Mexico City's quarantine narratives and underlying values for future urban and domestic design

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of quarantine narratives as they relate to the design of everyday public spaces and domestic artifacts in Mexico City. The interdisciplinary research studies the government-led health campaign and exposes pre-existing urban design problems further accentuated by the crisis. In parallel, the paper presents an online survey in which photographs and texts of domestic objects are analyzed alongside artistic exhibitions and events that uncover individual needs and aspirations. Finally, the paper identifies a set of collective and distributed values for Mexico City's New Normal to be materialized locally at the urban and product design scale and discusses the potential of narratives as a design tool.