Activities like dancing, sharing a meal with people, or connecting to an app question the frontier between art, design, and activism. Since the advent of conceptual art in the 1960s and socially engaged practices in the 1990s, participation has been a phenomenon at the heart of many artists and designers’ praxis. Following Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovič, Allan Kaprow, George Maciunas and Jirō Yoshihara, almost any human activity can be seen as art, and the role of creatives has shifted from artistic self-expression to socially, environmentally, and politically engaged events aimed at producing social change. But what does this social turn of the arts mean today? Is it a utopian call for the democratization of art making or a marketing operation? What does it mean to conceive of artistic or designerly practice as a form of participation? What new possibilities emerge when artists and audiences collaboratively explore the boundaries between making and being? How have these collective approaches to being together shaped contemporary society? This course investigates the ways in which socially engaged practices destabilize the boundaries between making and seeing, being and doing, emphasizing its capacity to generate alternative forms of togetherness beyond conventional artistic frameworks or established social norms. It also aims to explore how art and design can become a laboratory for social change through the work of contemporary artists and designers such as Ai Weiwei, Cecilia Vicuña, Tania Bruguera, Rirkirt Tiravanija, Ólafur Elíasson, Zanele Muholi etc. Through a range of materials—including art manifestos, theoretical essays, and artist interviews—students will be encouraged to critically reflect on historical precedents and engage with making as a form of being together.