Barbara Neves Alves

Barbara Neves Alves is an Amsterdam based designer and researcher, with a focus on teaching and lecturing. She develops self-initiated projects in design research, exploring hybrid modes of practice between design, theory and the political.

In her PhD in design (Goldsmiths 2016) she advanced miscommunication as a concept and practice that demonstrates how social and cultural exchanges that produce error or misunderstanding can become provocative sites for imagining new participatory practices and collective formations. She questioned notions of good communication and showed the processual character of a grounded practice for designers as non-neutral mediators, intervening and contributing in communication in a creative way through the drawing of dynamic political scenes.

Current research interests and areas of work includes researching the ecologies of communication in relation to the remains of colonialism in public space, studying the politics of communication, noise, participatory methods, emerging modes of practice, practice-based research, decolonising practices, spectrality studies.

She is currently research tutor and thesis supervisor at the Master in Situated Design at the Master Institute for Visual Culture, theory tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Fine Arts Department and research tutor at ArtEZ University of the Arts.