Steeping – 10-16 Sept 2026



To steep is to saturate someone or something, such as soaking leaves, grapes or herbs in liquid. From a different root, the adjective steep denotes a gradient, an incline, as in a learning curve that cannot be climbed without effort and duration. Common to both definitions is the condition of time, and what time does to things that are willing to be changed by it. The tea leaves swell up, the traveller returns home steeped in the aromas of the mountains. This Inquiry takes that process as its subject. Can this kind of transformation be anticipated and cultivated? Steeping raises questions about quantities, qualities and temporalities:  What we’re bringing to the host environment, how long we should be steeping it in the new surroundings, and how both ingredient and state might be transformed. 

At Banca del Fare, an educational farmhouse in rural Italy, where visitors share knowledge, traditional building techniques and design activities through “learning by doing”, DesignInquiry will be exploring the topic of steeping. 

Applications are now open!

Fourteen inquirers will be selected for the gathering, to work with local residents and artisans around materials (stone, wood, honey) and the questions: what activity or skill would you be happy to share, what might be transformed by this steeping, and how?





“Civilization seems in general to estrange men from materials, that is, from materials in their original form. The process of shaping these is so divided into separate steps that one person is rarely involved in the whole course of manufacture, often knowing only the finished product". 

–Anni Albers



Banca Del Fare

Banca del Fare is a project born in 2016 from an idea by Laura Sottovia with technical and educational input from Studio Ellisse Architetti with the aim of recovering the vernacular architectural heritage of Alta Langa, addressing the abandonment and degradation of the built landscape in a concrete way.

The transmission of knowledge, traditional building techniques and self-construction and design activities is done through the "learning by doing" method, bringing artisans and students together in a schoolyard mode to recompose that unnatural caesura between hand and mind that is increasinglỳ deep in the Italian education system.




Location

The Alta Langa, located in the higher-altitude, southern part of Piedmont’s Langhe hills, is a historic region defined by its rugged landscape, "Pietra di Langa" stone-walled terraces, and a long tradition of producing hazelnuts, cheese, and, since the 19th century, specialized sparkling wines. It is the birthplace of Italian traditional method sparkling wine, with its DOCG officially recognized in 2002. 

 The venue for the inquiry is at Cascina Crocetta, an educational farmhouse owned by the municipality of Castelletto Uzzone (CN) that has been renovated via Banca del Fare workshops.
The Alta Langa is now celebrated for its "traditional method" (metodo classico) sparkling wine, often referred to as "Alte Bollicine Piemontesi" (High Piedmont Bubbles). It is a high-elevation,, sustainable, manually-harvested wine, strictly regulated to be produced from 250 meters above sea level. The area is increasingly popular for its authentic, "off-the-beaten-path" charm, distinct from the busier nearby wine regions. 


Local Crafts & Artisanal practices

(stone, wood, honey, chestnuts, wine)



Fernando (90 y.o), a master of traditional stone built contructions, sharing his knowledge with young architects. 


A typical building typology of Alta Langa, linked to an agricultural past now distant: the ciabòt is a small land unit consisting of a functional cell generally developed on two floors. In Alta Langa, stone, a compact, limestone sandstone, has always been used both for the construction of terracing and for the roofs and walls of all buildings, public and religious, rustic and civil, with techniques that are not dissimilar. Despite their simplicity, therefore, ciabòt can be considered the minimum unit of buildings in the area, from which they take characters and construction technologies.


Honey making
Stone work
Wood work

Exhibition Chapel – San Luigi


An old chapel on the hill facing the farmhouse is available to be used as exhibition space. It houses a few furniture designed for exhibition purposes





Accomodation

The location includes: large dining hall, wood workshop, oven and baking area, dormitory, washing machine, botanical garden, fully equipped kitchen, projector equipment + copy machine, outdoor areas for working, a chapel to use for exhibitions, presentations and screenings. The farmhouse has a fully equipped professional kitchen and the outside yard can be used for events, dinner gatherings and private views.

Outside spaces include working areas, and an outdoor theatre for working/exhibiting


Rituals

The workday typically follows rituals for rest and collective activities. That includes having lunch and dinner together, resting after lunch and continuing work in the afternoon, cleaning up and preparing working areas day by day, evening relaxing activities by the fire. These rituals are the rituals common to DesignInquiry events. DesignInquiry is a collective of creative practitioners devoted to extra-disciplinary exchange. Designers, artists, scholars, architects, historians, critics, and writers (though anyone from any field is welcome) gather on-site to engage in creative research framed around a particular topic. Together we call each gathering an "inquiry," unfolding through presentations, discussions, performances, workshops, making, and exhibitions. Inquiries are incubators for the collaborative germination and cultivation of ideas. Shared experience pervades DesignInquiry’s work and inspires commitment to the practice and project—we do our best work together. For us, community is a continuum.


What we are reading:



Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communitiesWith the term steeping we are exploring a reciprocal immersion with a local culture, rather than an extractive "grab & run" approach. In this beguilingly chatty "letter to communities," Eve Tuck raises some serious issues about research that re-inscribes a one-dimensional view of local, marginalised and disenfranchised communities as passive victims of injustice.
Access here
Peters, J. D. (2015). The marvelous clouds: Toward a philosophy of elemental media. University of Chicago Press.
This book disrupts Romantic, binary ideas of nature vs culture, with a widely noted fact of ecology that populations flourish in adopted habitats. "Digital devices have spread like rabbits in Australia" (2000, p.54). This seems like a good mindset with which to approach steeping, not to Romanticize bucolic settings and rural crafts, but to explore how humans, tools, and culture respond and are transformed by the environment.
Nancy, J.-L. (2000). Being singular plural (R. D. Richardson & A. E. O’Byrne, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
A philosophy of inter-being. “Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists.” (2000, p4) 
Access here
Sennett, R. (2012). Together: The rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation. Yale University Press.
Sennett explores how modern society can rebuild the weakened skills of cooperation required to live with difference, framing it as a "craft" rather than merely good will. Sennett argues that listening, empathy, and dialogue (rather than debate) are crucial skills for repairing social bonds across diverse communities, workplaces, and digital spaces.
Cooperation as a Craft: cooperation requires, and can be developed through, specific skills and practices.


Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Challenging the single, Western-dominated view of the "universe," the book promotes a pluriverse - a world that embraces multiple ontologies, diverse ways of being, and radical interdependence of all beings.

Radical Interdependence: Design should focus on relationships between people, places, and the environment rather than isolated products

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Steeping is about expanding our understanding of communication. In the chapter "Council of Pecans" (pp12-22), botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains how trees appear to talk to one another via airbourne pheromones and underground fungal networks -- in order to coordinate a defence against insect attack by releasing compounds or to synchronise a mast fruiting event -- whereby pecan trees in a grove produce nuts not every year, but every few years so that an excess of fruit overwhelms would-be predators, ensuring that new forests are generated.




DesignInquiry is a non-profit educational organization that explores pressing issues in design and culture. We are a collective of thinkers and makers devoted to extra-disciplinary exchange with a changing roster of designers, artists, scholars, teachers, architects, historians, critics, writers and other practitioners carrying out and sustaining our work.

DesignInquiry spearheads intensive team-based gatherings, shares the diverse outcomes and publications, influences design research and teaching methods, and inspires professional designers to rethink what design can be and can do.