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.
In particular, in my presentation–titled Technologies of friendship? Open design objects and their figurations of relatedness–I will be speaking about some of the particular creative processes of En torno a la silla (or ETS, the Barcelona-based critical disability and open design collective I have been part of since 2012), gadgets and indoor/outdoor spatial interventions whose conception and execution have entailed a series of experiments whereby the relation between the people involved was granted particular architectural and design affordances. Indeed, and thanks to particular relations they have afforded, I will refer to them using the particular name the very collective has employed: i.e. technologies of friendship. Thinking from there I will search to unfold how En torno a la silla’s open design objects should not only be described as inscribing and supporting already existing relations but also affording a plexus of potential figurations of forms of relatedness, whereby the process of making is also a process of relating. Or, as I would call it, an exploration into a ‘how-to’ friendship: a particular mode of relating premised on the very concern of discussing and showing the how-to of relations.
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This Winter school, with the title Building Lives, invites for a reflection on the place buildings occupy in peoples’ biographies by studying the transformations of built forms and its correlation with individual subjectivities and societal changes at large. Specifically, the objective of the event is to explore the possibilities to correlate personal maturing and the life states of buildings and provide new tools, concepts and frameworks for understanding the plural life stages of the built environment.
A key proposition behind this Winter School is that comparisons can be drawn between the biographies of persons and the biographies of buildings, yet perhaps the metaphor of biography highlights a too linear process of change, instead of the eventful discontinuation and change of states they might go through.
The programme is set up to reconsider the birth, death, and reconstitution of the built environment by paying attention to the different relations that emerge between buildings and people. The event will consist of lectures, workshops and artists talks, including a keynote and four excursions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be:
What are the recognised stages of a building’s life?
Can we use human metaphors to study the built environment?
In which ways do buildings store personal memories and social significance?
What discrete activities are engendered to maintain buildings alive?
When or what is the ultimate no-return point that marks the death of buildings and their functional discontinuation?
Organiser: Francisco Martínez
Invited scholars: Tomás Errázuriz (Andrés Bello, Chile); Andres Kurg (EKA); Patrick Laviolette (Tallinn Univ.), Michał Murawski (Queen Mary Univ. of London); Tomás Sánchez Criado (Munich Center for Technology in Society)
Artists, designers & architects: Andra Aaloe; Flo Kasearu; Paul Kuimet; Laura Kuusk; Karli Luik; Triin Ojari; Margit Säde; Ingel Vaikla and Tüüne-Kristin Vaikla.
Programme
15th, Monday(Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Introduction and lecture by F. Martínez, Architectural Taxidermy
11:45 Seminar by P. Kuimet
14:00 Seminar by L. Kuusk
15:00 Lecture by T. Errázuriz, When new is not better: the making of home through holding on to objects
16:00 Seminar by T.K. Vaikla, How long is the life of a building? Screening the film ‘The House Guard’ (I. Vaikla, 2014),
17:00 Excursion to the F. Kasearu Museum.
16th, Tuesday (Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Students’ Seminar.
14:00 Excursion to the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.
16:00 Excursion: Sense of Domesticity by A. Aaloe & M. Säde.
17th, Wednesday Independent research by the students, preparing their own work on the biographical correlation between people and buildings / the built space.
18th, Thursday (Suur Kloostri 11, Room 103, Art History Dept.)
10:00 Keynote Lecture by M. Murawski, People make buildings (and buildings make people), but not under conditions of their own choosing. Chair, A. Kurg.
12:00 Round table about the life stages of buildings with T. K. Vaikla, K. Luik, T. Ojari, A. Kurg, and M. Murawski.
14:00 Independent research by the students
19th, Friday(Suur Kloostri 11, Interior Design Dept.)
10:30 Lecture by T. Sánchez Criado, Technologies of friendship? Open design objects and their figurations of relatedness.
A cardboard set for an egalitarian reading group methodology…
Originally developed for a reading group in Barcelona (called TEO – Taller de Experimentación Objetual / Object Experimentation Workshop) on infrastructures and STS.
The cardboard design is licensed CC BY NC SA 2014Carla Boserman.
Method developed by TEO (Carla Boserman, Blanca Callén, Marcos Cereceda, Gonzalo Correa, Aída de Prada, Daniel López, Guillem Palà, Jara Rocha, Natalia Rodríguez di Tomaso & Tomás Sánchez Criado).
English adaptation CC BY NC SA 2017 by Tomás Sánchez Criado & Anna Gonchar.
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SEMINARIO A LA CARTA (Versión en castellano)
Juego de cartas para seminarios de lecturas con una metodología igualitaria…
Este método “a la carta” fue diseñado por/para un grupo de discusión sobre infraestructuras y STS (titulado TEO – Taller de Experimentación Objetual), que tuvo lugar en Barcelona.
El diseño del juego de cartas tiene una licencia CC BY NC SA 2014Carla Boserman.
El método fue desarrollado por TEO (Carla Boserman, Blanca Callén, Marcos Cereceda, Gonzalo Correa, Aída de Prada, Daniel López, Guillem Palà, Jara Rocha, Natalia Rodríguez di Tomaso & Tomás Sánchez Criado).
Next November 28th I will be in Brno to take part in the Antropologie Umělcům, a series of course of lectures, discussions and screenings organized by Kristína Jamrichová on current approaches and various forms of collaboration between Social Sciences and Contemporary Art not only within the so-called Visual Studies but including also other fields and topics such as experiment, engagement, applicability or design. The courses will take place from 16th to 30th November 2017 in Aula FAVU VUT in Brno, Czech Republic.
Here you can access the information of mine’s:
A ‘how-to’ anthropology? The ‘ethnographic recursions’ of tutorial and documentation-driven projects
In the last years, I have engaged as ethnographer in extensive tutorial and open documentation projects of different activist ‘free culture’ and ‘DIY’ urban groups in Spain (mainly, the activist design collective of Barcelona “En torno a la silla” and other associated endeavours). In my ethnographic work with them I have had to partake of art-related and design-inspired multimodal playful experimentations addressing styles, genres, and formats of documenting design processes and events. Thus, what might have only been a descriptive stance of a particular design culture became an inventive process, full of ‘re-descriptive’ moments, holding in suspension the very aims and goals, as well as the modes of authorship, the devices and the narrative styles brought to bear to ethnographic endeavours as practices ‘documenting’ the life of others. Such joint modes of relating–that is, of producing encounters or forms of togetherness as well as accounts–had a lasting impact on my very ethnographic practice, generating many moments of ‘unlearning.’ Here I wish to address the ‘ethnographic recursions’ they made me enter. Indeed, my involvement in such projects premised on the idea of the ‘how-to’ as a grounding trope has somehow urged me, in collaboration with other colleagues (namely, the ones we are gathering around the EASA’s Colleex network), to reinvent our fieldwork devices drawing inspiration from the how-to ontology of our epistemic partners. In showing somewhat playful attempts at translating that ‘how-to’ ontology into academic debates for the discipline I would like to delineate here the productivity of addressing forms of methodological rather than conceptual recursion as a way into other modes of learning and doing anthropology.
Mañana tendré el inmenso placer de poder estar en Alicante (algo que me apetecía especialmente desde hace mucho tiempo), gracias a la intermediación de Ester Gisbert y Miguel Mesa del Castillo, en el Máster en Arquitectura de la Universitat d’Alacant (Sala 01, Politécnica IV).
Mi intervención y los talleres en que estaremos trabajando, girarán en torno a los “efectos documentales“. En los últimos años–y sobre todo a partir tanto de mi participación como etnógrafo/documentador en el colectivo En torno a la silla, como de la experiencia pedagógica en una facultad de arquitectura–me ha venido interesando enormemente la importancia de una indagación sobre las “interfaces documentales”. A pesar de que en particular me he centrado en los ámbitos de diseño abierto y el activismo de la diversidad funcional, cada vez más me está interesando particularmente experimentar y reflexionar sobre cómo los diferentes tipos de trazos–en diferentes lenguajes, géneros o estilos, producidos para el recuerdo o la puntualización de la experiencia de momentos de gran intensidad colaborativa, o donde se está más preocupado por hacer más que por el pensar sobre lo que se hace–producen efectos particulares sobre quién, cómo y qué se diseña. Y, por ello, quisiera que prestáramos particular atención a diferentes dispositivos, plataformas, sistemas de registro, o métodos para la generación de encuentros donde producir acercamientos y situaciones para compartir las experiencias; esto es, interfaces donde la documentación–entendida más bien como una experimentación con diferentes medios, formatos, sensibilidades y momentos que al modo enciclopédico o positivista–se nos aparece como un recurso esencial para el descubrimiento y articulación de la experiencia compartida en la relación entre quienes construyen y los diferentes materiales con los que lo hacen; esto es, para el trazado de ciertas transformaciones o efectos, pero también para permitir, recursivamente, generar otras relaciones en y a través de los procesos de diseño.
Soy consciente de que muy probablemente la principal impugnación o crítica de inicio a lo que voy a plantear aquí es que “no documentar así” también tiene sus efectos sobre el diseño, y me encantaría discutirlos; aunque me parece que la documentación, con todas sus dificultades y efectos complejos (porque aquí hablaré de la documentación que se enfoca en el proceso, no en ese proceso de documentarse para diseñar o en la producción de una divulgación a posteriori para hacer circular o vender un diseño), que a veces bloquean o paralizan un proceso de diseño, nos acerca a una reflexion mucho más mundana sobre las prácticas y la política del diseñar. Pero siendo una de sus principales virtude que abre registros de lo político que van más allá del “hacer visible” y que, al menos en los casos que he venido estudiando, plantean redistribuciones de la experticia, circulaciones de saberes, aperturas de relaciones e incorporaciones constantes de elementos o reacciones en los propios procesos y materializaciones (algo que no puedo llamar de otra forma que “auto-experimentación”).
IMAGE CREDITS: Navajo sand-painting, negative made from postcard CC BY Wellcome Trust
Last week we published a series of #Colleex blog posts at Allegra Lab.
‘Ethnographic experimentation‘ is the topic we explore in the six posts of this thematic thread whose publication evolved from the first workshop held by the new EASA network #Colleex (‘Ethnographic Experimentation. Fieldwork Devices and Companions’, 13th–15th July 2017, Jardim Botânico Tropical, Lisbon’).
We would like to accompany the debate we sought to open up in Lisbon with this publication in Allegra’s digital platform, an association that has supported our venture since its very beginnings.
Hope you enjoy them, and if so please forward them to anyone potentially interested!
Ethnographic experimentation refers to an ethnographic modality where anthropologists venture into the collaborative production of venues for knowledge creation that turn the field into a site for the construction of joint anthropological problematizations.
Collaboration is an epistemic figure resulting from the careful craft of articulating inventive shared modes of doing together with our companions in the field. The field turns into a site for the construction of joint problematizations.
Researching with social movements (environmental activism, makerspaces) brings ethnography’s nuanced, embodied and collective sense-making to the fore. I also argue that anthropological research within academia is important in its own right.
Stories are a venue for experimentation and research, they tell about, define, create, and interact with social realities. Therefore they are important to include in analysis, and in order to do so the researcher must be open-minded and confront these stories with a toolkit of methodologies.
A re-description of my two-fold engagement as ethnographer-cum-documenter in the activist design collective En torno a la silla. Highlighting the importance of note-taking as a ‘fieldwork device’ for the problematizing and relating in the field.
Using participation in a collective online experiment with Twitter as a springboard, I interrogate the tweet as a fieldnote. How do the temporalities of tweeting intersect with disciplinary understandings and imaginings of “field time”, and how might we address fraught question of audiences, transparency and visibility brought about by tweeting from the field?
The Chilean journal DISEÑA has just published its latest bilingual issue (Spanish & English), a detailed reflection on the relations between Politics & Design (DISEÑA #11), carefully edited by Martín Tironi.
I collaborate with a reflection (pp. 148-159) on the ‘politics’ of design–in a Rancièrian sense–undertaken by ‘functional diversity’ activism after the 15-M uprisings, and my participation in the En torno a la silla collective.
¿La diversidad funcional como una política del diseño?
Este artículo es una indagación sobre el activismo de la “diversidad funcional” tras la ocupación de las plazas del 15-M español, y, más concretamente, acerca de cómo a partir de ella la diversidad funcional se convierte en un repertorio que politiza el diseño (particularmente el mercado de ayudas técnicas y entornos accesibles desarrollados de acuerdo con el modelo social de la discapacidad). Para apuntalar una lectura de la política del diseño —en el sentido de la filosofía política de Jacques Rancière— que ahí aparece, tomaré como caso un pequeño proyecto colaborativo desarrollado por el colectivo de diseño abierto radicado en Barcelona En torno a la silla.
15-M _ Diversidad funcional _ En torno a la silla _ política del diseño _ Rancière
Functional diversity as a politics of design?
This article is an inquiry into the activism around ‘functional diversity’ after the public square occupations of the Spanish 15-M movement; and, more specifically, how, in them, ‘functional diversity’ developed into a repertoire for the politicisation of design (notably, the market of technical aids and accessible environments created according to the social model of disability). To underpin the particular reading of the politics of design —in the sense developed by political philosopher Jacques Rancière— that appears there, I will describe a small collaborative project put together by the Barcelona-based open design collective En torno a la silla.
15M _ En torno a la silla _ Functional diversity _ Politics of design _ Rancière
Realizado con materiales del proyecto de documentación en video Vidas fuera de catálogo* (2013-2015) por Arianna Mencaroni, con la colaboración del resto de En torno a la silla (T. Sánchez Criado, A. Díaz, R. Vilatovà, N. Gómez, X. Duacastilla, M. Alonso, N. Gómez, P. Rovira & A. Centeno)
* Proyecto “VIDAS FUERA DE CATÁLOGO. UN RECORRIDO A LO LARGO DE UN PROYECTO AUDIOVISUAL INACABADO | VIDAS FUERA DE CATÁLOGO. A JOURNEY THROUGH AN UNFINISHED AUDIOVISUAL PROJECT”, presentado en BIDEOTIK 2017 (Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao)
‘Re(u)sar desde la diversidad funcional‘, trabajo en equipo de En torno a la silla para la exposición organizada por MAKEA en el Espai Txema BioBuil(L)t de Barcelona.
* Video-documentación mostrada en el programa La Aventura del Saber (La2, 13 Abril 2015, 30′)
“Fieldwork is not what it used to be” (Faubion and Marcus, 2009). The investigation of previously ignored social domains and the incorporation of new sensibilities beyond its typically verbal or visual conventions, have expanded ethnography: Anthropologists now engage in novel forms of relationship and intervention, and enter into heterodox exchanges with other disciplines like arts and design. The invocation of experimentation in fieldwork is part of this widened exploration of new ethnographic modalities that reshape the norm and form of fieldwork.
Recent invocations of experimentation in ethnographic projects are not merely a metaphorical gesture. Descriptive accounts of experimentation bring to life ethnographic imaginations that transform field informants into epistemic partners (Holmes and Marcus, 2005), remediate the form of ethnography in the company of others (Rabinow, 2011), or trade in the traditional comparative project of anthropology for a collaborative one (Riles, 2015). The experimental can thus be a distinctive articulation of the empirical work of anthropologists in the field.
The epistemic figure of experimentation is not new in anthropology (or other social sciences). On the contrary, the experimental nature of many ethnographic projects of the contemporary connects with and draws from the creative exploration of writing genres inaugurated in the 1980s but, while the experimental drive was then located in the space of representation, we are now witnessing a shift where fieldwork is a locus of experimentation.
To invoke ethnographic experimentation is not necessarily to signal a methodological rupture with conventional forms of ethnography. Rather, it is a distinctive form of narrating contemporary forms of fieldwork where ethnography is less a set of practicalities and procedures than a mode of anthropological problematization (Rabinow, 2011). Relying on the most genuine descriptive aspiration of anthropology, the invocation of ethnographic experimentation thus signals the exploration of conceptual languages for describing distinctive forms of engagement in the field.
Experimentation remains an elusive term however, sometimes loosely used, perhaps metaphorically or allegorically. At the workshop we would like to focus on specific, thoughtfully designed interventions through which ethnography in the field unfolds in experimental ways. We are interested in particular forms of relationship, material artefacts, digital infrastructures, fieldnotes genres, spatial venues, methods of meeting… Following John Law and Evelyn Ruppert (2013) we call them “fieldwork devices”: arrangements that assemble the world in specific social and material patterns for the production of knowledge. We thus invite scholars to share descriptive accounts that offer insights of how fieldwork devices turn ethnography into a venue for experimentation.
References
Faubion, J. D., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (2009). Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2005). Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (pp. 235—252). Oxford: Blackwell.
Law, J., & Ruppert, E. (2013). The Social Life of Methods: Devices. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), 229—240.
Rabinow, P. (2011). The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
Riles, A. (2015). From Comparison to Collaboration: Experiments with a New Scholarly and Political Form. Law and Contemporary Problems, 78(1-2), 147—183.
Organised by
#Colleex – Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation, an EASA network
Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), Universidade de Lisboa
EBANO Collective – Ethnography-Based Art Nomad Organisation, Lisbon
Supported by
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
Jardim Botânico Tropical, Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência (MUNHAC), Universidade de Lisboa
Professorship for Participatory Technology Design, MCTS, TU Munich
Organising committee
Eeva Berglund, independent scholar
Francesca De Luca, ICS, ULisboa
Adolfo Estalella, Spanish National Scientific Council
Anna Lisa Ramella, Locating Media, University of Siegen
Chiara Pussetti, ICS, ULisboa
Tomás Sánchez Criado, MCTS, TU Munich
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Live tweets of ‘Ethnographic Experimentation: Fieldwork Devices and Companions’, First Workshop of the #Colleex Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation, an @EASAinfo network | 13th–15th July 2017, Jardim Botânico Tropical, Lisbon
Tuesday July 11th 19:00 at Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (Spain), as part of the Festival BIdeOtik 2017
The presentation of the unfinished audiovisual project will tell the story of our several years’ exploration in En torno a la silla (Barcelona) with digital forms of documentation (namely, blog and audiovisual platforms).
En torno a la silla is a Spanish non-profit association operating from Barcelona. In En torno a la silla we co-create and fabricate collaboratively between people with diverse knowledges and modes of functioning with the aim of transforming and intervening urban environments, seeking to improve the conditions of accessibility, inclusiveness, and care in the urban world.
En torno a la silla is a collective that works at crossroads of open design and functional diversity. All our material explorations in recent years have sought to go beyond a world built for standard bodies, opening up design processes to the consideration and incorporation of the different experiences and needs of diverse bodies.
However, even though the material ‘tinkering’ with our environments through activities like building objects or generating co-creation events has constituted the essential focus of the collective, an important part of our activities has had to do with ‘tinkering’ with the use of different registration tools for the reflection, representation, and communication of our small objects and findings: tutorials and construction manuals, video-documentation of processes or interviews, poetic or political reflection texts, etc.
What role does this opening up of the design processes play when we think about documentation processes? Through the presentation of some our ‘tinkering with documentation’–including the conception and prototyping of diverse non-linear web-video projects–, we wish to delve into the central importance of representational processes, and discuss in what way our different successes and errors in tinkering with them might have contributed to a wider learning process, as well as different transformations of the collective.
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About BIdeOtik 2017: From January to December 2017 Azkuna Zentroa hosts BIdeOtik 2017, a video festival / series that highlights different ways of recording and representing all that surrounds us using other audio-visual narratives. The object of this series is to showcase video-creation works and projects generated in a local, national and international context by people from the fields of art, creation and culture who use audio-visual language in a more personal, intimate and familiar way.
