Mediaccions: Critical studies in culture, design and networked communication

CAT / CAST

Mediaccions is an interdisciplinary research group of the Open University of Catalonia, devoted to the study of culture and digital communication. Our vision involves a critical take of collective creation and everyday practices online, as a source of transformative knowledge that contributes to the understanding of current communication forms.

We are interdisciplinary and undertake a diverse and innovative methodological approach taking ethnography as a basis and that includes both digital methods and other methods based on action and citizen participation. We work on the co-creation of knowledge with groups, companies and institutions in media projects, storytelling, design, art, technology and social innovation.

These are our current research lines:

  1. Experiential storytelling. We research the role of stories, new narrative formats and collective forms of storytelling at the design, development and experience level. We want to observe the centrality of narratives from a social perspective, in different creative and professional fields, as they articulate expressive and personal forms, their interrelation with their audiences, as well as their potential to generate alternative imaginaries and possible futures.
  2. Visual culture and social media. We research the expressive and communicative forms that use the visual in order to elaborate personal and collective narratives in social media. We explore the potential of these practices in relation to the emergence of new forms of activism that promote social change and the frictions that occur in such platforms in relation to phenomena such as datafication and algorithmic bias.
  3. Open design. We investigate the disciplinary limits of design and its expansion to other fields of knowledge, and we delve into the methodological changes, research processes and the political pulse of the practice of design in the 21st century. We study the impact of the Internet on design and how it has changed the way of production, distribution and research in an interconnected and interdependent society.
  4. Creativity and participatory culture. We study participatory and collective creative practices, their processes and structures both inside and outside the cultural and creative industries, as well as the tensions that are generated in them. We study citizen laboratories, communities and self-managed processes of cultural action.

2021-SGR-01476