Diseña

Embroidery to Repair Life: Body-Territory Mapping and Collective Embroidery

Diana Albarrán González — 2024-01-31

In Latin America, textile traditions such as embroidery are integral to the community and personal well-being, representing the experiences and resistance of women in both domestic and public spheres. From a feminist lens, this article explores the role of collective embroidery and body-territory mapping as resistance tools within conflict zones. This analysis focuses on the project ‘Memories of Our Body-Territory. Testimonies about Structural Violence and Daily Life of Women Weavers in the Municipality of Magdalenas, Chiapas’. This region has faced political and territorial disputes impacting women’s lives and textile practices. Collective mapping and embroidery foster safe spaces for dialogue, reflection, and connection, promoting self-knowledge and well-being. The embroidered pieces transmit the memory of the body-territory, repairing the individual and collective and solidifying mutual support networks among women affected by the armed conflict.

Maintenance, Care, and Repair of a Communal Architecture in Trouble: The Disassembling

Candela Morado — 2024-01-31

This paper attempts to ethnographically reflect on how material vulnerability is conceived and considered in practices of communal sustenance of architectures in trouble. Drawing on theories of maintenance, care, and repair, we will dwell on the learnings cultivated during a socio-material process that unfolded in response to the burning of a communal library in the southern periphery of the city of Bogotá. The collective practices of sustenance deployed to take care of the threatened architecture help us bring to the forefront questions of (I) distributed agency and ecology of practices; (II) unanticipated future and alternative temporalities; (III) creative and generative responses to damage or conflict; as well as (V) tentative and (IV) ‘opening of black boxes’ methods. Through the ethnographic analysis of the disassembling process, we will problematize the socio-material ecosystems needed to sustain lives in a ‘broken world’.

Caracas, City of Aftermath. Caretaking Practices After Emigration and Collapse

Stefan Gzyl — 2024-01-31

This article examines the caretaking practices of vacant domestic spaces amid a migratory crisis and generalized collapse. Caracas is conceptualized as a ‘city of aftermath’, where the material residues of modernity are reconfigured in response to the logic of crisis and the needs of migrants, re-signifying spaces and extending their life beyond the conditions of their production. The text is centered on the figure of the caretaker. Based on interviews, site visits, and photography, the article examines the daily routines of Carlos, who looks after more than twenty apartments in Caracas. His work is entwined with migrants’ trajectories and local needs, generating new economies and support networks around the maintenance and adaptation of vacant spaces. In this way, caretaking practices offer clues for a reading of the city that transcends progress/decline oppositions and their respective imaginaries: the new and the ruin.

Care and Repair through Intimacy: A Live Lab Approach in the Garden City

Josymar Rodríguez Alfonzo — 2024-01-31

Participatory Design (PD) is increasingly interested in the repair process, motivated by the curiosity to articulate a more caring and relational attitude toward our socioecological environment. However, placing ‘repair’ centrally in PD is difficult, since the latter has been traditionally focused on ‘making together’ and less on repairing what was once made, or even ‘unmake’. While repair is part of our continuous activities (repairing clothes, bikes, marriages, and relationships), it is often a painful and challenging endeavor. Repair entails hope but also grief. This article discusses how we used a Live Lab to explore more intimate design approaches, opening pathways to explore plural relations and access embodied and emotional knowledge. Finally, based on our research experience in a garden city, we reflect upon how acting within an intimacy framework contributes to PD’s repair process, by bringing socioecological entanglements to the agenda of citizens.

Co-designing Resilience: Practical and Social Skilling through Place-based Repair

Eleni Kalantidou — 2024-03-07

The environmental and social injustices stemming from consumer culture have made evident the necessity to rediscover repair, as a means against growing precarity. This article presents such effort through a pilot program that took place in regional Queensland, aiming to re-engage at-risk youth by exposing them to practices of creative repair. The program provided opportunities for the youth participants to repair preloved items and reuse materials while collaborating with mentors, creatives, and peers. The stakeholders’ lived experience was documented via a co-design workshop, which was based on findings derived from interviews and visual data. According to its outcomes, practical and social skilling can enact self-confidence, communities of repair, and resource preservation. These, along with the program’s blueprint, were included in a toolkit to support other regional communities facing similar challenges. To conclude, the program’s learnings demonstrated repair as a place-based approach responding to a global condition, pragmatically addressing environmental and social emergencies.

Dirt Jumps are Matter Carefully Placed, Maintained, and Governed

Liam Healy — 2024-01-31

This article draws on research produced with DIY bike trail and dirt jump builders to unpack the forms of repair and care that they employ in maintaining their spaces. I begin by describing the mundane practices involved in keeping bike trails running, such as shoveling, watering, and compacting, and conceptualize these activities as repairing the ‘ruins’ of the often squatted spaces that they occupy. Second, I draw from literature in feminist science and technology studies (STS) and commons to argue for a thickening of care, finding that these spaces alert me to the ways that ‘neglect’, and exclusion from participation-in, and research-on, are often a requirement of their subsistence. In conclusion, I find that in these spaces forms of repair and maintenance are multiple and layered―from mundane practices to their forms of governance—and in recent years, have involved practices to ‘repair’ the pervasive and dominating macho, heteronormative cultures of these social worlds.

Repairing the Harm of Digital Design Using a Trauma-informed Approach

Melissa Eggleston — 2024-01-31

With increased awareness and mindful decisions, digital designers can repair the harm caused by digital design and improve the online experience of individuals who have been previously marginalized. This repair of poor design decisions, well-intentioned or out of ignorance, is necessary in a world where technology, exclusion, and trauma are pervasive. This article provides examples of digital harm that designers must acknowledge, understand, and avoid recreating. The concept of trauma-informed design is explained along with two practical approaches for designers to use to become more trauma-informed, and repair harm when creating websites, apps, and other digital experiences.

Raising the Dead: Repair as Re-appropriation in Critical Design

Myf Doughty — 2024-01-31

In this article, I examine Dale Hardiman and Stephen Royce’s critical design work Open Garden: Digital Mirror (2020) to explore their approach to the reuse and modification of electronic waste (e-waste) and proprietary software of the iPhone 8. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s theory of the weird, along with Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘queer use’ and John Scanlan’s cultural theory of garbage, I consider how the designers’ conspicuously clandestine re-appropriation of the effective and affective properties of discarded devices animates the physical and metaphysical possibilities of repair. I demonstrate how re-appropriation as repair can precipitate a form of weird design that provokes reflection on the possibilities and potentialities of deviance and departure within the discipline.

Anticipatory Repair: Reframing Breakage through a Futures Agenda. Interview with Minna Ruckenstein and Sarah Pink

Minna Ruckenstein — 2024-01-31

In this interview, we wanted to explore the notion of repair beyond the usual materialities and temporalities of the present. Therefore, we proposed a conversation between Minna Ruckenstein and Sarah Pink, in order to rethink repair in the digital realm of algorithms, AI, and robotics; as well as to speculate on future breakages, and thus anticipate the kind of repair we might need. The following pages represent our dialogical reflections about the promises of completeness that underpin technological and innovative design, which are nevertheless continually broken through everyday and organizational practice. We delve into algorithmic and robotic breakages and repairs, and their implications for how we understand the relationship between humans and machines. This leads to critical questions about how STS might contribute to a futures-focused research agenda, and specifically, how it might beneficially account for optimistic and hopeful futures. To advance these questions, Minna and Sarah draw on their extensive trajectories of empirical and conceptual research.

Interview conducted by Melisa Duque and Blanca Callén