Community Engagement

“Allein machen sie dich ein” (literal translation: “(when you’re) alone they pickle you”) -Ton Steine Scherben on their album Keine Macht für Niemand

general reflections

This whole week was interesting. I enjoyed role-playing gentrification before visiting the places our exercise was about. But most of all, I enjoyed the sessions with Holon. Despite missing two due to the birth of my niece, they will continue to influence me for quite a while. They articulated more precisely an approach which is very similar to fragments of one that have been floating in my mind for a long time, slowly aggregating to something more concrete (which also pushed me to study the MDEF).

Designing from within creative communities

Who is my community?

The central theme of my project - for the time being - remains playful production, the search for an alternative to the self-flagellating, extractive, hierarchical and wasteful work ethic of status quo production. As such, potential ‘co-conspirators’ could be any number of people. So, the answer to “who is my community”, for now, can be approximated by the following:

Long-term, more or less everyone who is interested in making/growing/producing things, food, energy, etc themselves (together with others). Those who wish to reduce their dependence on legacy systems & organisations. Mid-term: People who have time to engage in such pursuits, or are especially motivated to do so. That may include:

• people who can’t find appropriate work (incl. recovering addicts, ex-prisoners, …)
• people not allowed to work (incl. refugees)
• perhaps, in some cases, ‘stay at home’ parents, people caring for family
• people who work part-time / ‘’‘underemployed’‘’
• students and people ‘in training’
• people who don’t want to work (and have found some way to do so, through privilege, luck, or cunning)
• people with well-paid jobs on sabbatical/break/mid-life crisis
• people with ‘normal’ full time jobs that are especially motivated to diy/o or have no hobbies/friends

In practice, the actual creative communities may, at this stage, be extremely ephemeral. The intervention(s) we’re planning to do (and have partly already done) will likely include more or less random people off the street of my neighbourhood, and people from IAAC/MDEF. The self-selection process, mediated by our communication choices (such as language, medium, location, etc), will have to be examined as part of a post-mortem of the intervention(s) (“prodparties”). On a more ‘zoomed-out’ the level of analysis, some emerget creative community will perhaps become visible.

Actant map

To better understand my/our problem space, we were asked to map (a quintessentially mdef activity). This is what I came up with: (actants are anything that has some sort of agency, a term which was given a very broad meaning in this context..)

(right click, open in new tab to be able to zoom)

Context

The context for my planned interventions is the wage labour system - in particular as it is experienced by people at its margins (whether ‘materially’ or emotionally) - in its concrete local expression right here in Barcelona. I have attempted to sketch some of the dynamics in the map above. A further analysis of the particularities in the neighbourhoods and in the city itself would likely be beneficial.

Current situation

People need to work, and depend on the paid work of others. The very ‘lucky’ ones only the latter, some extremely ‘unlucky’ ones only the former. I should note that this is a perspective that focuses on mainstream societies, as this may not be the case for some indigineous communities or other groups that have somehow evaded the violent spread of the dominant status quo.

However, alternative ways of producing and collaborating are emerging (and have always co-existed with our current mainstream). This includes DIY/O cultures and communities, makerspaces, probably FabLabs, community gardens, some cooperatives, some DAOs, some open source projects and communities, etc. These could potentially - and to some extent do - exist in symbiosis with community land trusts, the solidarity economy, mutual aid networks, neighbourhood communities, less mediated markets, and some small businesses,

Despite this, many if not most people depend on large scale industry coordinated hierarchically, convuluted and captured supply chains, etc for fulfilling their needs and desires. For some areas, this may be - currently - the only option (eg. for highly specialised medical equipment). Even that is not certain. What is clear, however, is that for many products (to focus on this for now) that people require to fulfill their needs and desires there are alternative (do-it-yourself / do-it-ourselves / distributed design) ways of producing them and yet these are not used by a large proportion of the population, at least in e.g. Europe.

Engagement & limits

[I don`t currently know what this section is about.]

Theory of change

Social change emerges through the complex interaction of (usually at least initially) small-scale collective efforts that spread through societies and together act to build alternatives to the status quo, at times clashing with it in dramatic was as the status quo convulses.

“To change everything, start anywhere.” Individuals who come together in small communities, in a networked way, ideally conscious of the emergent implications of their collective action if it happes to spread, are able to enact change.

Concretely, gradually and collectively reducing our dependence on extractive, exploitative and hierarchical systems of production by engaging in DIY/O practices, distributed design, community-owned automation, gardening, etc may lead to an emergent broader societal change.

In order to build a new mainstream, such practices must not only be understood as ultimately collectively rational but also - perhaps more importantly - become desirable (desired). For that to happen they must seem attractive, easy, cooler, fun, cheaper, more ethical, etc (which they often are..).

Design challenges and opportunities

Challenges:

• time: people don’t have time to do things themselves, or so they think
• cultural habits and loss of skills through generations of the relatively recent past
• some desires shaped by mass media and marketing
• the perception that diy/o approaches are cumbersome
• the reality that some such methods currently are precisely that
• lack of community infrastructure
• lack of protocols / cultural habits / for diy/o production
• direct and indirect subsidies for non-diy/o production
• lack of salience of diy/o knowledge
• lack of viable designs for rapid, needs-based diy/o production
• lock-in effects as sketched in the section on context
• …

Opportunities:

• to some extent, the internet and its effect on the spread of information, possibilities for ephemeral community-building
• existing efforts as detaied in the section on context
• increasing awareness of the urgency of the climate crisis and the utility of decentalised/distributed/ diy/o systems to mitigate it, and to build resilience
• increased frequency of crisis situations / extreme weather events and related social crises paired with the utility of diy/o approaches in responding such events, and the well-documented tendency of human beings to engage in mutual aid in such extreme circumstances
• the widespread acceptance of technology disrupting current ways of doing things, which can potentially be leveraged for some diy/o efforts by engaging in strategic discourse on futures
• also relatively widespread backlash against power-grabbing and rent-seeking centralisation of power in the digital realm, which may lead some people to accept initial costs of alternative ways of producing
• the appreciation for small-scale production, or at least its aesthetics embedded in ‘hipster’ culture (however obnoxious it may be)
• increased inability of centralised actors to control the flow of information, the enforcement of intellectual property, ..
• decreasing identification of many people with their work (partly due to precarisation, ‘flexibilisation’, the gig economy)
• partly (at least temporarily) aligned interests with centralised actors such as corporations looking for adaptable knowledge workers and governments looking to increase crisis resilience
• the inherent desirabilitiy of autonomy;)
• …