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events experimental collaborations intravention objects of care and care practices re-learning design urban and personal devices

4.02.2020 – DIE ZUKUNFT DER STADT(FORSCHUNG) | HCU Kultur der Metropole

https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/fileadmin/documents/KM_Website/10_Jahre_KM-flackern.gif

Das Studienprogramm Kultur der Metropole an der HafenCity Universität Hamburg feiert zehnjähriges Bestehen auf Kampnagel

Das Wissen der Stadt in Bewegung halten – dazu diskutieren diverse Stadtforschende und -machende am 4. Februar 2020 auf Kampnagel.

Die Diskussion ist Teil eines abendfüllenden Programms anlässlich des zehnjährigen Bestehens des Studiengangs „Kultur der Metropole“ an der HafenCity Universität Hamburg. Den Auftakt macht die Schweizer Kulturwissenschaftlerin Monika Litscher, die einmal mehr anschaulich macht, dass die aktuellen gesellschaftlichen und vor allem in Städten zu verortenden Herausforderungen und Krisen nicht ohne die Geisteswissenschaften zu meistern sind.
Studierende präsentieren in Form von Werkstattberichten ihre Projektarbeit zum Deutschen Hafenmuseum, zu den Rändern des Urbanen und zu neuen Mensch-Tier-Verhältnissen in der Stadt.
Eingeladen sind Stadtinteressierte, städtische Akteur*innen, Projektpartner*innen, Studierende und Studieninteressierte. Der Eintritt ist frei.

Seit seiner Gründung 2009 ist das Studienprogramm „Kultur der Metropole“ mit seinem Profil einzigartig in der deutschsprachigen Hochschullandschaft und steht für kulturwissen-schaftliche Stadtforschung und kreativ-angewandte Kulturarbeit im urbanen Kontext. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die kulturellen Dimensionen von Stadt (und ihre Wirkung auf alle Handlungsfelder des Städtischen). Gelehrt werden Grundlagen in Kultur- und Raumtheorie, Stadtethnographie, historische Stadtforschung, Museologie sowie künstlerische Forschung – und der Transfer in verschiedene Anwendungsfelder wie städtische Kulturarbeit, aktuelle Stadtentwicklungsprogramme bzw. partizipative Stadtgestaltung, Quartiersmanagement u.v.m.
Absolvent*innen von Kultur der Metropole arbeiten heute erfolgreich auf vielen Feldern der Stadtkultur: in den Deichtorhallen, bei der Behörde für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt, bei der Kreativgesellschaft, sie promovieren, gründen Modelabels, werden Filmemacher*innen, und Journalist*innen u.v.a.

Wann: Dienstag, 04.02.2020, 19:00 Uhr

Wo: Kampnagel | Jarrestrasse 20 | 22303 Hamburg Veranstaltungsprogramm

DIE ZUKUNFT DER STADT(FORSCHUNG)

19:00 Uhr BEGRÜSSUNG UND VORTRAG
Monika Litscher (Kulturwissenschaftlerin, Zürich) über die »Values of Humanities« und kulturwissenschaftliche Stadtforschung

19:45 Uhr PODIUMSDISKUSSION
Es diskutieren u.a. Tomás Sánchez Criado (Anthropologe, HU Berlin), Amelie Deuflhard (Intendantin Kampnagel, Hamburg), Lisa Kosok (Historikerin, HCU Hamburg), Alexa Färber (Stadtanthropologin, Universität Wien); Moderation: Kathrin Wildner (Stadtethnologin, Berlin/HCU Hamburg) und Laurenz Gottstein (Student Kultur der Metropole /HCU Hamburg)

ab 21:00 UHR PROJEKTPRÄSENTATIONEN VON STUDIERENDEN UND GET TOGETHER

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caring infrastructures experimental collaborations intravention objects of care and care practices open sourcing politics and economy of care publications urban and personal devices

DIY Anthropology: Disciplinary knowledge in crisis

Adolfo Estalella and I take part in a thematic section of the ANUAC. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, titled Changing margins and relations within European anthropology. In it we shift from a discussion around the geo-political identity of anthropology to its status as a scholarly discipline.

Ours is a situated account of how a particular setting and moment in time affected our anthropological practice: The beginning of the 2010s was a period of political unrest in Spain. Like many other countries, it suffered the harsh effects of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. However, despite the crisis (or maybe because of it) cities experienced a moment of political creativity and urban inventiveness: People occupied empty buildings and unused plots of vacant land to create all kind of projects, refurnishing the city with an impulse to reanimate collective forms of life. All kind of knowledges blossomed in these initiatives. Our several-years-long ethnographic investigations were carried out in this period in Spain’s main two cities (Madrid and Barcelona)

Thrown into an urban landscape left behind by a policy of financial austerity, we worked intimately with architects, activist designers, and bodily diverse people. Singularly and unexpectedly for us, we found in them the companions we lacked in our local institutional academic contexts. They turned into epistemic partners: companions in the shared endeavour of producing anthropological problematisations. Under these circumstances, the knowledge we produced at the time emerged out of a moment of crisis: knowledge in crisis

We do not intend to argue on the European condition of our anthropological practice, neither we are interested in tracing geo-political frontiers of disciplinary imaginations. Instead, drawing on our ethnographic experience – and the collaborations we established with our epistemic partners in the field – we feel urged to problematize the disciplinary boundaries anthropology conventionally tends to assume

Hence, in the article we offer an account of the interstitial spaces that we both inhabited “in the vacuum of tradition” in the recent Spanish crisis, and how that enabled us to articulate singular relations with variegated epistemic partners with whom we set up distinct ambiances of care. In our ethnographic description we pay attention to the blurring of institutional and scholarly infrastructures and modes of togetherness. In describing the particular transformations – or “intraventions” – that these joint spaces enacted, we would like to intimate a different figuration anthropology took in our practice: Not a disciplinary field but a field of experimental collaborations.

As we show, treating our ethnographic counterparts as epistemic partners has the potential to retrofit our institutionalized settings and disciplinary practices. The anthropology we describe, hence, is one assembled from scratch, caring for the mundane issues that very often are forgotten and rendered invisible: an anthropology done with others, a DIY anthropology?

El Campo de Cebada CC BY 2014 Manuel Domínguez Fernández

Abstract

This is an account of the transformations in our anthropological practice derived from working in the many interstitial spaces that opened up in the wake of the recent Spanish economic crisis. Ambulating in void spaces of Madrid and Barcelona, our anthropological practice was there re-built in ways that blurred our disciplinary boundaries. What there emerged was anthropology not as a disciplinary field, but as a field of experimental collaborations. A practice that re-learnt its ways treating counterparts as true epistemic partners, and setting up distinct ambiances of care with them: not only to care for one another in situations of great difficulty, but mostly to care for our different forms of inquiry, addressing the very situations we were under. An anthropology done together with others, assembling from scratch a conceptual body, caring for the mundane issues that are very often forgotten and rendered invisible by disciplinary fields: A DIY anthropology?

Published in Anuac. Journal of the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology, 8(2): 143-165 (co-written with Adolfo Estalella) | PDF

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art events experimental collaborations intravention materials multimodal

Spiele als Stadtforschung / Games as urban research

Our Stadtlabor for multimodal anthropology‘s explorations around urban games feature at the exhibition „Open Form neu Denken“ organized by Z/KU at the Werkstatt of Haus der Statistik.

When? October 25–27 2019
Where? Werkstatt Haus der Statistik – Karl-Marx-Allee 1, 10178 Berlin

Come by and play with us!

Events

Friday, 25.10.2019: Opening

Saturday, 26.10.2019: Conference
A conference in the exhibition will be focusing on the concept of open form and how it travels between design, architecture, politics and anthropology. Ignacio Farías and Tomás Criado will give a short input on games as a form of urban research.

Sunday, 27.10.2019: Playing
The Stadtlabor team that worked on the games will be hosting the exhibition and playing and explaining the games to the visitors

Picture by Francisco Montoya, 2019 [CC]

More information (German & English)

DE | Spiele als Stadtforschung

Als Stadtlabor entwickeln wir konzeptuelle, spekulative und materielle Werkzeuge, wie etwa Spiele, um auf die aktuellen Krisen des modernen Urbanismus zu reagieren. Trotz oder gerade aufgrund ihrer spielerischen Dimension befähigen uns Spiele, die Art und Weise zu verändern wie wir Themen in Frage stellen, Wissen teilen, Bewusstsein schaffen, kritische Öffentlichkeiten generieren, Zukünfte imaginieren und Fürsorge erlernen.

Die von uns entwickelten Spiele sind keine finalen Produkte, sondern offene Prototypen. Sie sind Ergebnis und Methode unserer Forschung und Werkzeug, um Stadtentwicklungsprozesse gemeinsam zu gestalten. Als solche sind sie offen für Veränderung und Versionierung, damit ihre spezifischen Sprachen, Logiken, Spielweisen und Effekte an spezifische Situationen und unterschiedliche städtische Akteure angepasst werden können.

Unsere Explorationen rund um Spiele begannen im Kontext eines einjährigen ethnographischen MA-Studierendenprojekts The Only Game in Town?, das die aktuelle Krise des Berliner Wohnraums und Immobilienmarkts analysierte. Inspiriert von der Geschichte des Spiels Monopoly – registriert im Jahr 1904 von Elizabeth Magie als The Landlord’s Game und konzipiert als pädagogisches und politisches Instrument, um über die Gefahren von Landmonopolen aufzuklären – haben wir uns vorgenommen, Spielprototypen zu entwickeln, um unsere Forschungsergebnisse zu teilen.

In Zusammenarbeit mit dem ZK/U haben wir drei Spiele entwickelt: (1) House of Gossip problematisiert die drohende Verdrängung von Mieter*innen aus ihrem Wohnraum; (2) in Sue Them All setzt sich ein Kollektiv für gerechte Wohnpolitik ein; und (3) das Kiez Mind Archive schafft einen performativen Raum der Wissensproduktion. In diesem Prozess stellten wir fest, dass die Auseinandersetzung mit Spielen auch unseren Bezug zur Wissensproduktion verändert: vom Beschreiben zum Eingreifen, von Repräsentation zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeiten, und damit auch zu einem Experimentieren mit der Bedeutung von Politik und Kritik bei der Entwicklung und Nutzung von Spielen.

EN | Games as urban research
In the Stadtlabor for multimodal anthropology, we are developing conceptual, speculative and material tools, such as games, to respond to the current crises of modern urbanism. In spite, or even because of their ludic dimension, games are capable to alter the ways in which we discuss issues, share knowledge, raise awareness, make urban problems public, imagine futures, and learn to care.

The games we have developed are not final products but open prototypes. They are result and method of our research, and work as devices to intervene in urban development processes. As such, they are open to be transformed and re-versioned, so that their specific languages, logics, gameplay, and effects could be adapted to specific situations and concerns of various urban actors.

Our exploration around games started in the context of a one-year ethnographic MA student project The Only Game in Town? analysing the contemporary crisis of housing and real estate markets in Berlin. Inspired by the history of the game Monopoly–registered in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as The Landlord’s Game and conceived as an educational and political tool to reveal the dangers of land monopolies–, we then set to prototype games as a means to share our research results. In collaboration with ZK/U, we have produced three games: (1) House of Gossip problematizes the threat of displacement of tenants from their homes; (2) in Sue Them All a collective advocates for fair housing policy; and (3) the Kiez Mind Archive creates a performative space of knowledge production. In the process, we discovered that developing games also impacts how we could do research: from describing to intervening, from representing to performing (and breaching) reality, thus experimenting with what politics and critique might mean whenever we prototype and play.

Testing games at Open Form Exhibition,  2019 [CC]
Hackaton with Invisible Playground, 2019 [CC]
Neighborhood festival KMA, 2019 [CC]

Games: Open Documentation

House of Gossip

House of Gossip is problematising the threat of displacement of tenants from their homes. The opaque information during a house selling process leads to rumours among the tenants. Through improvised encounters and the exchange of rumours the players are trying to ally with each other and to fight for their interests.

Sue Them All

In Sue Them All, a collective advocates fair housing policy. The aim is to bring inadmissible leases. Individual and collective interests are coming together. Whether you pursue a competitive or cooperative strategy, change your tactics during the game or compromise is up to you.

Kiez Mind Archive 

You move through the district with an open task. It creates an associative game with the everyday and the unknown. Through your photographic interpretations you create an alternative visual archive of the neighbourhood.

Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology

DE | Das Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology ist eine Forschungsplattform, in der Anthropolog*innen, die an aktuellen Stadtthemen interessiert sind, multimediale Formate der Wissensproduktion und -intervention in Zusammenarbeit mit städtischen Akteuren erkunden und wird vom Lehrstuhl für Stadtanthropologie der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin geführt. Mitglieder, die an der Entwicklung der Spiele beteiligt waren, sind: Diana Mammana, Tan Weigand, Lilian Krischer, Lena Heiss, Leonie Schipke, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Marie Aline Klinger, Tomás Sánchez Criado und Ignacio Farías.

EN | The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology is a research platform, where anthropologists interested in contemporary urban issues explore multimedia formats of knowledge production and intervention in collaboration with other urban actors and is run by the Chair of Urban Anthropology at Humboldt University of Berlin. The members who participated in the development of these games are: Diana Mammana, Tan Weigand, Lilian Krischer, Lena Heiss, Leonie Schipke, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Marie Aline Klinger, Tomás Sánchez Criado and Ignacio Farías.

**

Texts adapted and expanded from the official invitation & the documentation of the exhibition

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design intraventions events experimental collaborations intravention more-than-human objects of care and care practices open sourcing re-learning design techniques & ways of doing

DGSKA 2019 Konstanz – Plenary ‘Envisioning Anthropological Futures’

Under the theme ‘The End of Negotiations? / Das Ende der Aushandlungen?‘ the DGSKA (German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology) celebrated it’s 2019 conference from September 29th till October 2nd at the Universität Konstanz.

Kristina Mashimi and Thomas Stodulka (on behalf of the DGSKA board) organised and moderated the following plenary session, to which they invited some of us “mid-career scholars” – Janina Kehr (Universität Bern), Sandra Calkins (FU Berlin), Michaela Haug (Universität zu Köln) and yours truly – to envision anthropological futures departing from our own experiences engaging in public, inter and transdisciplinary settings, their epistemic and methodological opportunities and limitations.

Below you could find further information on the session, as well as links to the videos / audio files of our interventions. Hope you enjoy it.

Plenary session IV: Envisioning anthropological futures

Tuesday, 1.10.2019, 9.00-11.00h, Audimax

In the wake of political, economic, and ecological transformations of the contemporary world, and the far-reaching impact of digitalization and mediatization, social and cultural anthropologists are challenged to continuously rethink their theoretical, methodological, and professional practices. Not only are they required to respond to the emerging topical challenges of globalizing, postcolonial research settings by engaging the expertise from other social science and humanities’ disciplines, the wider field of area studies, and the natural and health sciences. They also face growing expectations from their interlocutors, funding organizations, and their immediate professional environments in regard to shifting standards of research ethics and data management, the engagement in various modes of collaborative research, and meeting their responsibilities to society and the public.

This plenary assembles presentations from 4-5 early to mid-career scholars who discuss the challenges and tensions they face when doing anthropology today. They will outline their visions for future positionings of the discipline regarding its epistemological and methodological opportunities and limitations in inter- and transdisciplinary research settings. Furthermore, the panelists will discuss the discipline’s engagement in academic teaching and the move towards open access publishing, as well as its intervention in public debates. As a forum for innovation, the plenary session is less concerned with systematic reviews of previous disciplinary discussions than with the articulation of future visions for practice and collaboration in and beyond the context of anthropology (or, in the German-speaking context, Ethnologie or Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie). The contributions will be published in the upcoming 150th anniversary issue of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (ZfE, 2019) which will be edited collectively by the DGSKA board and is due to appear in time for the 2019 conference.

Videos / Audio files

Janina Kehr (Universität Bern): Crafting the Otherwise in Medicine and Anthropology

Tomás Criado (HU Berlin): Anthropology as a careful design practice?

Sandra Calkins (FU Berlin): Writing planetary futures: Plants, loss, and intersections of STS and anthropology in Germany

Michaela Haug (Universität zu Köln): Looking into the future through the lens of hope: environmental change, diverse hopes and the challenge of engagement

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accessibility experimental collaborations intravention participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures publications

Erfahren: Experimente mit technischer Demokratie in Entwurfskursen

Séverine Marguin, Henrike Rabe, Wolfgang Schäffner and Friedrich Schmidgall have recently edited a compilation in German featuring interesting and relevant work in different creative disciplines foregrounding modes of experimenting.

Titled Experimentieren. Einblicke in Praktiken und Versuchsaufbauten zwischen Wissenschaft und Gestaltung (published open access by Transcript Verlag) the scope of the book is as follows:

Forschen und Gestalten sind experimentelle Vorgehensweisen, die darauf ausgerichtet sind, etwas Neues, noch nicht Existierendes hervorzubringen. Sie haben beide Projektcharakter, denn sie führen an einen Nullpunkt des Wissens. Doch welche Strategien und Verfahren sind es, die aus diesem Nichtwissen, diesen Vermutungen und Ideen zu konkreten Ergebnissen führen?

ForscherInnen aus 23 Wissenschafts- und Gestaltungsdisziplinen berichten in diesem Band über ihr Experimentieren und geben Einblicke in ihre Praktiken und Versuchsaufbauten. Er bietet damit eine Bestandsaufnahme zeitgenössischer Experimentalkulturen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Wissenschaft und Gestaltung und skizziert eine Praxeologie des Experiments.

Ignacio Farías and I contribute to the volume with a chapter, where we adapt and translate into German some of the insights from our pedagogical experiments with technical democracy’ at the TU München’s Department of Architecture.

Erfahren: Experimente mit technischer Demokratie in Entwurfskursen

CC BY NC ND 2017 Design in Crisis 2: Coming to our senses (Sofia Ruíz, Irene Landa, Sophie Razaire, Emilie Charrier, Léo Godebout and Lambert Drapeau, Technische Universität München, 2017)

Abstract

In diesem Aufsatz erzählen wir von pädagogischen Herausforderungen, denen wir an einem der größten deutschen Institute für Wissenschafts­ und Technikforschung (STS), dem 2013 an der Technischen Universität München gegründeten Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), begegnet sind. Konzipiert als „integratives Forschungszentrum“ mit Lehrstühlen an verschiedenen Fakultäten, will das MCTS nicht nur verschiedene STS­Traditionen unter einem Dach zusammenbringen, sondern auch mit Formen der Kollaboration und Intervention in den Natur- und Technikwissenschaften experimentieren. Zwischen 2015 und 2018 lehrten wir an der Fakultät für Architektur, wo wir einen vom STS geprägten stadtanthropologischen Ansatz zu aktuellen Herausforderungen technischer Demokratisierung vertraten. Im Folgenden möchten wir experimentelle Strategien aufzeigen, die bei den Entwurfskursen für Masterstudierende der Architektur zum Einsatz kamen. Unsere Experimente hatten ein zentrales konzeptionelles Anliegen: die Bedeutung und die Möglichkeiten von technischer Demokratie für die Ausbildung zukünftiger EntscheidungsträgerInnen in Sachen gebaute Umwelt entfalten.

Published in Experimentieren. Vergleich experimenteller Kulturen in Wissenschaft und Gestaltung Repair (pp. 57-70). Bielefeld: Transcript | PDF

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accessibility animal therapy caring infrastructures design intraventions ethics, politics and economy of care events experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights independent-living intravention objects of care and care practices older people participatory & collaborative design of care infrastructures re-learning design technical aids techniques & ways of doing urban and personal devices

Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) 2019 conference “Who cares?”- Keynote speech: ‘How to care’

The Nordic Design Research Society (Nordes) organises its 8th biannual conference next 3–4 June 2019 at the Aalto University in Helsinki (Finland), under the timely topic ‘Who cares?‘, whose call looks fantastic:

 What do, or should, we care about in design and design research today? Underpinning the question are issues of culture and agency – who cares, for whom, and how? Taking care, or being cared for, evokes the choice of roles, and processes of interaction, co-creation and even decision-making. Caring, as a verb, emphasizes care as intention, action and labor in relation to others. Care can be understood as concern for that beyond oneself, for others and, thus, human, societal and even material and ecological relations are at stake. The question of care is also a call for questioning relationships, participation and responsibility, democratic and sustainable ways of co-existing. From this expansive societal standpoint, we could even ask who cares about design? And what should we do about it? The 8th biennial Nordes conference poses the question, “Who cares?”, exploring related questions, issues and propositions concerning responsibilities, relationships, ways of doing and directing design today.

[…]

In the 2019 Nordes conference, we draw inspiration from notions of care as a lens through which to reflect upon and critique as well as potentially to refocus and redirect design and design research. Care might be understood in relation to philosophical lines of inquiry in other disciplines exploring theories, politics and ethics of care. Care might be understood concretely in relation to the ideals and infrastructures of welfare and healthcare systems, or service interactions. Care might be understood personally as a mindset seeking out what is meaningful for people, and for life, and with design as reflective and skilled action concerned with improving things and preferred situations.

Thanks to the generous invitation of the organising committee I will have the immense honour to act as one of the keynote speakers, contributing to one of the main themes of the conference: ‘How to care?’ (Care and care-ful materials, methods and processes in design and design research) – For this, I will be sharing my anthropological work on and my different modes of engagement with inclusive design (see the text of my intervention below)

HOW TO CARE?

Keynote speech, 3.06.2019, Helsinki (published online on 9.04.2020)

Dear all,

Before anything, I would like to warmly thank the organizing committee of the NORDES conference for their kind invitation to speak here today.

When I received your proposal I thought this was a fantastic occasion to attempt to think collectively on how to care in and through design practice. But also, an occasion to think through the recent popularization of the term.

Why such a recent fuzz about ‘care’, you might ask?

As the organizers of the conference have aptly identified, care has indeed begun to pop up in many design domains and situations beyond the arena of social and health-care services. And the concept is now being vindicated when discussing particular modes of architectural and design practice: ranging from participatory approaches to discussions around the ecological crisis as requiring designers of all kinds to engage in ‘critical care’.

Care, hence, has become a politically and morally-laden vocabulary for designers to engage with issues of energy transition, environmental concerns and social inclusion. This interesting expansion of the term is indeed bringing about interesting new repertoires of action for designers, but also newer problems: it is sometimes used as an all-purpose and generic term. Having worked in the vicinity of different uses of this term by professional and amateur architects and designers in the last decade, I have trained myself to pause a bit whenever I hear it being used.

To me, care as a concept has a very specific origin in the feminist politicizations searching to make palpable our constitutive vulnerability and to grant value to the ecologies of support and interdependence put in place to sustain our lives. As such, this term not only highlights the practices that can lift what might be heavy, might serve to protect and support. But also it is a fraught terrain with a very thorny legacy of asymmetries and further violence: sometimes, when coupled with a clear-cut knowledge of what needs to be done and how, care could also be a way of imposing understandings of what it might mean to lead a good life or a good death. Perhaps the best thing we might keep in mind is that, as the saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

Hence, in what follows I will invite you to share a reflection that, at best, will try to incite you to think on your own practices on how to bring forth more careful modes of designing, rather than attempting to tell you what to do. My aim is to lure you in considering that rather than having clear and straightforward ideas on what caring might mean, perhaps to care is always an intervention into the very meanings and ways in which practicing care could be possible and desirable, or not.

In the last decade I have been practicing what I call hyperbolically an anthropology of, through and as inclusive design–having worked on a wide variety of settings where care was vindicated as a domain or concern, from telecare for older people to urban accessibility infrastructures, and in a wide variety of engagements as an anthropologist, from providing ethnographic input to design processes, to working in activist collectives or formally training architects.

Drawing from my work, I will sketch out different versions care: namely, as (i) domain of intervention, as (ii) a method (of inclusion or participation), as (iii) a mode of inquiry, and I will close (iv) advocating that perhaps the best way in which we could mobilize care would be as a way of activating the possible, what is not here yet, what could be otherwise, hence weirding our understandings of care in design, enabling to speculate with alternative knowledge distributions and materialisations of togetherness not based on clear-cut understandings of the good nor consensus and commensurability. Perhaps this is what we might need, to navigate the uncertain conditions of the present.

I. Care as a domain

Most people think that to care about care as designers relates to a particular domain of intervention: namely, that of care services and technologies. Indeed, since the 1990s and as a result of the fear of what some call the ‘silver tsunami’–the alarming prospects of population ageing and its alleged catastrophic impact in welfare systems and everyday informal chains of support–, many designers felt the call to engage in conceiving services and products attempting to bring solutions to this conundrum. Largely conceiving their role as that of technologizing or, more specifically, digitalizing these relations, the last decades have seen the advent of many promising devices and platforms, commonly advertised as solutions bringing a technical fix to care burdens. The list might be long: telecare, AAL, robotics, etc.

After my initial involvement in understanding the prospects of this technologisation, I learnt that despite the great investment put into them, these innovations sit on very problematic grounds: These projects and services tend to work articulating and bringing into the mix private actors, such as insurance companies, perpetually claiming that this could lead to more efficient ways of caring for care. However, the potential for their widespread use still resides on the state sustaining via pensions or direct payments the lives of a vast majority of vulnerable populations. An economy of hope that piggybacks on social states and their incentives to grant solutions for those who could not afford them.

After the 2008 crisis, this machinery was exposed at least in many countries of the European south, and it began to show darker contours: in deflating economies, and in the advent of a crisis of welfare systems, the technologisation of care and the prospect that we will all be taken care of by 1m€ robots seems to me rather flawed.

These innovations usually travel within the closed circuits of a handful of countries of the rich North; not only they do not substitute informal care, which is usually rendered even more invisible as an essential work for them to operate as solutions. Not to mention that we know very little of their polluting footprint. Indeed, making an educated guess, critical work on e-waste, such as Josh Lepawsky’s Reassembling Rubbish, indicates that we should include in the calculations of the impact of many digital innovations their environmental effects: not just in terms of its post-consumer polluting externalities, but also those related to the extraction of materials and their production. In fact, if we held all these things in sight, most of our understandings of welfare tend to be premised upon a human exceptionalist, colonial and extractive project of techno-centric innovation.

Welfare, seen in this light, is revealed as a deeply unsustainable machinery. I don’t mean to say that innovation in that sector is not important or even crucial, precisely to tackle our many social and environmental challenges, but we need to think hard beyond the present-day regime of innovation, revising the promise that nitty-gritty technologisation and hardcore digital infrastructuration will automatically bring the common good, as it risks not only creating further social divides when social states cannot work to redistribute wealth, but also further damaging our environment.

How to do it then?

II. Care as method

Against this background, a popular register for care in product, service and urban design has tended to reinvigorate it as a concern around inclusive methods or means of designing: namely, a worry for non-tokenistic forms of participation and inclusion of concerned publics in the creation and articulation of a wide variety of social and material arrangements. Care, then, here reads as an agenda for processes so that users’ voices, wishes or needs could be heard, discovered, interrogated, made available, shared and discussed in the hope that we could find a more inclusive common ground. In the desire to be more careful, more standpoints should be brought into the equation.

These issues are, for instance, constantly made to emerge in attempts at building urban accessibility infrastructures. Let me share an example: all over Europe a new pedestrianized paradigm has popularized, the ‘shared street’. It is premised upon a gigantic infrastructural transformation of squares and sidewalks using more durable and hard-surface materials, with the idea that if the zoning of street uses–and with it the differences in patterns and heights–was dropped, pedestrians and bikers would be safer, because cars would have to slow down, and pay attention to their surroundings. However, with mounting cases of older or blind or deaf people being hit by cars or motorbikes all over the place, many find these spaces paradoxically much more dangerous than before. Yet, finding a solution by consensus doesn’t look very promising here. Perhaps for these spaces to allow for good forms of pedestrianization the views and needs of some must prevail over others, for this to be a lasting good, and protective solution.

As this example shows well, participation is much more complicated than just bringing all concerned people in or back into the design fabric. Composing a common ground tends to be very complicated when we are not only in the business of the concertation of  already known interests of well-articulate parts of a whole–that is, when we are not dealing with mere stakeholders–, but when we operate with wicked problems affecting us in strange and emergent ways, for which we have no simple nor common definitions of the problem, and therefore much less solutions, and where the process might need us to take part not as a clearly recognizable part of a whole but engaging in more agonistic, critical, and dissent-oriented design practices.

What about those whose views are not that articulate, those whose ways of being and acting do not make of them adequate liberal subjects in the social-democratic search for consensus? What about ‘the part of those without part’, to paraphrase philosopher Jacques Rancière?

In situations like this, to care might not be to enact consensus through the concertation of interests. This doesn’t work when we have incommensurable positions, and when we’re in a situation of uncertainty. How to care, then?

III. Care as a mode of inquiry

What these situations show is that care, rather than a clear path towards a solution, should be addressed as a domain of problematisations, in the sense that Foucault gave the term: that is, as problem spaces whereby we probe into and articulate competing and sometimes opposing versions of the world through particular material and semiotic assemblages.

In that vein, care as a mode of inquiry became an analytic in feminist initiatives: As a descriptive tool, it conveyed the importance not only of invisible or undervalued work — that is, the everyday reproductive tasks of supporting fragile and interdependent beings in both informal and formal settings — but also of affects and emotions going against the grain of modern societies obsessed with efficacy, justice and rationality. As a category of political intervention, it helped give value and articulate a wide variety of forms of interdependence.

These two meanings can be appreciated in the notion of care famously coined, almost thirty years ago, by Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, p. 40)

Many designers have been involved in producing conditions for such a feminist inquiry, in projects of mapping, visualizing and debating alternative cartographies of interdependence and invisible labour.

These projects search to make exclusions and forms of supports visible so as to debate alternative arrangements, also opening up discussions on the very effects of making visiblet.

The feminist legacy of care also points out at the requirement to practice care even though we might not know how to do it, even though we might not be fully sure of how we’re doing it, even though we might constantly be in a search for better ways of being and living or dying together, and even though we might fail most of the time.

Recent feminist works in STS have indeed readdressed care as searching to engage in understandings of ‘doing the good in practice’, to paraphrase Annemarie Mol; not only to dispute generic understandings of how, what or who to care for and why– in fact, care tends to be an art of the singular and the practical, rather than of the generic and the universal–, but also in some other occasions so as to not forget the violent prospects of care interventions. Highlighting the importance to remain, to rejoice, to learn from being troubled from the ways in which we care, not searching to explain them away.

As such, it resonates with the particularly lucid call by Michelle Murphy for a politics of care that unsettles its often-hegemonic histories, as well as contemporary alignments and circulations. Perhaps that might be the best way of caring: not taking for granted how to do so, doubting without ceasing to find ways to act, remaining aware of the potential exclusions it might bring to the fore, so as to find ways to retrace our steps and act towards more just modes of togetherness. And for this, care concerns with practices that stress not just the finitude of our particular bodies and their vulnerabilities, but also their openness and unfinishedness.

Seen in this light care, then, care could be understood as a way of protecting the constitutive vulnerability of being in a way that doesn’t easily conflate to the certainty of who these beings are and what their contours might be: securing hence our ways of remaining open to the unknown, perpetually ‘assembling neglected things’ as María Puig de la Bellacasa has so vehemently put it.

But how to do it, then?

IV. Care as activating the possible

Perhaps the current situations of planetary distress have made us aware that care is now more than ever an issue affecting us all. And yet, although vulnerability and the need to find supports cuts across social divides care risks becoming a too generic a term if not considering the different forms and gradients of intensity to exposure and carelessness.

My warning is raised in a context in which care is also vindicated for the worse in the brutal responses: with its connotations of good will and humanitarianism, care can be problematic if not extremely violent analytic for many collectives and ecologies of practice. For instance, refugees or other collectives subject to social are tend to oppose a vocabulary that renders them into passive subjects of someone else’s attention.

Yet, this problematization or troubling of the care analytic might have become more generic today, when the likes of Trump or Salvini regularly word out “we must take care of our own” as an exclusionary project, be it in the building of more steep and brutal borders or preventing rescue ships from having a safe port in the Mediterranean.

When care is invoked in violent nationalist, supremacist and macho projects of cocooning against our own constitutive otherness; but also when care is vindicated as an expert vocabulary of professional certainty, some of us feel we might need another word.

However, care is too important to be abandoned to its own fate. It is precisely under the influence of these brutal, palliative and reparative understandings of care–that is, those that want to keep things as they are, or restore things to an imagined or aspirational Valhalla of how nice things once were, that we should insist in vindicating and pluralizing care. As I see it, in such a context, care might be understood as a task of what philosopher Isabelle Stengers might call ‘activating the possible’: a way of making available what isn’t there yet, what could be otherwise.

Practiced in this unsettled way, care might be expanded even, not only to many other-than-human and more-than-human ecologies but also beyond the regular modes of politicizing care in all too human affairs.

One of the most interesting places for the recent renewal and expansion of careful design practices have been the many community-making endeavours that emerged after the doomed landscape of the 2008 financial crisis. In Spain, for instance, the indignados protests gave way to a wide variety of crowd-sourced, low-tech and DIY community explorations–analogous to others that appeared in many other locales–exploring forms of activist design with hackers, makers, maintainers, and menders experimenting with recycling, re-use and up-cycling, activating design as a practice bringing forms of care by other means.

Revitalising the critical debates of the 1970s these projects started to show how design practice, as a sometimes technocratic and consumerist-driven modernist endeavor, might as well be part of the many problems of our contemporary predicaments rather than a solution.

As a reaction to these modes of practicing design, these initiatives have created conditions for shared and distributed expertise going well beyond the technocratic pact of social utility of design: whereby designers act as experts in the closure of political and social conflict through solutions–services or products–for the common good, sometimes asking different groups their opinions, or enrolling social scientists like yours truly in learning about users and uses through methods like ethnography or participatory fora.

To me, the most interesting thing is that many of these projects reveal care as a project of what in STS is known as ‘technical democracy’, when searching to remain open to uncertainty, dissent and probing into complex yet collaborative modes of inquiry, with the aspiration to bring forth divergent ecologies of support.

Indeed, these different design enact other roles for designers: as facilitators of ‘socio-material assemblies’ or ‘design things’, as Thomas Binder, Pelle Ehn and colleagues would call them: staging and infrastructuring problems and different modes of engagement in design after design; or as bringing forth critical, speculative, poetic and more explicitly adversarial forms of design practice that elicit and provoke material modes of collective interrogation around design and its effects.

As I see it, these divergent design practices elicit a wide variety of repertoires of caring for the possible, precisely because they operate against how anthropologist Arturo Escobar defines modernist design practices, as operating under the ontological occupation of modernity and its natural and cultural, expert and lay clear divides. Indeed, these projects enact or activate the possible because they practically carve out alternative ontologies of the world and relational modes to the classic modernist ones, however unknown, unfathomable or scary they might seem at first. Indeed, caring for the possible in these endeavours is far from being an easy task.

 Activating things: En torno a la silla

But allow me to exemplify. From 2012 to 2016 I actively participated in a collective space of this kind in Barcelona: an exploratory activist design initiative called En torno a la silla, a wordplay in Spanish signalling an attempt at situating ourselves around, en torno, wheelchairs, sillas, so as to activate other possible environments, entornos, for them. And have been searching ever since to learn from our hyperbolic aspirations, fraught methods and experimental practices to open up inclusion not as a solution but as a problem-space.

En torno a la silla emerged after the indignados protests of 2011, after the recognition that we had no spaces to meet in bodily diversity, and that we might need to make or carve out those spaces so as to keep knowing each other. It started operating as a collective including an architect, professional craftspeople, members of the independent-living movement in Barcelona and me in the role of a documenter.

What gathered us was the intention to prototype a toolkit to turn the wheelchair into something beyond a chair that moves with wheels, but rather as something akin to “an agora that produces agora”: that is, a political and collective space that brings further people in. This was not a participatory design project where designers lured us to work with them in their own solutions or aims, but a collaborative space of inquiry through making where all present contributed in different ways.

For instance, we discovered a lot in the process of creating from scratch a portable wheelchair ramp: not only that we needed to elicit a lot of knowledges about our partners’ bodily diversities and their different types of wheelchairs; but also to think through the technical modes of folding, transportation and unfolding, or the right materials for it to make sense. We also learnt a lot from using it, from the particular effects it created, and the conversations it opened up.

Upon using it the first time in an accessible bar, and publicizing the result on our blog, a debate with colleagues in the independent-living movement ensued; we were accused of undermining the collective struggle by proposing an individual response, but we tried to remain true to what the experience had allowed us: being together in places that had not been imagined for us, opening up an encounter with the people populating them by the sheer act of irruption.

We learnt that the ramp was no solution, but a way of unfolding the problem of inaccessibility in particular situations. And in the joyful way in which we always operated, we started doing it more purposefully: calling the practice that there ensued one of a-saltos, playing with the double meaning in Spanish of jumpy walking, as we were entering places after a jump, as well as one of assaulting, irrupting and disrupting the static normalcy that those places enforced.

Rather than being a project whereby designers cared for known needs and conditions, the intense 4 years that En torno a la silla worked at full steam was rather a process of learning together to care for forms of mutual access, and mutual exploration of whomever wanted to live in bodily diversity, making but also repurposing and recycling all kinds of materials to do so.

This is the reason why we speak in a weird way about what we discovered busy doing: as we came to understand, were not designing technical aids for the of inclusion of the disabled, but caring for the emergence of technologies of friendship, as we called them. That is, spaces of encounter without clarity of purpose beyond the very desire to keep on finding ways of relating at the hinges of unrelatability. Our open approach to design became in time for us a form of inquiring into the conditions of mutual access in bodily diversity.

But working in conditions of ontological occupation, to reiterate Escobar’s appreciation, tends to make things difficult for these attempts at sustaining critical, collaborative and speculative initiatives search to pry open other modes of relating and living together. Many of these projects prove extremely fragile and vulnerable. How could we care for them?

In the last years, much efforts have indeed been put to sustain the liberation of modes of designing that these practices entail. One of the most notable examples has been a concern to infrastructure and generate conditions of exposure to a wide variety of knowledges, through the critical involvement in open-access publication platforms and open-source infrastructures. In opening up to other knowledges and in making them available there lies a hope that we might create alternative resources for alternative modes of living together.

En torno a la silla’s legacy, for instance, remains in the open-source platform that I allowed to put together, with a careful attention to the documentation of our processes of doing and thinking in tutorials, accounts of processes or events, or poetic reflections. However, this liberation of design and its knowledge also needs a welcoming ecology. And for this we need to be aware that open design and its knowledges tend to be framed when not diminished by particularly market-centric and expertocratic conditions of circulation, subject to many disputes in deeply asymmetric contexts of variegated expertise, in many circumstances putting these strategies of opening in danger.

The fraught prospects, hopeful versions and capitalist deformations of the sharing economy are, indeed, here a case in point. As I see it, care here becomes a practical issue for designers whenever searching to test experimental modes of inclusion into the fabric of products, services, platforms, cities or environments. This way of understanding care, then, might demand from us to become activators, so that this openness might flourish. And, for this, to care might mean to open up experimental pedagogic spaces.

Activating pedagogies: Design in crisis

I especially learnt of the difficulties not just to sustain this openness but to create situations of openness when I moved to Germany in 2015. I started working from the belly of the Bavarian beast–if you allow me the pun to talk about the leading German technical university at the core of one of the golden cradles of global corporate capitalism, teaching architects and other types of designers more formally in the chair of participatory design, where I was hired to bring what I had learnt in my variegated engagements in Spain.

From the beginning I faced the many difficulties or sheer impossibilities of translating the modes of thinking and doing I had learnt in the previous years to a context I couldn’t relate to very easily. In fact, this stupid idea of believing I could do it has made me feel a great sense of loss in many a dark night.

I also had to face my naiveté or sheer audacity in having forgotten that institutional spaces of alleged financial or funding abundance are not devoid of other problems of scarcity: a chronic lack of time created by the many commitments and compromises that ‘spending money reasonably’ entail; but also, the lack of a generic care for free processes of collective thought that an individualist focus on career and unit-centric demarcations might create; not to speak of the problems deriving from how well-greased hierarchies might operate in places of monetary power…

Hence, for most of the first year, I was constantly accompanied by a sense if failure: a failure to carve out openings in a hierarchically conceived academic culture; a failure to capture the students’ attention beyond ready-made humanitarian gestures, facing an overall tendency to understand their role as one of ‘problem solving’ and perpetually reenacting technical-social divides, demanding from the social professionals that we provided information about users and uses or methods to deal with the problematic prospects of ‘the social’.

Indeed, and much to my dismay, students and colleagues seemed many times uninterested. But I also realized that perhaps my teaching methods were the problem: lecturing, reading and commenting proved deeply inappropriate.

Under such circumstances, I realized that the best thing one could do is to attempt to put the students’ design in crisis, forcing them to engage in processes of learning to unlearn, to undo, or even to undesign the trained habits, goals and practices of modernist design ontologies, and its market-centric and deeply unsustainable effects. But how to do so? Indeed, such was the premise of a radical pedagogical approach in a series of design studio settings called ‘design in crisis’ put forward together with my colleague Ignacio Farías, which lead to a collective reflection on ways in which STS could be made to matter to design and architecture students in the edited volume Re-learning design, published by the Chilean bilingual journal Diseña.

In our particular approach, we sought to design studio practice, searching to sensitise future designers to other forms of understanding their practice, exposing and confronting them with somewhat impossible tasks that force them to engage in other learning process, as well as exposing them to the potential exclusionary effects of their practice.

That became our aim in a series of design studio projects that we framed under the title Design in Crisis, where we tried to work on creating experimental situations that should function as operating a reflection on our student modes of designing, although

the idea was also to show that this was feasible to make students aware that, however crazy or strange our proposals were, the briefs responded to ‘real’ situations where their particular mode of designing should be readdressed.

In Design in Crisis 1 we made them design at great speeds a series of architectural solutions in a fake competition to provide solutions for a series of humanitarian disasters, such as the refugee crisis, then devoting 3 months to undoing and unfolding the problem of their proposals, making them confront their projects in a wide variety of ways with those who might suffer from them.

However, we realized that we might need to train them to practice these confrontations, and for this, in the following versions, we devoted great lengths to train them in multi-sensory approaches to design, then producing toolkits for an alternative architectural practice: in Design in Crisis 2, for instance, we confronted them with the impossible task to design a toolkit for a blind architect, which led them to develop a tool they called ManualCAD, a multi-sensory tool for co-design processes; and in Design in Crisis 3 the challenge we confronted our students with was to re-learn green space co-design by creating a set of devices–simulation and co-working suits, pipes and chemical substances– to establish enter in a relation with the beavers populating the river Isar, attempting to enable them to participate on its renaturalisation.

The outcomes our students produced might be conceived as potential toolkits for a different kind of architectural design practice. Despite being ‘gadgets’ these toolkits should not be seen as closed ‘objects’, nor well-packaged ‘plug-n-play solutions’.

Quite on the contrary, being accompanied by an open documentation of all the shaky learning outcomes the groups had been through in becoming a group, they function as a re-learning device of sorts: as pedagogical devices performing an ‘intravention’ into architectural practice with the potential of having an impact on our students’ future professional practice and allowing others to follow their steps.

Intraventions, hence, whereby students were exposed to forms of designing more carefully, activating the possibility of alternative architectural modes of designing.

Concluding thoughts

But En torno a la silla or Design in Crisis are just some of the many examples of a potential design practice understood as a form of care for the possible. That is, a form of designing so as to activate other forms of designing. But I am sure you could contribute with many others.

In times of planetary distress and complex future prospects for any form of living together, perhaps we need render ourselves amenable to activating our modes of designing in unforeseen ways.

As I would have liked to propose, perhaps the best thing we could do is to decidedly engage in the design of situations to explore different speculative engagements, demanding from us to engage beyond the strict role of ‘advocates’ or ‘activists’: sites, venues or forums to problematize the worlds we live in by making and provoking distinct registers of appreciation of complex conditions in a wide variety of aesthetic registers and design genres, from the parodic to the fictional. Hence acting as ‘careful troublemakers’, un-doing or un-designing the conditions of those whose actions have the potential to be harmful, so that we could attempt to create uncertain practical openings into the possible, where we might experiment and learn to engage in alternative and hopefully better ways of living together.

Categories
design intraventions events experimental collaborations functional diversity & disability rights intravention re-learning design

Relatar una ecología documental – Intervención en el seminario “Más que texto” (UCM)

El martes 19 de febrero, de 16.00-18-00, participaré en el tercer seminario del ciclo ‘Más que texto. De la mono/grafía antropológica a la inventiva multi-modal‘ que tendrá lugar en el Seminario del Área de Antropología Departamento de Antropología Social y Psicología Social (UCM)

Relatar una ecología documental: En torno a la silla como dispositivo de campo multimodal

¿Qué implica hacer trabajo de campo, tomar notas y producir interpretaciones etnográficas en contextos como los de la cultura libre, poblados por sujetos que documentan ampliamente sus actividades con una inventiva descriptiva, gráfica y textual, que excede las competencias y maneras tradicionales de los profesionales de la antropología? ¿Qué aporta el trabajo antropológico cuando esos mismos actores leen y producen interpretaciones sobre los mundos en que se mueven, empleando referencias académicas análogas a las nuestras? En suma, ¿en qué se convierte la práctica etnográfica o la investigación antropológica en este tipo de sitios ‘para-etnográficos’, como los llamarían Marcus & Holmes? El presente relato recorre las transformaciones experimentales y aprendizajes que mis indagaciones sufrieron a partir de mi participación en el proyecto En torno a la silla–un colectivo de diseño libre desde la diversidad funcional que comenzó a operar en 2012, primordialmente en la ciudad de Barcelona–en el que comencé a colaborar desde sus inicios, documentando los diferentes procesos y actividades o gestionado la ecología documental digital del colectivo.
De ser un ‘estudio de caso’ parte de mi proyecto de investigación postdoctoral sobre el diseño participativo de tecnologías de cuidado, en ese proceso se produjo una transformación. Pasé de ser un etnógrafo a un documentador y, como explicaré, mi etnografía pasó a tener lugar a través de la gestión del blog y otras plataformas digitales así como los eventos–presentaciones y talleres de creación. Esta implicación etnográfica tuvo un impacto también en En torno a la silla, en tanto que esa documentación y reflexión pasaron a ser un problema compartido. Como contaré, en ese proceso, En torno a la silla se convirtió en un ‘dispositivo de campo multimodal’ en torno al relacionarse para relatar y relatar para relacionarse, una plataforma colaborativa y experimental, desde la que problematizar conjuntamente el diseño abierto desde la diversidad funcional.

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Más que texto. De la mono/grafía antropológica a la inventiva multi-modal – Ciclo de seminarios dedicado a investigaciones cuyo conocimiento etnográfico se expresa a través de formas multimodales: representaciones teatrales, formatos visuales, repositorios documentales, manuales didácticos o infraestructuras etnográficas (programa completo aquí).

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Imagen CC BY NC SA Carla Boserman 2014

Categories
experimental collaborations intravention materials multimodal publications

The Lab is not Blah: Academic encounters, venues to re-train ourselves

Eeva Berglund, Adolfo Estalella,  Anna Lisa Ramella and Tomás Sánchez Criado (#Colleex convenors)

Published as part of the Colleex Open Formats, August 10, 2018 

Position paper introducing ‘A lab of labs: Documenting open formats‘ (a lab at EASA 2018’s conference)

Meetings are, together with papers and books, perhaps the quintessential mechanism for the circulation of academic knowledge. And yet, despite their relevance, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: paper presentations, round tables, etc. Nevertheless, anthropology has recently recognised the need to explore other ways of sharing our knowledge and thinking together. The lab call that EASA has made in the last conferences evinces an interest that we at the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (#Colleex) network also share.

In our case, we strongly believe that formats to share and think together should be considered as part and parcel of a discussion on ethnographic experimentation. In our work we have been exploring these venues using the rather loose term open formats. What are they? And, most importantly, what can an open format be? In this sense, this documentation project has a twofold goal. First, we aim at bringing for discussion the relevance of experimenting with meeting formats as pedagogical spaces for the apprenticeship of ethnographic experimentation. Second, we argue for the need to document these ‘experiments in meeting’ so that they may travel, be learnt and reproduced elsewhere.

1. Meetings as academic encounters, and venues to re-train ourselves

Adolfo: We meet to share knowledge and learn: at large conferences or intimate workshops, in the classroom with students or in seminars with colleagues. A screen, somebody standing, a series of slides over 10, 20 … even 30 minutes! Sometimes the speaker sits rather than stands. And then, questions at the end. This arrangement applies to most of the meetings we have had and are likely to have over our academic career. We meet to learn, but perhaps, and this is our point, we should learn to meet. Because meetings are, together with papers and books, quintessential in the circulation of academic knowledge. And yet, despite this, we usually resort to the most conventional formats: panels of paper presentations and round tables. We want to explore new ways to get together.

Meetings are extended bureaucratic forms, organisational techniques and forms of relationality across all kinds of collective and organisational contexts. Defined in space and time, meetings always point to a larger context. This is the argument made by Hannah Brown, Adam Reed and Thomas Yarrow (2017) in a special issue devoted to the topic. Thus the relevance of meetings has to do with the effects they produce beyond. To quote Brown et al.: “[meetings] contain and animate social worlds outside the spatially and temporally demarcated arenas through which they take place” (Brown et al. 2017: 12).

There is always something at stake beyond then: interests, contexts and agendas that shape a meeting and will be affected by it. Marilyn Strathern has argued that meetings, as organisational events, constitute miniaturise versions of the collectives they are embedded in: “meetings mimic larger apprehensions of a scaled-up object” (2017: 197). In a period of transformation that seems to call to experiment with new forms of producing knowledge, I would say that we need to mimic in our meeting methods this experimental impulse.

Tomás: At the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation we are trying to open up venues to rethink the norms and forms of ethnography, and more specifically, the ways in which we do and narrate fieldwork. Hence, since we started out almost two years ago now, we have tried to foreground the particular social and material interventions, the devices and the spaces, the discourses and the practices,  through which forms of fieldwork beyond the canonic participant observation could be examined in closer detail.

Seeking to explore alternative meeting formats, we organised our first workshop in Lisbon last year. We devoted half of the programme to an exploration of situation-based,  art-oriented, multi-sensory, spatial and audio-visual and other work that we called ‘open formats’. In this alternative meeting mode to the regular paper presentation, we not only experimented with fieldwork and how to learn to do it differently. Also, open formats became reflexive situations whereby what it might mean to experiment could be centre-staged, highlighted, examined, and debated. But as we would like to discuss today, our interest in ‘open formats’ goes beyond a mere playful exploration in a workshop. This is why we are suggesting to meet today in order to learn how to meet in many different alternative ways: Meeting in order to learn how to do fieldwork otherwise, meeting to appreciate what it means to experiment in fieldwork and what it brings. In fact, we believe that we should devote time and space to understanding open formats as interesting learning and fieldwork devices, and to making them relevant for teaching and research…

An image of one of the open formats organized in the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).

Adolfo: One source of inspiration has been the realisation, captured by Michael J. Fischer, that “life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained” (2003: 37). Or, to put it differently, engaging with forms of ethnographic experimentation has made us realise that conventional ethnographic training–or, to be more specific, the canon expressed in many handbooks and manuals of ethnography–is not adequate to the challenges fieldwork poses today. A second source would be our own very ethnographic engagement: some of us at Colleex we have learnt from our epistemic partners in the field, such artists and activists, alternative ways to come together. This doesn’t just mean that they have shown us specific meeting formats but that we have learn to inhabit in sophisticated ‘how-to’ meeting cultures: ones that mobilise an ecology of practices whose key goal is to get us together to engage in forms of joint research. From our partners we’ve learned about composing ambiences for discussion, arranging spatial layouts, deploying varied technologies for record keeping and documentation, unfolding practices of care…  That is, practices whereby ethnography becomes an art of learning to relate–meet, tell, forge relations– in order to relate–that is, to keep on meeting, telling, and forging relations– .

Eeva: We agree that heterodox and improvisational formats also generate academic value, and that they could and should be supported further through documentation. And so we thank EASA for the way it is seeking to break out of such constraints through, for instance, labs. EASA has been trying to raise awareness and give some relevance in the programme to labs. To us, labs are not just ‘blah’ they are not a mere playful format, but fundamental sites where the renewal of learning and ethnographic fieldwork might be attempted in a miniaturised time and space. Hence, this lab focuses on how labs matter. This is, then, a lab on how labs operate, a lab of labs…

Anna: In that sense, and putting open formats centre-stage, perhaps we should outline some different modes in which open formats happen. I can think of three modes: (a) meetings in which we convey our knowledge through open formats; (b) meetings in which we generate knowledge through open formats; or (c) meetings in which we show experimental fieldwork devices through open formats. Of course they aren’t as distinct from each other as this, but we need to disentangle their different moments: (a) knowledge-production happening before the format takes place, (b) knowledge being simultaneous or reciprocal with regards to the format, and (c) knowledge being derived from the open format. Meetings of academic content combine these by sharing knowledge from the field and generating more knowledge around it in the meeting. By analogy with paper presentations, later developed into articles or fully written-up papers, what would be the most finished form of an open format? How can we translate this step of the process where knowledge becomes more integrated into open formats? How could we generate the situational knowledge we could to take beyond the situation, and how could it be shared? What role would documentation play in this? And, also, what kinds of documentation are we talking about?

Eeva: We recognize a need for more adequate accounts of fieldwork than tropes and modes that build on ‘participant observation.’ We share an imperative to verbalize or articulate in more-than-textual terms but also to embody the formats and devices through which we encounter and engage the world. We also recognize the need to give some structure and even a little order to the space we as #colleex are occupying, and which we hope enables further developments in heterodox forms of research. There are multiple voices and divergent projects in this space, not just the wider network, but even among ourselves as convenors. (We don’t want to kill the network or limit ourselves by trying to agree on everything, let alone reach consensus.)

But if we are to practice new ethnographic modes and have them recognized and valued, we do need to take a position on what experimental fieldwork might constructively be guided towards and why, and this is where documenting and discussing the ways in which we do it, or drawing inspiration from one another to attempt newer ways, plays a fundamental role. Though of course any attempt at articulating this in any genre is likely to be somewhat hesitant, always contingent and probably relational. It’s not reform so much as a recognition of already productive work and thinking that’s needed. This won’t be easy in the university’s profit-oriented institutional set up, but a drive to push along these lines is definitely there. In places it’s already possible to work without reducing ethnographic insight to text or things like ‘key performance indicators’, plus it’s clear that the extremely serious can easily and productively dovetail with the playful. What we now need is a lively, possibly provisional, documentation format that can travel and contribute to pedagogy.

Adolfo: A reflection on how and why to do this, is an integral part of our work about ethnographic experimentation, as a specific ethnographic modality beyond participant observation. But beyond just talking about it or giving it value, the challenge ethnographic experimentation poses is that it requires different forms of ethnographic training. This argument links to a debate on the transformations of fieldwork in the contemporary and the need to re-equip our discipline (Rees 2008). Paul Rabinow, Chris Kelty and Kim Fortun for instance have explored other forms of learning with their students and young researchers (Rabinow 2011, Marcus 2013, Kelty 2008, Fortun 2008). The volume edited by George E. Marcus and James D. Faubion (2009), Fieldwork is not what it used to be, is exemplary in this sense. It makes a strong case for the need to renew pedagogies in the anthropological profession if we want to measure up to the challenges of the contemporary. Specifically the PhD is an exceptional learning moment or space to experiment with the possibilities of ethnography, as Marcus has argued: it constitutes a threshold where the limits of the norm and form of field work are negotiated (Marcus 2009). This has led to rehearsing formats borrowed from other disciplines, such as the ethnocharrette or the design or art studio. In a similar vein, Paul Rabinow has explored what he designates labminar, a space of academic exchange that remediated–that, is, changed from one media to another– the meetings of the laboratories he studied.  In these spaces Rabinow, together with his students, explored the possibility of “new forms of inquiry through ways collaborative guided by an ethic of care” (2011: 142).

An image of one of the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).

2. On the importance of archiving documentation of meetings and open formats

Adolfo: If ethnography is moving beyond the solitary to the collaborative, shifting away from the visual to multi-sensory, being captured not just textually but in other mediums, how are these conveyed? Can and should they be captured and re-moved to other locations?

Tomás: Perhaps we need to reflect on how to document, how to tell, how to narrate all these experiences, beyond the very situations in which they happen… How to make them travel?

Anna: And how can the multi-sensory experiences be documented or made relatable at all? For instance, open formats in mode (c) as I introduced it earlier – that is, as meetings in which the production of knowledge derives from the very open format itself – entail a particular form of documentation. And the documentation of fieldwork encounters and experiments is different, I think, from the documentation of the open formats with which we either seek to produce knowledge (b) or to just transmit knowledge (a).

Tomás: What if we gathered the documentation of open formats into something like a collection… Would this help to discern different approaches to ethnographic experimentation, or serve as inspiration to practice more experimental forms of ethnography?

Eeva: Assuming this is desirable, and that documentation should be easily accessible, what should we call this thing? Not a handbook… An inventory or list, taxonomy even? An archive? A library of how-to manuals or toolkits, even a protocol? A recipe collection or a cookbook?

Tomás:  There are implications in calling it an inventory or a cookbook. Both are nice terms, but they connect to different powerful imaginaries and aesthetics that could have a potential impact on the output…

Eeva: Terminology always carries baggage. The term cookbook is perhaps most open and tolerant of gaps. Inventory is perhaps the most rigid and colonizing word we might use. This is certainly so if it consists of standardised entries to be completed in each case, and assuming some underlying structure that is infinitely transferable from context to context.

Tomás: I think there are also different notions of these terms, and I am not that sure that an inventory is colonial per se… It certainly brings to mind an imaginary of knowledge as taxonomy and logistics. Is that the connotation that we want? If we’re talking about a gathering of open formats, their very openness suggests more the idea of recipes people can alter, transform, adapt, that the openness doesn’t just refer to the types of meetings being experimented, but also the types of documentation being attempted, not to speak of the openness of their subsequent uses?

Anna: I think if we use the word cookbook it will need a very clear explanation of our understanding of recipe, that it is a mix of things whose outcome can vary. My first association with recipe is still the “take a+b, get c” type of thing, and I don’t think that’s what we mean. Maybe we could even be more open with our metaphor and use something that is more abstract and doesn’t yet have that connotation, I’m thinking carousel (for dynamics) or something that is a an open collection, not a box and not an a+b=c connotation.

Eeva: Metaphors and words do matter. Still, as texts and in texts, these vocabularies can all be read as if they were fixed, but they can also all be invitations to improvise and work on them further. One of the key motivations for documenting any research is to share experiences and inspire further adaptation. I think what we are calling for is ways of expanding our academic (and other) imagination. At the same time, some people might be reading documents to get going, to learn something totally new, in which case a step-by-step set of instructions might be handy. Documentation as a way of giving an account (whether as a story or financially) is also simply an invitation to engage and respond, to continue. In the case of #colleex, it’s a kind of reconstructed epistemic practice we’re looking for, that cares for the ethnographic in all its dimensions: as interpersonal engagement, fieldwork, description, theory and combinations of them all.

Tomás/Adolfo/Anna/Eeva: Hence, in this spirit, we are meeting today to show you our first steps in attempting how and why to document, something that started after our workshop in Lisbon. In what follows, we will show previous documentation of several open formats. But our aspiration would be to think beyond these first baby steps, and to invite you to join us in meeting to further discuss how we might imagine to document the inventiveness of open formats, and what for? What should be the appropriate genres, archival modes, styles? And, after discussing this, we would also like to propose engaging in a process of documenting the experimental ethnographic practices and accounts of open formats in the conference’s labs: where we think this might be a bit more explicit. But we also reckon that not every lab has to be necessarily experimental, and maybe experimentation in and around open formats might also be discussed in presentations across the conference.

Our proposal would be to display such a documentation in our digital platforms, so that we could open up a further discussion and a learning space on how to train ourselves to undertake experimental ethnographic modes. For this, we could use the hashtag #colleexperiments to collect the documentation gathered by all of us. It is our hope that the reflections and the hands-on work in this lab, could pave the way to something like the alternative to the handbook we discussed beforehand. Perhaps, in doing this we could collectively imagine how to make such a cookbook?

An image of one of the open formats organized in the 1st Colleex Workshop (Lisbon, 2017) (Vitor Barros).

References

Brown, H., Reed, A. & Yarrow, T. (2017). Introduction: towards an ethnography of meeting. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(S1): 10-26.

Faubion, James D. & George E. Marcus (eds.). 2009. Fieldwork is not what it used to be. Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Fischer, Michael M. J. 2003. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Fortun, Kim. 2009. “Figuring out ethnography”, in James Faubion y George Marcus (eds.), Fieldwork isn’t what it used to be: 167-183. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Kelty,  Christopher et alt. 2008. “Fieldwork after the Internet. Collaboration, coordination and composition”, in James Faubion and George Marcus (eds.), Fieldwork isn’t what it used to be: 184-206. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Marcus, George E. 2009. “Introduction. Notes toward an Ethnographic Memoir of Supervising Graduate Research through Anthropology’s Decades of Transformation”, in James D. Faubion and George E. Marcus, Fieldwork is not what it used to be. Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition:1-34. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Marcus, George E. 2013. “Experimental forms for the expression of norms in the ethnography of the contemporary”. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory3(2):197–217.

Rabinow, P., Marcus, G. E., Faubion, J. D., & Rees, T. (2008). Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rabinow, P. (2011). The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Rees, Tobias. 2008. “Introduction”, in Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, James D. Faubion y Tobias Rees (eds.), Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary: 1-13. Durham, London: Duke University Press

Strathern, M. (2017). Afterword. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 23(S1).

Categories
intravention re-learning design

DISEÑA 12 (2018) RE-APRENDIENDO A DISEÑAR: EXPERIMENTOS PEDAGÓGICOS CON STS EN TALLERES DE DISEÑO | RE-LEARNING DESIGN: PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENTS WITH STS IN DESIGN STUDIO COURSES

[ES]  Diseña 12: Esta edición explora las intersecciones entre diseño y STS en talleres académicos y espacios pedagógicos de diseño

[EN] Diseña 12: This special issue explores the crossroads of design and STS in design studio courses

Ignacio Farías & Tomás Sánchez Criado (Eds.)

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Editorial
Renato Bernasconi

4-11 PDF

Aprender diseño con insectos sociales: la hormiga, la araña y la avispa | LEARNING DESIGN WITH SOCIAL INSECTS: THE ANT, THE SPIDER, AND THE WASP
Ester Gisbert Alemany

256-283 PDF

**

Lanzamientos oficiales | Official launches

27.3.2018, 19:00 Santiago de Chile.

 

27.7.2018, 12:30-14:00 Lancaster (EASST conference)

If you plan to attend Lancaster’s 2018 EASST conference, please feel welcome to come to our special issue launch: “Pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses”

It will take place Friday July 27th at the Marketplace 13:00-14:00 (this will be a brown bag event, so from 12:30 to 13:00 feel welcome to grab your lunch before coming), and we will have Yana Boeva (York University, Toronto) and Teun Zuiderent-Jerak (Linköping University) as guest commentators.
In the last decades, the institutionalization of STS in technical universities has made urgent the challenge of how to teach STS sensibilities and political commitments to a project of technical democracy when operating in the belly of the beast. Focusing on the crossroads of design and STS, “Re-learning Design: Pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses” is a bilingual issue of DISEÑA recently edited by Ignacio Farías and Tomás S. Criado, which features a series of interviews and articles on pedagogical experiments with STS in design studio courses undertaken by a diverse range of academics from Europe and the Americas.