Here is my scribble on a wall in the physical world...
Designs for the Pluriverse
by Arturo Escobar
In this reflection on the essay "Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation" (Manzini 2015), Arturo discusses how design plays a role in the construction of new communication and vision networks that span multiple distinct locales of belief or operation. He refers to this barrier-breaking network as the 'Pluriverse'.
"The amalgamation of face-to-face and virtual interactions creates propitious conditions for the reexamination of people’s collective life projects. 'Collaborative life projects' have become salient in modern life in recent times, in part as a corrective to the excessively individualistic lifestyles promoted by the modern ontology and as a response to the disabling effect of expert-based systems in health, education, transportation, and so forth."
"collaborative organizations should be considered as bottom-up initiatives not because everything happens at grassroots level, but because the precondition for their existence is the active involvement of the people concerned"
"An interesting aspect of the framework is the idea that diffuse design capabilities can also be enhanced through these tools and practices, and that this might be an important step in making codesign effective. Enabling solutions will arise in accordance with the strength of codesign tools and methodologies. “Enabling solutions are product-service systems providing cognitive, technical, and organizational instruments that increase people’s capacities to achieve a result they value” (167–168). They stem from a seemingly straightforward question: how can we achieve the life we want to live? Here again we find the strong relevance of the notion of life projects and the importance of visioning."
"Far from being a neutral and allegedly objective position, it is an ethical and political position that takes a stand on the side of a particular understanding of life and a particular style of world making that privileges localization, self-organization, and a collaborative social praxis. In advocating for a new civilization, it directs our attention away from the “big dinosaurs of the twentieth century”..."
Some theoretical questions:
How can 'collaborative life projects' succeed when they directly oppose the status quo?
How do people respond when 'collaborative life projects' oppose the status quo?
Are 'collaborative life projects' capable of uprooting existing power structures?
What happens when 'collaborative life projects' come against resistance from the status quo?
Extinction Rebellion, April 2019
Covid-19 and the Continuity of the Familiar
Raza Saeed
In this article, Raza asserts that the only 'novelty' caused by the Covid-19 pandemic is our own awareness of long-existing capitalist contradictions and societal imbalances.
Raza argues that, in the context of an impending (and truly 'novel') climate crisis, the default responses of our capitalist society are not up to the task of protecting the status quo or fuelling the endless growth of the machine.
Raza suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic has simply exacerbated existing power structures, which (unsurprisingly) favours the white and middle-class privileged. This article makes no attempt to dethrone these powers, but does seek to remind those in power that the foundation of their power is built on the general health, wellbeing and productivity of their workforce.
"The outbreak of Covid-19 is billed as a ‘once in a century event’. It has appeared as the prophesied rupture in our social, economic and political fabric of the world, with the recognition that what follows may not resemble what humanity has become used to. It is posed as a discontinuity in the normality of everyday life; a panic-inducing pandemic that threatens our collective existence across political borders and socio-economic and geographical locations. But the genetic novelty of the virus is one thing; there is nothing novel in how we have individually, collectively, politically or culturally responded to this challenge."
"...there is not much to suggest that humanity is carving new tools to deal with this novel challenge.
"We have to consider Covid-19 a test case for the climate crisis that is on the horizon, and it pales in comparison to the latter. Our response to Covid-19 can only be novel if we understand that our sovereign borders, nationalistic boundaries, economic values, surveillance technologies and exclusionary policies will not be enough to shield us."
"And the rich and the powerful should realise that if there is no workforce to enrich them, and no food growers to grow their crops, and no labour to do their chores, the islands of comfort and isolation will get very small very quickly."
Our collaboration whiteboard
Some experiments we did...
I attended a Zoom Techno party at 1:30am...
Meeeeee
Some visuals
Dancing dude
Some people were making crazy 'visuals'
This is the DJ
An illustrator
There was a woman doing strange things in the street...
So we ran outside, sung and danced alongside her!
She was entertaining her friends, who were 2 months indoors... this is their card!
...it turns out that they are also members of the firebrigade of the apocalypse!
Later, Carla and I returned to play an acting game with them
The next day, we prepared a song for them...
...but they were busy. So we performed it to the traffic instead!
We drew 1.5m radius circles in chalk to visualise the 'invisible' rule that is enforced upon us
Some people avoided our circles... other people walked right through them
An idea that I did not execute: If I draw a visual boundary in a public place and sit with my eyes closed, will people respect the boundary?
I experimented with filming my own 360-degree video and viewing it in VR...
This would be a very immersive way to share an experience with strangers!
I also used an app called vTime XR to meet with strangers in a 'physical' world!
I had an idea for a way to distribute our collaborative publication...
In the end we decided to create a document for the next team! Here's my sheet: