical.

The exhibition unfolds over six emotional thresholds, each a spatial and conceptual territory where projects gather around shared intensities: STAND, LOVE, LISTEN, HEAL, GATHER and PLAY. These are active invitations to practice social infrastructures for peace, recognising that in the design of the Common, emotions are not decorative but structural. And the collection of works invites us to embrace our constitutively relational nature through temporalities driven by love rather than fear.

Each section is anchored by one of the Happisodes – co-design projects drawn up in collaboration between designers, communities and municipalities in Porto and Matosinhos that embody the opportunity to enhance the present. They are living, inhabited processes documented through video director Miguel C. Tavares’ work and explored through Parallaxes: Common Stories – curated by poet and editor Andreia Faria, which brings together seven writers and one illustrator to unearth scope for resistance and joy through storytelling, fabulation and speculative fiction.

Grounded in public and shared spaces, these interventions are established as a real, permanent and co-created offering for citizens. They aim to act as facilitators of conviviality and to create conditions for social reproduction beyond market logics, through their reparatory dimension. In the urban context, they act as time-based lessons in how to inhabit and organise collective living in alternative ways.

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

This new stance of the Porto Design 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 organisations and their institutions.

The seven projects map different intensities of the kairotic present, from sensory devices that make care tangible (In Synchro); sonic architectures that encourage public listening (House of Echoes); to dining spaces that reimagine dignity (New Diner); urban and institutional spaces that are transformed into grounds for collective play (Arena Viva); micro-architectures that are self-built for intergenerational encounters and agency (Pole Pole); playgrounds that are designed with children as co-authors (Serpentina), and libraries that treat design as a field of labour and organised refusal (Comunoteca). Each project is a unique intervention that explores how gestures of care, assembly and co-creation can structure time and daily life in alternative ways.

This is not an escape from crisis, but rather a cultural rehearsal, a collective dry run to let us build within it now. What you will find as a result may not be entirely perfect, but it has sparked a myriad of new conversations and possibilities that go far beyond the ephemeral nature of a design biennial as well as far beyond design circles and discourses.

As a small team, we have been learning and collaborating together for quite a while, facing the daily pressures of time constrictions while using the very notion of time as our primary argument, with the aim of freeing design as a social practice from cultural and material constraints. Changing conventional procedures and known processes is never easy. In this one, we have cried, celebrated, blamed each other and then found ourselves protecting each other like a family. We acknowledge that what you encounter in this exhibition, and what now lives in the city’s public sphere, is the result of an incredible journey, and we celebrate the fact that even though the world is full of divisions, it is also full of incredible energies, dreams and ideas that need to be trusted, shared and distributed.