CLEENIK is searching for “sick” ethnographers interested in donating their time for science, sharing their suffering experiences, and helping others find the #xcol™ cure!
For this, you would be receiving a treatment FOR FREE in our internationally renowned CLEENIK, an institution with the most innovative experimental collaboration techniques for the treatment of contemporary fieldwork disorders.
Have you ever suffered from…
EES – Excess of Engagement Stress?
When you and your natives get ‘too involved’ or simply ‘become too strange’. Symptoms may include permanent conflicts, provocations, an excess of questioning, quarrels, love & hate relationships, irritation, misunderstandings, too much objections, mutual aggressions, constant jokes, natives making fun of you/you making fun of them, playful inversion of roles or blurring the boundaries sensation (‘natives’ becoming the observers and you the object of their scrutiny), frictional effects, unpredictable consequences – and in extreme situations, ethnographic breakdown.
GN – Goingnativosis?
It’s that point when you realize you did it all wrong – in the ethnographic process you have become a ‘professional native’. Symptoms may include (cultural, disciplinary) identity crisis, feeling like a foreign in your own culture, feeling unadapted when back home, becoming too critical about your own culture (the ‘things are so much better back there’ kind of feeling), feeling like being a stranger within the anthropologist community, or never being able to ‘come back’ (physically, emotionally, etc.).
“One does not born, but rather becomes, an anthropologist”. The more typical symptoms of TRIAD are disciplinary disorientation. In our clinic we make change-of-discipline interventions – either from anthropology to other disciplines or from other disciplines to anthropology. You can also choose the hybrid half-way.
CLEENIK is a specialized anthropological clinic. We treat anthropologists suffering from the multiple syndromes consequence of ethnographic experiments in fieldwork. If you think you may have suffered any of these syndromes or you want to prevent in case of starting fieldwork, you may just drop by to our session and ask for advice and treatment.
In the CLEENIK we will create the grounds for a discussion around the figure of ethnographic experimentation in fieldwork. For this, we ask participants to share the diseases they have suffered in their fieldwork.
CLEENIK is an open-source adaptation and a continuation for ethnographic audiences of ColaBoraBora’sKlinikaalso an adaptation of an initiative by Maria Salazar, part of her artistic residence at Muelle3 in Bilbao (more info here).
Everybody seems to agree: There should be no more large infrastructural projects, especially in cities, without a proper citizen participation process. Fine. We need to democratize technical decision making. But what does this mean?
In this cycle of PARTIZIPATORIUM, we will explore a simple hypothesis: democratization of technical decision making does not simply require citizens or lay people to become experts. More importantly, it needs professional experts in the private and public sector to become aware of the limits of their own expertise, to open themselves to other forms of sensing, knowing and valuing and ultimately, why not, to be trained differently.
Dates 31.05.2016, 18-20h #1 | RE-EQUIPPING ARCHITECTS FOR THE INFORMAL CITY – AN EXCURSION TO CAÑADA REAL GALIANA Prof. Regine Keller, Johann-Christian Hannemann, Johanna Rainer, Laura Loewel (LAO, TUM) + Dr. Tomás S. Criado (MCTS) Comments by Dr. Eduardo Ascensão (Universidade de Lisboa)
In many projects of ‘slum upgrading’ technical professionals tend to call for the participation of local dwellers as a way to validate or discuss the prospects of their proposals. But this could also become an extremely top-down approach to the problems at hand. Hence, what if we thought of participation as something that involved a radical transformation of the technical professionals themselves? What if they needed to be ‘re-equipped’ to become sensitive to the needs of the local dwellers and to the constraints of the spaces in which they will operate?
For this, in this session, we shared and discussed a teaching experiment undertaken between Regine Keller’s LAO and MCTS’s Participatory Technology Design research groups at TUM: a field trip where Landscape Architects where speed-trained as social scientists, taking field-notes shadowing the local dwellers, using picture-based methods to elicit conversations with them, and reflecting on the involvement with them writing up comprehensive diaries. After presenting this experience, we sought to explore whether ‘re-equipping the technical professionals’ could be considered a necessary condition to redefine participation in urban affairs.
14.06.2016, 18-20h #2 | LEARNING NOT TO SEE – BLIND PEOPLE TRAINING LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS IN ACCESSIBLE URBANISM Prof. Birgit Schimdt, Maja Prenzlau, Ferhat Türkoglu (HWST) + Mag. Melanie Egerer (BBSB) Comments by Prof. Dr. Michael Schillmeier (University of Exeter)
On Tuesday June 14th together with Prof. Birgit Schimdt‘s Objektplanung in der Landschaftsarchitektur (Hochschule Weihenstephan-Triesdorf), her students Maja Prenzlau & Ferhat Türkoglu, Melanie Egerer from the Bayerischer Blinden- und Sehbehindertenbund (BBSB) and with comments by Prof. Dr. Michael Schillmeier (University of Exeter) we will be exploring the devices, gadgets, activities and practices needed to ‘sensitize’ students of Landscape Architecture to become assistants in the political work of the BBSB’s associates to foreground problems in the design of accessible public spaces. We would like to understand the role played by these gadgets in learning what it means ‘not to see’, paying special attention to how lived and embodied experience is translated or worked out in these processes, and how sensitization might be crucial to democratize and to make urbanism more accessible.
05.07.2016, 18-20h #3 | FRIENDLY HACKING THE PUBLIC SYSTEM – A STADTTEILLABOR FOR NEUAUBING-WESTKREUZ Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías, Claudia Mendes, Hanna Varga (MCTS, TUM) + Korinna Thielen (Stadtentwicklung, München) Comments by Dr. Anna Seravalli (Malmö University)
Tuesday 5th of July in this final session of the first cycle of the Partizipatorium Prof. Dr. Ignacio Farías, Claudia Mendes, Hanna Varga (MCTS, TUM), together with Korinna Thielen (Stadtentwicklung, München) and with comments and discussion by Dr. Anna Seravalli (Malmö University), we will be exploring how co-design projects might not only require a transformation of the relations between designers and potential end users, but also –and especially in projects involving the public administration– between different types of experts.
In this paper we would like to explore an ethnographic mode that takes the shape of experimentation in the field. We will draw on the ethnographies (Adolfo’s & Tomás’s) we have been carrying out in the last five years in urban contexts populated by urban activists, guerrilla architects, amateur tinkerers, and disability rights advocates located in Barcelona and Madrid. These projects account for the wave of urban creativity and civic invention that has spread out through these cities after the uprising of the ‘15M movement’ (the Spanish precursor of the Occupy movement).
Our ethnographic sites are populated by people struggling to transform the city: they do so building infrastructures, producing a vast amount of documentation that describes their own practices and exploring methodologies for the production of knowledge. Very often, these collectives invoke the trope of experimentation to refer to their relationship to the city. In a way, the locations we are describing might be aptly characterised as ‘para-sites’, following Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2008) description of ethnographic sites populated by people whose research practices resonate with those of the anthropologists.
Even though ours has been a deep involvement in these sites, activist or militant registers and vocabularies would not be the best description of our practice. For lack of a better term, our engagement has been of an ‘epistemic’ kind. Indeed, during our fieldwork we both became gradually involved in the production of shared spaces of investigation, in the construction of material and digital infrastructures, and in the process of documentation, sometimes even taking a leading role, as we will describe here. We would like to suggest that our ethnographic projects were dragged into the experimental ethos of these projects.
Our ethnographies have been infused by these forms of experimentation: Somehow, our fieldworks seem to have incorporated in a recursive gesture the epistemic experimental practices of our counterparts in the field, as we seek to describe today. Thus, drawing on Tomás fieldwork we describe the distinctive practice of tinkering of an activist design collective called En torno a la silla. Working among tinkerers that extremely value the production of documentation, Tomás fieldwork turned into a tentative practice of tinkering with documentation. Describing his fieldwork in these terms (as a form of fieldwork tinkering), our attempt here is to provide a tentative descriptive vocabulary to account for this ethnographic mode we call ‘experimental collaborations’.
II. Tinkering in/with fieldwork
Barcelona, it’s the morning of February 8th 2013. We’re in the bedroom of Antonio’s house. I (Tomás) am struggling to adjust a semi-professional Canon EOS 60D camera that a good friend has lent me to shoot a video. The plan according to the rather informal script we have discussed is to re-enact for the record how the armrest-briefcase we have designed in the last months for Antonio’s wheelchair works. I take some shots of Alida disassembling the former armrest and assembling the new gadget to Antonio’s wheelchair. Later on we start improvising and moving around to demonstrate different uses of the briefcase. Since I am not a professional I struggle with the light settings in the inner parts of the house. The next month is really busy for us and I slowly learn to edit these video materials using an amateur software package.
After I have it, two months after shooting the video we three meet at Antonio’s house to discuss it using his big TV screen and my laptop. They like it and have nothing to comment, even though I spot and make them pay attention to some of the mistakes I’ve made with the light settings and the shots, to understand whether we should be recording it again. After some talk we decide that we cannot get stuck, that it’s good enough and we have to move on since this is only a very small thing of the many other projects that En torno a la silla is working on.
However, given that the video only shows the processes of disassembling, reassembling and use, Alida also wants to work to produce some exhaustive hand-drawn sketches to create a downloadable text and image tutorial showing the technical detail: how to build it and why, what were the main technical challenges in the conception and production, as well as showing detail on important pieces, such as the joystick-briefcase junction. We will work on that in the following weeks. That day the discussion leads us to upload the video to YouTube, later embedding it in a blog post, also adding a couple of high quality pictures, and collaboratively write on the spot the explanatory paragraph telling what the gadget is.
En torno a la silla was originally put together in the summer of 2012 in Barcelona by Alida – architect with a large experience in activist collectives in the city–; Antonio – mathematician, powered wheelchair user and one of the most renowned independent-living activists in the country–; and Rai – an anthropologist graduate who works as a wood craftsman and who also has a large experience in activist collectives in the city–. En torno a la silla was set up as a project seeking to prototype an open-source wheelchair kit to ‘habilitate other possibilities to the user.’ The kit consisted of three elements: a portable wheelchair ramp, a foldable table, and the armrest-briefcase described in the vignette.
The group started to work on the fabrication of these technologies in October 2012. We came to use the Spanish term cacharrear –to tinker– to talk about what we were doing. None of us were expert designers of technical aids, and neither of us were trained craftspeople in the many skills that the gadgets we have started learning to fabricate required. What we called tinkering was always characterised by playful learning processes, a rather mundane exploratory practice of searching for inspiration from tutorials, sketching and fabricating, sometimes searching for help from specialists in a given craft.
But I would like to explore a different nuance of the term tinkering, grounding on STS literature, where scholars like Karin Knorr-Cetina (1981) or Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997) have qualified the technoscientific practices of reasoning and laboratory experimentation as particular forms of tinkering. Tinkering is also an apt metaphor to foreground not only experimentation as an ‘opportunistic’ and open-ended reasoning practice, but also the important role of tweaking and setting material and spatial infrastructures in knowledge production: An arrangement that, if successful, might allow experimenters to pose new questions that they did not have in advance.
En torno a la silla also wanted to engage in another particular form of tinkering: from the onset they were worried about producing an open documentation of the process wishing to make it public so that their prototypes might be replicated by or serve as inspiration to others. When I approached the project for the first time in search for a case study for my postdoctoral project on participatory design in care technologies they were sharp in relation to my role: “You can’t be an observer here”, an imperative aligned with the motto of independent-living movement whose philosophy pervades En torno a la silla: “Nothing about us without us.” So when I started hanging around with them I was quickly dragged into their exploratory material and documentary practices of fabrication in a way that I would like to suggest infused my ethnographic practice with an experimental gesture.
III. Tinkering with documentation
Hence, I joined the project taking the responsibility of the documentation process shortly after it had began. This happened given that the ethnographic skills and interests that I had been displaying in our first encounters were thought to be useful for the project. But this also entailed a considerable effort, since I had to test and try a whole set of technologies to take care of documenting the design and fabrication processes. The regular notepad gave way to the use of Evernote software on my smartphone since I needed to take pictures and make quick notes. In other occasions I jotted down exhaustive minutes including verbatim quotes using my email that I would send others, and I later learnt to use WordPress blogs and many plugin services to manage the different aspects of the project’s documentation.
Indeed, I had to fabricate a shared environment to document and circulate the fabrication process. Testing digital platforms, discussing the records in joint meetings, collecting material from different sources and combining the appropriate media format for the records, I experimented with the documentation in a similar way to how the project struggled to fabricate an environment for the wheelchair. My fieldwork recursively became a tinkering ethnographic space. Tinkering ‘around the wheelchair’ indeed involved a twofold dimension: both material and documentary; that is, we had to explore the open source design of gadgets while testing the appropriate techniques and record genres to open up their process of fabrication.
At some moments in meetings where I was in charge of taking the minutes the distinction between design documentation and field notes blurred: taking the minutes of meetings later forwarded by email to the group I sometimes turned them into ethnographic notes of sorts, using verbatim quotes as well as remarks on personal impressions of emotional climates or situations. In other occasions it was the other way around: my very personal field notes were turned into the documentation of the process of fabrication, being scanned or shared for the common record after the fact. Often this double-register made very difficult to keep my record practices untouched. The distinctive written genre of my field notes seemed to blur with documentation, but my ethnographic practice blurred too. This went beyond a mere experimentation with literary styles.
IV. Experimental collaborations
Tomás’s collaboration tinkering with documentation unearthed an experimental moment in fieldwork. Tinkering with documentation took Tomás into a close relationship of collaboration with his tinkering counterparts through an open process of documentation and reflections. A collaboration that was neither a militant nor an ethical gesture, but an effect of the shared space of joint tinkering practices, both material and documentary.
My ethnographic experience (Adolfo’s) in the field has been similar to Tomás’s. I would say that during my work with urban activists and guerrilla architects I was also trapped by the experimental ethos of my counterparts. In a way close to Tomás’s experience, I felt that I was transgressing the norm and form of the ethnographic fieldwork I had learned and I felt the need of an appropriate conceptual vocabulary to account for my fieldwork practice.
Our joint discussions sharing the oddity of our experiences led us to work on an edited compilation focusing on similar experiences, where we refer to this particular ethnographic mode as a form of ‘experimental collaboration’, one whose relationality in the field is articulated (and described) in terms of collaboration (and not only participation); and in which the epistemic figure describing knowledge-production invokes experimentation (instead of only observation). But our invocation of experimentation is not new to anthropology.
Our invocation of experimentation is not completely new to anthropology. The reflexive turn of the eighties inaugurated a wave of writing experiments that addressed a deep reconsideration of authority and authorship, and explored different representational forms and textual genres or expanded authorship beyond the single ethnographer to include fieldwork counterparts. In recent times, an experimental invocation has been increasingly translated from the space of ethnographic representation to the fieldwork. Experimentation, hence, is invoked as a way to renew the norm and form of ethnographic fieldwork.
Our description does not invoke experimentation metaphorically. On the contrary, our fieldwork account foregrounding tinkering with documentation seeks to explore a vocabulary that is faithful to the empirical practices that we have found in the field and have infused our own production of knowledge. We have thus explored a descriptive vocabulary around tinkering but many more singular conceptual empirical languages could be developed to account for other anthropological forms of experimental collaboration in the field.
We are tempted to say that experimentation has always been an art part of the ethnographic repertoire in fieldwork, an epistemic practice that however has not been foregrounded in the tales of the field that have narrated our empirical practice in terms of participant observation and sometimes using the register of rapport or the instrumental management of relations in the field ‘participating in order to write’ (Emerson et al., 1995: 26-29). We have tried in this account to test a different tale of the field, one that describes our fieldwork through the mode of experimental collaboration.
References
Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. I., & Shaw, L. L. (1995). Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2008). Collaboration Today and the Re-Imagination of the Classic Scene of Fieldwork Encounter. Collaborative Anthropologies, 1(1), 81–101.
Knorr-Cetina, K. D. (1981). The manufacture of knowledge: An essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. Oxford: Pergamon.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Colaboro con el pequeño texto “Del cuidado inteligente al diseño del cualquiera” (pp. 9-13) en el libro “Ciudades en Beta: De las SmartCities a los SmartCitizens“, editado por Martin Tironi (2016). Santiago de Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, presentado recientemente:
Este volumen pretende hacer visible, a una audiencia especializada como no-especialista, diferentes comprensiones y aplicaciones del término Smart City, proponiendo problemáticas, casos y conceptualizaciones que van más allá de una visión tecnologizada del urbanismos smart. Permite pluralizar y a la vez tomar distancia crítica de esta ola de Ciudades Inteligentes, mostrando las múltiples formas de inteligencia que adopta la vida urbana, que pueden ir desde la recomposición de espacios públicos hasta sofisticadas formas de gestión en transporte. Digámoslo de otra manera: aquellos productos diseñados y definidos por “sistemas expertos”, no tiene el monopolio de lo smart, y el prototipo espontáneo de una cancha de fútbol o de una barrera anti-ruido elaborada por un colectivo ciudadano puede ser tan inteligente o más que que un brazalete wearable. Lo importante es estar atento a esas pulsiones y gestos, sensores y desplazamientos urbanos. En suma, la vocación de este libro es abrir el debate sobre las Smart Cities, explorando a partir de diferentes perspectivas y disciplinas (Antropología, Diseño, Ingeniería, Sociología, Arquitectura, Políticas Públicas…), la pregunta sobre qué implica una práctica urbana inteligente y sus efectos en la estructuración de la ciudad y sus discursos. Algunos de los ensayos aqui reunidos formaron parte de la conferencia organizada por Diseño UC y el académico Martín Tironi en 2014 (¿Smart City para Ciudadanos Inteligentes? Re-pensando la relación entre espacio, tecnologías y sociedad) y otros son de autores nacionales e internacionales que aceptaron la invitación a re-pensar las implicaciones y ramificaciones del término Ciudad Inteligente.
‘La acción humana depende de todo tipo de apoyos, siempre es una acción apoyada […] No podemos actuar sin apoyos, y sin embargo tenemos que luchar por los apoyos que nos permitan actuar’ (Butler, 2012)[1].
Tecnologías inteligentes del cuidado y el problema del diseñador como figura solitaria de autoridad
El cuidado cotidiano y de larga duración sufre una transición
gigantesca desde hace pocas décadas, configurándose como uno de los asuntos
públicos de la más importante índole en la mayoría de países postindustriales.
No es infrecuente leer en numerosos cotidianos reflexiones ante el envejecimiento
poblacional creciente (que pone en riesgo tanto el cuidado informal como las
formas de mutualización reguladas por aparatos estatales). Pero también son
conocidas desde hace décadas las innumerables reflexiones y politizaciones desde
espacios feministas que han venido luchando contra la invisibilidad de esta
práctica de sustento vital cotidiano, su minusvaloración y los problemas
derivados de considerarse algo ‘propio de las mujeres’, no formalizado ni
remunerado apropiadamente.
Aunque quizá la cuestión más relevante en esta
última década tenga que ver con el gigantesco desarrollo de tecnologías
digitales ‘inteligentes’ que ofrecen nuevas soluciones para, supuestamente, hacer
‘más eficaces’ las prácticas y relaciones de cuidado. Sistemas tecnológicos,
dispositivos y aparatos (como sensores ambientales para tomar registros,
aplicar algoritmos y crear representaciones de patrones de usos de la casa o predicciones
de situaciones de dependencia; o geolocalizadores y dispositivos de alarma) en
los que se están invirtiendo ingentes cantidades de dinero público y privado para
su desarrollo. Y cuya promoción viene siempre acompañada de grandes loas en las
que estas ‘tecnologías inteligentes’ digitales aparecen como heraldos de un
cambio en las formas de cuidar: contienen, o eso se dice, promesas de economización
del cuidado, así como de alivio de parte de sus cargas para las personas
cuidadoras y para quienes reciben el cuidado. Unas tecnologías que, así se
suele plantear, permitirían responder con mayor eficacia a los retos del cuidado
ante los imperativos que plantean el cambio demográfico y las necesarias transformaciones
destinadas a acabar con la distribución sexual asimétrica del trabajo de cuidados.
Sin embargo, a raíz de mis trabajos a lo largo de
los últimos 8 años explorando etnográficamente esta tecnologización inteligente
del cuidado (analizando la implementación de servicios de telecuidado para
personas mayores, participando en el diseño colaborativo de productos de apoyo
o ayudas técnicas auto-construidas, o realizando estudios sobre los modos en
que son implementadas las infraestructuras urbanas de accesibilidad), quisiera
plantear algunos compromisos o cuestiones que suelen quedar por fuera de esta
promesa de un ‘futuro inteligente’ que parecen traer los dispositivos automatizados
de las grandes firmas o de las instituciones públicas promotoras de estos
grandes cambios tecnológicos.
En no pocas ocasiones las personas que acaban usando
o empleando estas tecnologías no han sido partícipes de su concepción más que
de un modo enormemente residual, colateral o robándoles las ideas al vuelo en
sesiones de supuesta ‘co-creación’. Cierto, ‘los usuarios’ no suelen tener un
modo específico de hablar de las mismas más allá de los términos que ponen en
su boca los ingenieros, desarrolladores y proveedores de tecnologías
inteligentes. Pero esto acaba haciendo que, lamentablemente, la mayor parte de
ocasiones en supuestos proyectos de diseño participativo o colaborativo, bien
por la rapidez con la que estos se realizan debido a presiones industriales o dado
el modo en que los diseñadores se posicionan en estos procesos, acaban dando
lugar a:
(a) dispositivos metodológicos en los que se
pide a los usuarios que colaboren con su trabajo no pagado más que con una
retribución simbólica proporcionado toda suerte de información sobre sí mismos
o testeando los aparatos, pero haciendo esto de un modo que comúnmente impide
que los usuarios puedan participar en el formateo de la información relevante o
en la conceptualización final de esos proyectos (a lo que podríamos denominar una
forma de ‘diseño colaboDativo’ o extractivo, donde la colaboración consiste en
dar información para que esto pueda ser usado en la creación de un dispositivo
de cuya comercialización esos ‘co-creadores’ no ven un duro); o
(b)
meros usos validadores o sancionadores de los aparatos ya creados (a los que
podríamos denominar ‘diseño consultivo’ o ‘diseño corroborativo’ donde la voz
del usuario es incorporada para decidir si le gustan unos productos cuyo diseño
fundamentalmente ha venido predefinido y su conceptualización ha tenido lugar
en otro sitio).
Aparatos, por tanto, que son pensados para que seamos
sus ‘meros usuarios’, siendo nuestras necesidades perpetuamente pensadas por
otros que, pareciera, saben más sobre nuestra vida y nuestras necesidades
cotidianas de sustento y soporte vital que nosotros mismos. En esto parece residir
su ‘inteligencia’ incorporada. Y, sin duda, traducen el esfuerzo de excepcionales
profesionales del diseño y del ámbito sociosanitario que necesitan navegar entre
enormes constricciones económicas, materiales y constructivas para poder
ofrecer una solución de calidad que pueda entrar en mercados de productos de
salud cada vez más altamente competitivos y exigentes. Pero, ¿son estas formas
de ‘colaboración’ las que realmente queremos o deseamos para el diseño de
elementos ‘inteligentes’ cruciales en nuestro sustento o en el de nuestros
seres queridos? Esta ‘inteligencia’ parece un asunto demasiado importante como
para que se la confiemos únicamente a los profesionales…
Asimismo, quizá pudiéramos aplicar un ápice de
malicia al considerar los enormes esfuerzos puestos en práctica por los
diseñadores profesionales y las industrias que les pagan para evitar que pensemos
en, por ejemplo, configurar muchos de esos dispositivos una vez llegan a
nuestro poder. Cierto que en ocasiones se trata de aparatos que están ‘cerrados’
porque toquetearlos pudiera alterar su eficacia o tener efectos perniciosos
para nuestra salud. Y, claro, tiene sentido que en ciertas situaciones, como en
el diseño de localizadores GPS de personas con demencia o Alzheimer, se busque
dificultar ese toqueteo insistente de los usuarios para que los aparatos
funcionen apropiadamente, pero en la mayor parte de los casos lo que opera como
principal herramienta para evitar que esto ocurra no son sólo criterios de
salud, sino los regímenes de propiedad que se ponen en juego: los saberes para
intervenir estos aparatos suelen estar protegidos por el secreto industrial y
perdemos la garantía de los productos si los abrimos. ¿Es este rol de autoridad
o de guardianes de la industria el que los diseñadores quieren cumplir ante la
sociedad? ¿Es esta la manera en que se quieren aproximar a dar soluciones,
aplicando toda su ‘inteligencia’ a los problemas fundamentales de nuestro
presente como nuestro sustento vital y cotidiano, o el modo en el que forjamos
e intervenimos nuestros lazos de interdependencia, o el modo en que queremos
vivir una vida en la que se respete nuestra diferencia? Quizá necesitemos
invocar un modo de hacer distinto, donde los saberes de los diseñadores sean
puestos a trabajar de otro modo, donde la inteligencia esté redistribuida.
Redistribuir la inteligencia ciudadana, tomar la infraestructura del cuidado
Desde 2012 colaboro estrechamente en el proyecto En torno a la silla[2],
un colectivo de diseño crítico de Barcelona, integrado de forma heterogénea por
arquitectos, manitas, activistas del movimiento de vida independiente, así como
por etnógrafos-documentalistas, todos nosotros vinculados al despliegue de
inteligencia ciudadana que ha supuesto el 15M en España. Un proyecto colectivo
centrado en el uso de medios digitales de comunicación, documentación y
fabricación para la auto-construcción y ‘diseño libre’ (por el modo en abierto
con el que se conceptualiza, fabrica y documenta el proceso con el objetivo de
que quien se sienta interpelado pueda participar) de productos de apoyo desde
la filosofía de la ‘diversidad funcional’[3].
En este proceso hemos venido: (1) fabricando colaborativamente elementos para
transformar los entornos de las sillas de ruedas, sus ocupantes y sus relaciones;
(2) realizando muy diferentes tareas de sensibilización y protesta de las
condiciones de inaccesibilidad, así como organizando eventos para visibilizar y
mostrar la innovación cacharrera del colectivo de personas con diversidad
funcional: y su ingenio para forjar aparatos, apaños y arreglos de bajo coste o
de diseño libre y abierto a partir de los que las personas con diversidad
funcional buscan hacerse la vida más a medida, con un estilo propio, diferente
del de la industria tecnológica con planteamientos ‘capacitistas’ (bien con su
estética hospitalaria y rehabilitadora para reconstruir y hacer presentables
cuerpos carentes o haciendo primar el ‘que no se note’); así como encuentros de
co-creación donde son estos usuarios con unas necesidades enormemente claras y
bien especificadas los que dirigen y coordinan el proceso.
Sin dejar de considerar los enormes problemas para
crear una economía sostenible en torno a estas prácticas, la auto-construcción
o el cacharreo de colectivos como En
torno a la silla bien pudiera estar ayudando a configurar una nueva forma
de inteligencia ciudadana que traiga consigo una nueva práctica del diseño de
tecnologías de cuidado centrada en la radicalización democrática de sus
prácticas, procesos y productos. Una cierta idea de autogestión o de gestión
participada (derivada del lema ‘nada sobre nosotros sin nosotros’ del
Movimiento de Vida Independiente y de lucha por los derechos de las personas
con diversidad funcional), que nos conmina a que cada cual en su diversidad recupere
su voz a la hora de gestionar cómo quiere articular materialmente su vida.
Politizando, por ende, nuestros formatos de diseño, haciéndolos más atentos a
esas alteridades, a esos cuerpos diversos que comúnmente quedan fuera de las reflexiones
y las consideraciones sobre cómo articular la vida en común.
En el fondo en situaciones análogas de cacharreo digital
pudiera observarse la articulación o la infraestructuración de nuevos formatos
y sujetos de la colaboración (una suerte de ‘cobayas auto-gestionadas’) que,
atravesados por esta versión radicalizada de la colaboración en el diseño, articulan
una nueva manera de pensar la ciudad inteligente: una en la que los ciudadanos
toman y abren la infraestructura material (digital o no) del cuidado para
repensar cómo quieren vivir[4].
Y esto convierte el diseño en un asunto del cualquiera, más o menos ignorante. Lo
que no quiere decir rechazar los saberes de los artesanos o los profesionales
del diseño, sino redistribuirlos y convertirlos en patrimonio de todos aquellos
con los que se diseña (convocando a otros cualquiera a que le ayuden a mejorar
lo que hace a través de la documentación y difusión de su proceso puesta a
disposición de los demás).
Esto es, frente al diseño de la ciudad inteligente
que nos priva de la capacidad de tener algo que decir sobre ella, una
redistribución de la inteligencia ciudadana que altera las prácticas de diseño
digital: un diseño hecho por ese cualquiera que comparte que necesita las cosas
de una manera determinada y no le vale exactamente de otra, que quiere poder
decidir sobre ellas y que a veces no tiene más remedio que cacharrear para
poder seguir adelante, siendo todo el proceso frágil y requiriendo de un tipo particular
de mimo para poder seguir haciendo (cuando las condiciones institucionales y
económicas que nos fragilizan no parecen hacer más que dilatarse y extenderse,
requiriendo de nosotros que pensemos en otros formatos comunitarios de mercados
y relaciones económicas); un diseño que se documenta y comparte para que otros
puedan crear sus soluciones para que ese cualquiera pueda intervenir en tener
una vida personal y colectiva más digna y vivible. Un diseño para darse acceso
a la vida pública o, mejor dicho, para auto-otorgarse el derecho a diseñar la
propia vida con otros. Un cacharreo colectivo para crear dispositivos de cuidado
en común…
[3] Una concepción desarrollada por activistas del Foro de Vida Independiente y Divertad español
que sitúa en el centro la diversidad funcional constitutiva del ser humano en
lugar del eje de dis/capacidad, planteando la discriminación histórica que han
sufrido algunas personas en razón de su diversidad funcional como un atentado a
la diversidad humana.
[4] Para un relato más detallado de esto véase Sánchez Criado, T., et al. (2015)
Care in the (critical) making. Open prototyping, or the radicalisation of
independent-living politics. ALTER,
European Journal of Disability Researchhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.alter.2015.07.002
Antropocefa: A kit for experimental collaborations in ethnographic practice
Through an ironic reflection put forward in a public performance, this paper seeks to unfold an argument around what we call “experimental collaborations”: an exploration with the aim to expand the call to experimentation with writing, opened up in anthropology in the 1990s, to a new locus: namely, fieldwork. We believe that such a displacement resonates with the transformations operated in the art world by participatory practices and the proposal of “relational aesthetics”. This article, hence, describes a “kit” for the experimental and collaborative renovation of ethnographic methods called “Antropocefa”. This kit allows us, then, to attempt a translation of such a relational sensibility into the production of collaborative devices in ethnography. This reflection emerged out of our ethnographic relation with artistic environments, whose practice around the production of “microtopias” has given us the chance to rethink the relations between the worlds of art and anthropology.
Antropocefa: un kit para las colaboraciones experimentales en la práctica etnográfica
A través de la reflexión irónica propuesta en una performance pública, el artículo despliega un argumento sobre lo que denominamos “colaboraciones experimentales”: una exploración que busca expandir el impulso experimental abierto en la antropología en los 1990s en el espacio de escritura hacia un nuevo locus, el trabajo de campo. Creemos que ese desplazamiento resuena con transformaciones introducidas en el mundo del arte por las prácticas participativas y la propuesta elaborada desde la estética relacional. El artículo describe un kit para la renovación experimental y colaborativa de los métodos etnográficos: el Antropocefa. A través de él proponemos trasladar esa sensibilidad relacional a la producción de dispositivos colaborativos en la etnografía. Nuestra reflexión nace de nuestra relación etnográfica con entornos artísticos, cuya práctica de producción generadora de “microtopías” nos ha ofrecido la posibilidad de repensar la manera de entender la relación entre el mundo del arte y la antropología.
Please consider submitting a paper for the 4S-EASST 2016 conference (deadline February 21st) taking place from August 31st to September 3rd in Barcelona to our open track!
We’d be very grateful if you could also forward it to potentially interested colleagues.
Wild research: Radical openings in technoscientific practice?
A collaborative spectre is haunting science and technology. In the past decades we have witnessed an explosion of radical openings of research practices where increasingly technified citizens and engaged professionals collaborate in the most diverse forms of knowledge production in both online and offline platforms of all kinds. In these efforts they generate and put into circulation documentation on the most diverse range of issues, attempting to materially intervene their everyday worlds with different political aims. Practices that, for lack of a better term, might be described as ‘wild research’ not only signal collaborative redistributions of the who, how, when and where of knowledge production, circulation and validation, but also more experiential and sociologically-related expansions of the knowledge registers and material interventions there emerging: a whole constellation of practices forging different versions of ‘science and technology by other means’. Paying attention to these transformations this track would like to welcome ethnographic and historical works analyzing in depth open, collaborative and experimental ‘wild research’ projects helping to expand what STS up to date has considered more collaborative or more democratic forms of technoscientific production: participatory engagements of lay people into expert-driven processes such as in citizen science or articulations of counter-expertise and evidence-based activism to engage in conversations with experts. We are particularly interested in analyzing not only the different forms of knowledge and the political, but also the forms of STS otherwise that these radical collaborative openings in technoscientific practice might be bringing to the fore.
Convenors: Tomas S. Criado (MCTS, TU München) & Adolfo Estalella (Spanish National Research Council – CSIC)
For more information on how to propose a paper, please check the conference’s call for papers
To submit a paper to this open track, please click here
In this paper we reflect empirically on some collective attempts at intervening the ways in which care for and by disabled people is being devised and carried out in Spain in austerity times. We highlight the novelties and challenges of the way in which these projects seek to tackle the current crisis of care through different forms of self-fabrication of ‘open’ and ‘low cost’ technical aids. We analyse them as forms of ‘critical making’ expanding the repertoire of independent-living and disabled people’s rights politics to the experimentation with technological production. Through the deployment of an empirical example of the prototyping process by the Barcelona-based activist design collective En torno a la silla we show how open prototyping constitutes a major challenge for the radicalisation of the independent-living movement’s precepts of control and choice, displaying the matter of care arrangements and making available its transformation.
This research is part of an ongoing and very interesting discussion on careful design practices with our En torno a la silla mates (Alida Díaz, Antonio Centeno, Marga Alonso, Núria Gómez, Rai Vilatovà & Xavi Duacastilla) as well as the very nice people we have learnt to think with in the construction of its interactive documentary. To name but a few: Alma Orozco, Joaquim Fonoll, Mario Toboso, Carlos ‘Txarlie’ Tomás, Montse García and the Functional Diversity Commission at Acampada Sol. These ideas have also been extremely well taken care of and re-elaborated in the course of discussions and passionate politico-ethnographical reflections on design and care with Adolfo Estalella, Asun Pie, Blanca Callén, Carla Boserman, Daniel López, Jara Rocha, Marcos Cereceda, Manuel Tironi & Miriam Arenas.
Alida Díaz, Arianna Mencaroni, Rai Vilatovà, & Tomás Sánchez Criado, con la colaboración del resto de En torno a la silla, participamos del 15 al 31 de octubre 2015 en la exposición REHOGAR 7 · Diseño Abierto y Reutilizaciónorganizada por MAKEA en el Espai Txema BioBuil(L)t de Barcelona.
Esta edición de REHOGAR presta especial atención a las “Habilidades y Compromisos” de las personas, profesionales, comunidades y redes que activan procesos de transformación de su entorno, y posibilitan su reproducibilidad y adaptabilidad a otros contextos. Transformaciones que se hacen posible mediante técnicas de Reutilización y metodologías de Diseño Abierto, un diseño que crece y evoluciona porque puede ser mejorado por y con otras.
REHOGAR explora un amplio abanico de transformaciones a través de una selección de más de 30 propuestas con un ADN abierto y compartible, dando cuenta de los procesos, las prácticas y las herramientas que facilitan la transformación social de la vida cotidiana […]
Más allá de los posibles estilos de vida o target de consumo que puedan generar esta selección de propuestas queremos ahondar en esas otras formas de vida, que piensan haciendo y buscan una transformación del actual sistema productivo, los hábitos de consumo y por ende de la sociedad, de una manera lúdica y constructiva.
En torno a la silla es un colectivo de diseño y autoconstrucción de objetos y situaciones desde la diversidad funcional.
En todo lo que hacemos re(h)usamos; es decir, volvemos a usar o hacer uso de las cosas hasta convertir esto en un hábito, en un uso (reusar) y, a la vez, haciéndolo, rechazamos ciertas cosas y ciertas costumbres que no aceptamos, que no consentimos (rehusar).
Así, reusamos habilidades y saberes, rehusando capitalizar conocimientos y jerarquizar experticias…
reusamos materiales y herramientas, rehusando distribuirnos en diseñadores, usuarios o manitas.
reusamos afectos y vínculos, rehusando la rehabilitación de nuestros cuerpos en soledad.
reusamos dibujos, necesidades, deseos y argumentos, rehusando pensar desde el catálogo y la normalidad impotente e inalterable.
reusamos casas, calles, bares, luchas, memorias, rehusando someternos a mercados, estándares, obsolescencias, consumismos banales, relaciones de explotación y leyes de mercado.
Para la ocasión se seleccionaron algunos objetos y sus relatos, como los vídeos –16:9 (HD)– de la Primavera Cacharrera:
REHOGAR 7 tenía algunos eventos asociados, como la presentación COMUNIDADES RESILIENTES (que tuvo lugar el 29 Oct. 2015, 18.00 – 19.15h) donde nos invitaron a participar junto con: · Re-cooperar / Jaime Galán · Fem Plaça / Lucia Vecchi · Open Source Public Space Devices / Paco González, radarq.net
This essay reviews diverse strands of empirical and theoretical work in different urban studies areas (urban planning, urban ethnography, urban geography, and STS) reflecting on the manifold ways in which the smart city project is being “opened up” for scrutiny through experimental projects developing digitally-mediated sensing practices of either a specific or broad kind: i.e., producing both devices formally devised for sensing specific parameters, and sensing devices –emerging from less specific digital technology arrangements– used to share experiences, show solutions or politicize different urban issues. In doing this, we seek to understand, from an STS standpoint, the different ways in which a broad range of works are analysing the development, intervention, maintenance, and opposition of these ideas. In the first section we focus on understanding the definitions, features and clashes that several of these corporate projects (mostly municipal in nature) have come across, deploying smart devices, such as sensors to produce an “algorithmic city”. In the second section we expand the meanings of “smartness,” focusing on grassroots appropriations of broader digital arrangements and politicizations of open source infrastructures to display other forms of urban sensitivities, contributing to the cosmopoliticization of the “smart city” project.
“En torno a la silla“, the collaborative design collective seeking to self-fabricate and self-manage the production of DIY and P2P technical aids for independent living in which I collaborate ethnographically since 2012, was featured in La2’s (Spanish National TV network) “La aventura del saber“, broadcasted originally on April 13th 2015. Now with English subtitles!
We speak of the collective “En torno a la silla”, composed by a heterogeneous group of people seeking to collaboratively fabricate taylor-made prototypes with functionally diverse people in order to experiment with personalized solutions seeking to meet the needs of each wheelchair user. All this to make a more accessible city. The live footage used in the broadcasting was shot by Arianna Mencaroni for the webdocumentary “Off catalogue”
