Decentralized technologies is a term used to describe digital and spatial technologies which challenge the traditional centralized server model of prevailing software-hardware infrastructures. Examples of this range from Blockchain, which has been implemented successfully as alternative economic models for the current global monetary exchange, community peer to peer WiFi networks for participatory urbanism and more recently websites that could be hosted by their creators and be forked by others seamlessly. Peer to Peer (P2P) is a process or dynamic that can be found in many communities and movements self-organizing around the co-creation of culture and knowledge. Examples of this are the free/open source software movements and the Open Design and Open Source Architecture movement.
The history of informatics has been shaped by a constant flux between decentralized phases and centralizing phases such as the one experienced today with GAFAM and BATX, accumulating value over the exchanges of users and data on the web. Endeavours of centralization are also seen in the plans of some actors to propose urbanistic master plans through network infrastructures with the promise of efficiency. Decentralized technologies have been designed with a set of principles and values that contrast with the current political, labor and social ones of today’s world and are potentially the tools for a new phase of informatics.
This project proposal elaborates on an action based design research, operating a practical and theoretical inquiry on the roles of decentralized technologies and Peer to Peer networks within creative practices. The research aims to expand these artistic and design fields/practices from a technical perspective/standpoint producing both new knowledge and forms of social scenarios.

How could P2P protocols, decentralized technologies and open source principles be used in the context of spatial design practices? How could this impact the current methodologies put in place?

How could designers understand then appropriate these technologies for rethinking their workflows or adding them in their toolkit to solve design problems? How can designers’ methods help communicate the challenges of these technologies to the public, outside of academia?

P2P Technologies by definition pose contraindications to current political and social dynamics; how are designers being affected by them? What speculative scenarios of collective design work could emerge from decentralized principles?

lumbung radio is an inter-local online community radio originating from documenta fifteen, creating an open broadcast platform comprising a decentralized network of different radios and audio practices. Operating 24 hours daily across multiple time zones, the platform streams in various languages, featuring programs from music to experimental formats to conversations.

Each participating radio contributes through their own means of production, ways of thinking, learning, and sharing. The network operates as decentralized nodes producing an audiophonic commons – a shared sound space built through connection and multiplication of existing community practices rather than centralized programming.

Commissioned by Indonesian collective ruangrupa, Station of Commons coordinated artist collaborations with radio practices during documenta's 100-day duration. The project continues through ongoing partnerships including the African Art Book Fair in Dakar, demonstrating sustainable models for community-driven media infrastructure.

This work contributes to discussions about media commons and decolonial broadcasting, showing how radio can function as both cultural platform and organizational tool for distributed creative communities.

Master's thesis supervised by Lysianne Lechot-Hirt in 2018 for completing the Master's in Media Design at HEAD Geneva.
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This text provides an overview and comparative analysis of select contemporary methods used in smart urbanism in physical spaces. It aims to contribute to a critical understanding of best practices in contemporary urbanism and public space.

By drawing on interviews with practitioners, including artists, designers, architects, and software developers, and by conducting a comparative analysis of three cases, this research provides new and sometimes opposing perspectives on the issue of smart urbanism. The diverse methods that are examined are broad, and I will attempt to establish a typology.

Issues of decision-making for public space can be divided into bottom-up and top-down planning. Bottom-up planning prioritizes the hyper-local, and top-down planning prioritizes a master plan that is commonly developed from an institutional point of view.

The interviewees and the case studies are situated between these two planning methodologies. Hopefully, this way of proceeding will show how these two types of urbanism are not mutually exclusive. By working together, they may be able to create a better dialogue for the process of place-making in public space and reduce the number of points to be discussed in this process.

The rise of many DIY and guerrilla urbanism practices can be attributed to the lack of involvement of inhabitants and users of public spaces in their co-creation. Additionally, the lack of legal structures that facilitate temporary interventions or activities in public spaces has contributed to the rise of DIY and guerrilla urbanism.

The three case studies were chosen to better understand positive practices for participatory methods for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing the cases' proposals. Two examples come from Western European cities and one is based in Russia, but with outcomes that are global. Despite many efforts by diverse local or national authorities to establish participatory processes in urban decisions, there does not seem to exist a rule of thumb for creating an open hybrid channel—that is, one that is both digital and physical—for civic discussion about the future issues of the city. This essay intends to be the basis for a developing hypothesis on how a hybrid public space could exist.

Drawing from texts by Richard Sennett and other thinkers dealing with the concepts of the Public Sphere and the commons, I will share this research freely, its references and documentation in depth on a dedicated website: juanfortun.ch/hybridpublicspaces

This thesis aims to help users of public space understand the digital infrastructure narratives presented by many private and institutional stakeholders, as well as citizen and independent initiatives for the use and co-creation of public space.

Station of Commons is a collective research project exploring digital commoning practices and alternative approaches to technology. Founded in 2020, the collective investigates how digital tools and platforms can support community autonomy, shared resources, and equitable collaboration beyond extractive capitalist models.

The collective operates through collaborative research, workshops, and curatorial projects that examine the intersection of technology, community practices, and commons-based approaches to digital infrastructure. Station of Commons works with artists, researchers, and communities to develop practical strategies for technological sovereignty and collective ownership of digital resources.

Through projects like lumbung radio coordination for documenta fifteen and Digital Commoning Practices workshops and exhibition, Station of Commons demonstrates how collective research can create alternatives to platform capitalism while fostering community-centered approaches to digital practice.

A reappropriation is never total; otherwise, it would be a mere copy. The new production must modify, détourne, and work with the subject matter.

The research focuses on materials for using Raspberry Pi with various Linux distributions and open-source software.

The visual narratives of tutorials serve as ways of sharing contextualized practical and theoretical concepts.

The "gentrification" of software production and its relationship to contemporary architectural narratives.

How do we think of a temporally multi-dimensional space?

How do we define the precise subject matter within technological space, taking into account the different temporalities?

What constitutes a critical practice of digital space in terms of labor, relations to institutions, and radical political positions?

http://doxajournal.ru/events/di_school_en

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