Abstract

This paper provides a historical account of cannibalism as used to explain how Brazilians integrate foreign cultural influences into their own and introduces a design praxis based on it. From Modernism to Digital Culture, cannibalism is a recurring tactic used to overcome cultural traditions without throwing them out. It proposes the hybridization of old and new forms in festive celebrations. Design Livre is an approach that combines the principles of Free Software with design methodologies, aiming to enable participation in the design process by anyone. Sharing source-code is not considered enough to enable such participation, thus Design Livre goes back to the level of Metadesign – the underlining structures of design process – to subvert formalism and maximize appropriation. An example of a cannibal ecosystem developed by Faber-Ludens is described to instigate questions on intellectual property in design, co-creation, embodied relationships, and culture.

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AMSTEL, Frederick M.C. van; VASSÃO, Caio A.; FERRAZ, Gonçalo B. Design Livre: Cannibalistic Interaction Design. In: 3rd International Forum Design as a Process, Turin, Italy, 2011.

From what I observe so far in the Healthcare Construction Industry, where I conduct my PhD, this tactic won’t work. Unlike usual Participatory Design contexts, there is no single organization to work with. Each construction project is an assemblage of many companies working together with government representatives and clients. Each of them have their hierarchical structure, but typically they interact in a horizontal fashion for the purposes of the project.

In order to scale for complex organizations such as Construction Projects, Participatory Design may need to get into the process of actual working, making it a routine procedure. Instead of having a big consultation moment in a workshop, having a lot of small opportunities for participation. Instead of a decentralized network, a distributed one.

First I’ll look into how collaboration among project partners happens today and then I’ll see if I can hijack some participation into it. Let’s dive into the rhizome!

I had great conversations with Jonas Löwgren, Dan Lockton, and Anthony Dunne about one of my main  concerns: how to frame Interaction Design as a cultural project. Interaction Design is more usually thought as a methodology or as a professional practice, but I prefer to think that Interaction Design is a key part of culture development for current societies.

Technology is transforming every kind of cultural values into things. When abstract things get concrete, they are not so easy to change anymore, so culture can become stale, and ultimately die. Interaction Design is the only hope for us to keep culture evolving.

So I gave a short talk about the importance of keeping a dynamic circle between vernacular and lingua franca languages.

I cannot agree with that. I believe that participation is key to overcome Brazilian society fundamental contradictions: social inequality, poor education, urban violence. Luckily, I’ve got a good example during my vacation: Underground Art Gallery, a project from Bruna Corso, Olho Wodzynski, and Thiago Syen developed in a Curitiba’s bus terminal.

Bellow the terminal, there is a underground passage to get from one bus lane to another. I have been robbed there 15 years ago. It’s a sinister place, or better, a non-place where nobody dares to stop. Here is how it looked before the project. The photo doesn’t show, but there is a lot of crude graffiti over the walls that are constantly being washed away by maintainers.

The project completely transformed the non-place. Now, we’ve got a very nice art gallery featuring drawings and poems made by passengers themselves.

Each board gather responses to a question made by the artists. The following one is a response for drawing your day-by-day routine. The passenger explicitly emphasized the bus stop as an important step in his  routine.

And that one presented alternative transport means that the passenger used too. Pirocóptero is a lolipop stick that flies. Very funny entry indeed!

One asked the difficult question of “what is art?”. Many interesting entries, but the graffited answer over the question (below the board) took my attention. The passenger went over the limits of participation but not so much as to damage the wall. The answer says: “the graffiti”.

The participation process started when artists mounted a desk inside the passenge. Passengers could sit down and make their contribution in a coloured block. Artists have been very smart in leaving some blank blocks in each board, allowing contributions after the official participation time.

Participation was key to the project’s success. Art galleries have been tried in many decaying places in Brazil but vandals destroyed them very quickly. Including potential vandals into the creative process made them proud and not hostile about the artwork. Plus, people that stopped there to check the artwork made the place safer. Thiefs are not so kind for robbing when there are people looking around.

I must say that the only problem with gallery was not giving the appropriate credits for the passengers. The credits plate mentions only artists and funder. Then, one passenger graffited over it with the word: “Livre” (Free).

If you want to know more about the project and can read Portuguese, I highly recommend cheking the project’s blog, which documented the whole creative process.

Companies, at the other hand, have been very successful on fulfilling these wishes by offering a multitude of brands. Design became instrumental for that mean by its capability of embedding symbolic relationships into things. Lifestyle, age, income, culture were crafted into product’s shape and form. Design has been so effective in that effort that, in some sense, stole the public expectation of novelty from Art.

Today, I see a tendency for Design to advance reification further than the symbolic level. Instead of pointing to ideas, design is increasingly pointing to actions. Thus, broad and diffuse concepts are leaving out space for specific and measurable aspects in design practice. Usability was one of the first aspects that gained attention, followed by emotional and social aspects.

User Experience Honeycomb, Peter Morville

Some people criticize this tendency because it slices up the user experience into manageable parts, fragmenting the gestalt and ultimately killing product aesthetics. I prefer to think that this just is a new kind of aesthetics: an aesthetics that conflates ethics by explicitly shaping human behavior. Such thing must be accountable, either to companies, to users and to public institutions, that’s why Design is getting more grounded onto objective, defined, measurable things.

• lack of proper tools to collaborate over design models with non-design experts
• economic and political costs for scheduling meetings
• over reliance on consensus to move design process forward

My research goal is to come up with collaborative tools that help overcoming these points. I’ll develop tools in the context of the projects that I’m already observing. I cannot define them precisely because I don’t know enough about the context and I expect to have the participation of other people involved into the project. But, because I’m being pressed to tell which kind of outcomes I expect to have from my supervisors, I sketched some rough ideas.

Why Participatory Design?

More often than not, facilities are built or retrofitted with the expectation of accommodating new organizational behaviors, but this change is not always straightforward. Important details can be overlooked by a top-down approach, resulting in work breakdown or poor patient experience. In order to include more perspectives over the change process, design teams organize meetings with peripheral stakeholders at different stages of the project, giving them opportunity to participate into design and decision-making.

Idea #1 Tangible means for collaborative building design

When people are collaborating in meetings, they use only words to express themselves. Visualizations are often used to make a point, but they are not changed in real time. Tangible manipulative models could help them create models together.

Idea #2 Representing the time dimension

Current building visualization techniques focus mainly on representing space properties, but buildings are built to hold events. There are recurring events that should impact directly space planning such as workflow, but because of a lack of visualization techniques to cross these information, some mismatch occurs. Current visualizations that deals with the time dimension are used only for evacuation plans. There might be potential interest on visualizations on the process that keep people inside.

Idea #3 : Asynchronous collaboration with distant stakeholders

Buildings are complex projects where multiple stakeholders must work together. Most of the time, they cooperate with each other by sharing documents. Collaboration happens once-in-a-while through meetings, but meetings are difficult to schedule and sometimes not productive for every partner. There are some online tools for collaboration, but they are not used so much. There are plenty of room for good CSCW tools on Construction Management.

As I said, these are rough sketches that I hope will turn into more feasible proposals!

The platform was designed as part of an ecosystem that will include, in the future, connection to crowdfunding websites, Fab Labs and prototyping tools. Currently, it’s already integrated to Faber-Ludens educational programs.

My role in the project was to conceptualize the ecosystem, manage the community and program the whole infra-structure, based on a customized version of Open Atrium.

In addition to hosting projects, the ecosystem includes a card set with Design Methods made to help planning meetings. Members of the team can organize the cards as a process, using their input/output info. Each card has a QRCode that points to a wiki page where the method is described in details.

I was particularly interested on how to express the time dimension, which is overlooked in current modeling tools.

My friend thought that the external HD was a big flash memory pen drive, because it behaved like one. The case didn’t provide enough safety for hard-disks and even the advertising encouraged incautious handling. I think that if users can see what’s inside, they would probably be more cautious.

By going to real use contexts, we were able to extend our analysis further than the app usability like, for instance, observing how users combined the use of the app with other media.