Co-design spaces for peace-building in Colombia: A preliminary conceptualization

The Colombian conflict between the government and the FARC-EP guerrilla affected during 52 years diverse social sectors. In 2016 a peace agreement was signed after 4 years of talks. In 2017, a group of academics, activists, makers, and designers got together to plan a co-design summit at a Territorial Space of Capacitation and Reconciliation (TSCR), in Guaviare, Colombia. The International Development Design Summit (IDDS) is a co-design event created by MIT D-Lab since 2007. The main objective is to design in a collaborative way low cost prototypes that face the priorities (needs, aspirations or dreams) of local communities in the territory. The authors were invited as part of the organization team, and stayed in the camp for three weeks in January 2018. This IDDS allowed to include social sectors that were marginalized and excluded of peace negotiation and their own pathway of life. In this sense, co-design in a peace-building process created a new space for start reconciliation and rebuild the social fabric. In this paper we present some of the challenges and results of the IDDS where 61 participants were trained with the co-design methodology, 9 prototypes were created and a reconciliation community was built. The above elements can be insight to the emergence of a possible peace engineering framework.