Design designs the designer (Manzini, Politics of the Everyday)

Forum Social Design
#1

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/politics-of-the-everyday-9781350053663/

Reading especially the first two chapters of Ezio Manzini’s Politics of the Everyday made me think about our own Ecological Design Collective and its design. I just wanted to list some axes of reflection to invite us to engage with the design our own design collective, for “the designer is never external to the system on which [s]he acts.” (52)
The “enabling ecosystem” of this seminar and the wider practicum offers: “digital platforms”, “support teams of experts” and “codesign tools”. Also, it offers possibilities of “meaningful encounters” without trying to directly design human collaboration, and as Mazini writes “it is not possible to design interactions between people directly and bring them into being. Instead, conditions can be made more favorable for them to emerge by creating artifacts dedicated to making them possible and probable.” (28)
How do we balance “accessibility” and “relational quality” of our collaborative social form?(66)
How light is it? (32-33, 66)

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#2

Hale, I’m happy to see this is the thread you’re pulling. Working through the book, particularly the rhetoric about fostering light communities, made me think about this forum. While we haven’t ourselves spent too much time in it, I think it’s a manifestation of Manzini’s idea to maintain a foundation for committed, active participants, while accommodating for passersby. Like we talked about last Friday, we can use this space, others can read our material, and eventually they will be able to contribute to the discussion as well. In Manzini’s context, I see we the students and professors directly engaged with this class as the “committed, active participants,” while any friends, coworkers, classmates, and collaborators we may invite or who may find themselves here have access by virtue of the community being light. These new faces aren’t required to reach the same level of frequent accountability as we are, but hopefully if this forum represents an attractive, participatory democracy (i.e., if we make it so), they decide to stick around.

Slightly digressing, I was somewhat worried reading that Manzini says “the birth and diffusion of bottom-up initiatives… would never have happened without adequate governance” (117). I can see some truth in this for the specific examples discussed in this section, but I fear the extent to which this statement could be taken.

Manzini spends a good amount of the book emphasizing the autonomy of localities but then throws in this idea that adequate governance is a prerequisite. In a world/country (arguably) hostile towards participatory democracy, it is difficult to imagine that projects will garner the “top-down” infrastructural support necessary to flourish if they as much as smell like they lead to economically threatening local discontinuities. I understand that I myself am extending Manzini’s words here to argue something he may not be explicitly saying, but I worry about the rhetoric. Localities either have autonomy or they don’t; it is not gifted to them by officials of a (pseudo-)representative democracy. Even in the extreme, an authoritarian regime would not succeed in extinguishing autonomy.

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#3

I too thought a lot about the nature of our collaboration while reading Manzini’s work. In order for there to be a social commons and in order to produce change in our society, there must be a community. While we cannot meet with each other in person, we have built this online community. We are now “individuals who are connected but solitary” (21). While we are limited in our capabilities by the nature of meeting virtually, we have also expanded our possibilities. We can create an intentional community by inviting people to participate who would otherwise not be able to. If we met only in the classroom from 1:30 - 4:00 on Friday afternoons the number of people able to join us and participate would be severely limited. But now that all of our meetings are virtual (they exist outside of a physical space) and our discussions are here in written form (they exist outside of a discrete time) we can welcome so many more people to our community.

The virtual nature of this class has vastly increased accessibility, but that is very different from relational quality. What do we lose when we are not able to talk outside the door before entering the classroom? What occurs in the moments when we lose signal and drop out of the call? We cannot look each other in the eyes anymore. We can either look at someone’s eyes or look at our camera. We cannot do both. What kinds of emotional expression is lost because of that? I cannot share a side comment with the person sitting next to me. It is hard to share energy through a computer screen. How do we express sympathy and empathy in a virtual world? These are all questions and thoughts that present themselves through my many hours of virtual classes, virtual meetings, virtual clubs, even virtual hangouts with friends.

In terms of lightness, it would seem that our virtual platform has certainly “dissolved the solidity of the world” (32). We have opened “new possibilities” and are indeed “mobile” (32). I would even say that our virtual needs have “made visible that which is not so” (33). In this I am referring to our very choice of platforms. Anand and Nicole have designed this class to avoid the use of Zoom, Blackboard, Slack, etc. Choosing the open source platforms we are using now calls to attention the problems the corporate platforms create. They are exclusionary, they thrive off of the capitalistic model, their employees (their content creators and developers) have limited autonomy and must fit within the framework of the corporate agenda. By choosing not to engage with those platforms, we are creating a local discontinuity, the necessary ingredient for change in Manzini’s eyes. Those platforms may have started as their own local discontinuity, their own way of enacting social innovation, yet they have fallen into the trap of efficiency as Manzini describes in the Uber example. These open source platforms have the potential to maintain rational values, to hold onto the vision the had when they set out.

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#4

The virtual nature of this class has increased accessibility in that it now includes public online forums, but this accessibility is limited in that its participants are currently all JHU students. Even when this forum is opened to the public, accessibility will be limited to those with access to a computer, wifi, and the free time to scroll through and contribute to a sustainable design forum. As with many online endeavors, I think this accessibility comes at the expense of relational quality. This summer, I took some online courses through JHU’s partnership with Coursera, and this discussion about accessibility and relational quality reminds me of that. At any given moment, hundreds or even thousands of people will all be enrolled in the same Coursera course, but they will have little to no connection or knowledge of each other (other than through the class discussion forum, which is mostly relegated to questions about course content). I think the importance of developing in-person relationships speaks to why we even go to in-person school in the first place.

Like others have said, I think this class qualifies as a “light” community. We are a voluntary, self-selecting group of people where, as Manzini says, “the individuality of each member is balanced with the desire to do something together” (p. 2). I think there is a parallel between our group and the one Manzini describes under the oak tree at the beginning of Chapter 1; we are all here with different backgrounds and were drawn here for different reasons, but we all have a desire to affect positive change and share this with others.

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#5

I agree with many of the points on accessibility brought up by being a virtual and open source community – but I think it is important to also consider the accessibility given but by eschewing Zoom, Microsoft, and other costly platforms. Highlighting this is the experimental nature of the logistics of the course: for the past two weeks we have endured a wide array of technical issues while video calling that could have been avoided by using Zoom – leading us to try a new video conference platform this week. Even further, well established platforms like Zoom and Microsoft have had the time and resources to build up a wide array of accessibility options that are simply too time- and resource-intensive to implement on an open-source platform in early development by a group of collaborators. Most notably to me is the automatic closed-captioning build into Zoom. While all of us currently in this collective (to my knowledge) are able to hear, these lower-budget, open source, video conference platforms create new exclusion in that hearing impaired people would have trouble joining, and people already in the community who learn more visually than auditorily have higher walls to active engagement.

Despite these new exclusionary features, I think that remembering the context of this community and the nature of these barriers is important as well. In my mind, community will ever be completely accessible. The broader goals of this class and this collective are to enable conversation around a sustainable future and effect social change. If the platforms we use are cost-prohibitive and their inner workings closed behind walls and immutable, we are relying on others to properly read our needs and implement features that increase pur accessibility. However, by instead staying light and using these open platforms, we maintain the capacity to adapt quickly to new accessibility concerns and edit our software we use to ensure that we can adapt to the needs of everyone currently in our community.

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#6

Like others on this thread have noted, the public Discourse forum and the virtual format of this course demonstrate the ways in which accessibility concerns were factored into design of the practicum. I really appreciate Mitchell’s point about the inaccessible, exclusionary aspects of our open-source conferencing platform. Though I reached a similar conclusion, it is an important consideration to express because in exploring the possibilities of new projects, “limits…are defined by what is ethically possible…it is considered not possible to do something that is not just and fair” (86).

In response to Hale’s question of lightness, I do not think that we as participants in this practicum are engaging in light exchanges. The academic setting we operate in allows us to enrich our virtual space of opportunities with “heavier” interactions and longer term relationships. Returning to the role of Discourse, the structure of this practicum does, however, acknowledge and welcome the value of lightness through this forum. Here, anyone who is interested in ecological design can find our discussions online. Their degree of interaction can range from one-way - maybe returning to skim the threads every once in a while - to robust and reciprocal, as anyone will have the option soon to make an account and join our conversations regularly if they so choose. By incorporating weekly contributions to an openly accessible online forum in our coursework, this practicum is working to foster a wider community of interest within which we exist.

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#7

I really liked all the points made on “light communities,” it is very interesting to read everyone’s unique take on this book Politics of the Everyday. I want to touch on the point that Crystal just made, in a half and half response. I do agree with your point that this class allows “heavier interactions” due to the magnitude of what we are talking about and the clear deep passion we all show for the environment and helping each other. I believe what drew all of us to this class is the deep connection we all share for helping the earth.

However, I believe this heavier connection cannot be fostered right away. As stated in the book, even the community who has been coming to this tree for centuries is a “light community”. I believe for a community to become more than just “light”, it takes time and communication. In this way, I describe this class community as a “light community” at first, with the potential to grow into a true family as this class progresses throughout the year.

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#8

(in response to Vince) Interesting point. I was thinking about the same thing. I read it more as follows: large-scale systemic changes occur when small-scale (albeit ‘radical’, not ‘incremental’) changes accumulate. In other words, systemic change is a bottom-up process. That being said, if neoliberalist, top-down politics continue to dominate and destruct, it becomes harder for such accumulation to occur (because ideally, different bottom-up social innovations would be coordinated city-wide in a participatory way). But that does not mean that changes in our daily lives are futile without radical change in government.

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#9

I just wanted to add that while open source platforms and avoiding Zoom, Slack etc. may be causing more difficulties in the short term, I believe it allows for more accessibility in the long term. “Accessibility”, the way in which Manzini uses it, doesn’t only mean who can access, it also includes any kind of cost attached to being involved. And depending on Zoom and other platforms support what Manzini calls “a platform economy” (88). The greatest problem with this is that when one of these platforms does something a little bit more “refined” a bit quicker, then it monopolizes the global market, subjecting everyone depending on them for their economic survival to the mercy of the platform owners, including “digital laborers” who render microservices “with no continuity or guarantees for the future” (89). Also, in my opinion, another problem they cause is that the consumers fall into a “normalcy” and stop thinking about how to solve problems, let alone the price the institutions have to pay to get subscriptions to these platforms. I think, going back to maintenance and care, the difficulties we had in this experience of stepping outside the corporate communication and digital learning tools in itself disclosed the workings of the infrastructure that would have otherwise stay invisible.

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#10

Hale, I agree completely! I think that the tradeoffs in short term accessibility are a tradeoff in exchange for the ability to grow and change over time and breaks our reliance on a benevolent external body to decide what makes our communities accessible.

As a somewhat related and somewhat unrelated point – I find it interesting the way in which disability has been so divorced from our conversation of accessibility. I showed my friend who is very into disability advocacy this discussion thread, her immediate thought was the false divide we tend to create between economically/socially accessible communities and disability accessible communities.

“One of the main things I learned this summer is that it’s common for people to distinguish between ‘disabled people accessibility’ and ‘regular people accessibility’.
After considering accessibility more closely though, the lines get extremely blurred.
Is accessibility being able to get inside the building with a ramp? Is it being able to access a journal article online? Yes. And both are essential for people to be able to contribute to their community, whatever that community is.”

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#11

Thank you for emphasizing this! I think this is something that was also largely missing Manzini’s discussion.

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#12

Looks like Jitsi does support real-time transcription for individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing. Take that, Zoom!

Still, your point about digital accessibility and disabilities-related accessibility is very well-taken. I suppose I am glad to know that our platform is able to accommodate people who are hard of hearing, thanks to the efforts of independent developers who prioritized this capacity.

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#13

Douwe, thanks for the follow-up. That’s what I’m hoping he intends to say - that local changes are not futile without top-down support. If that were true, I struggle to imagine in what kinds of scenarios we’d see effective dispersion of ideas in our political context, broadly speaking. I understand that a supportive top-down infrastructure wouldn’t hurt, but I wouldn’t go as far as to agree with this notion (whether Manzini is saying it or not) that it’s a prerequisite.

#14

This is a separate post from earlier in the week, sorry! …
A few initial thoughts after reading Manzini’s Politics of the Everyday. This seems like a great book to read now as we are diving into a practicum course. No doubt it will be even greater to come back to it again as we continue to reflect with breadth and depth on our localities, our world, and the changes towards sustainable futures that we would like to see. While I really enjoyed so many of the points that he touched on, two topics that stood out to me the most were Manzini’s ideas about social innovation and his perspectives on collaboration.

Manzini’s discussion on social innovation was intriguing. He mentions that the change produced has to be radical (p. 10), and, in his section on Transforming in Chapter 3, discusses how transformation really does stem from the initial idea that radically departs from the norm. I found this point quite central, as we think about a sustainable future. Where will radical change come from, and what radical ideas will take hold? What are the principles of collective action and community psychology that we can draw on to predict how best to initiate and effect sustainable changes? From which points specifically will be the points of departure, where will we prioritize change?

Linked to the ideas of social innovation are the ideas of collaboration. Manzini’s discussion of collaboration made me think about the concept in a very different way. The word “collaboration” for me typically conjures up an image of finding people with different technical expertise able to perform experiments or lend ideas and ultimately, together, answer specific scientific questions. I never thought about extending this concept to social movements, or society on the whole. In one sense, we are already forced into a concept like this in our world. We are all expected to have jobs (which pay the bills) and specialize doing a particular task to contribute to society in some way. Jobs play some role in making our society tick along so we have federal offices, courts of law, sanitation systems, hospitals and doctor’s offices, schools and education systems. What about collaborations that will result in changes to disrupt all these areas of expertise that are established and work together? I see the scientific collaboration can be quite analogous to what Manzini has in mind: the more one collaborates, the greater the chance of success; no one person can be an expert in all things, and bringing together those who excel in different realms exponentially increases the expanse of what is possible; relational values emerge when encounters take place and we work together towards shared goals. Perhaps most importantly, each individual involved sees themself as part of the vision and therefore can become part of the transformation.

I think it is important to note where Manzini is writing from, the contexts from which he draws his examples, and the scope of societies he implicitly or explicitly refers to throughout his text. I do not believe his ideas can necessarily apply to all contexts, geographies, cultures and political systems. While it could be considered a limitation on one hand, Manzini provides the framework for understanding how history has created the present, how to understand the present, and how to work towards visions of the future. Awareness of biases and limitations for any aspect can also be considered a strength.

Lastly, I want to comment on one thing I found both intriguing and humorous. In his section on Lightness (p. 31-32) Manzini discusses the importance of light encounters. He notes how light encounters in fluid mobile world are actually quite important; they can be infinite in possibility, could seemingly arise out of randomness or chance and give rise to something strong. It made me think about chemical bonding and solutions with Brownian motion. Some of what would be considered “weak forces” are truly the glue that hold the world together. I loved the idea that just we are all like molecules just bouncing around in a solution, having chance interactions that are actually so key to creating our world. Interactions are paramount, even if they are considered weak on the spectrum of weak-to-strong, once these forces are initiated, they can shape the entire landscape of whatever scale we are talking about.

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