<div dir="ltr"><p dir="ltr">Of course we can, between other things because it is not possible to<i> think with others</i>, in the sense Puig dela Bellacasa proposes it in her essay "Nothing comes without its world", without that passing throughout our bodies. Thinking with others has to be an embodied practice, however that is not an Innocent and "happy" statement. Becoming with others, as a caring way to think with them brings with it responsibility, accountability, but it also brings crisis, dissent, conflict. That is, it involves, it touches us. It supposes, to me, a move from doing ethnography of design as an account of processes which are mainly understood, to doing ethnography of design as an affective process through which design takes place, through which it becomes. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Far is this process from a consensus ... the question is then how we deal with dissent, how we recognize it and think<i> </i><i>with</i> it as well, in order to make it part of design and its processes and practices. Puig dela Bellacasa (again, same reference) calls this <i>dissenting within</i>, as a way to recognize that dissent is part of becoming with others, in the sense that we are responsible for the critique we produce in designing processes, and for what the critique produces, in the sense that it engenders realities for which we have to care. This is not an easy thing to explain with words, perhaps because I see this as a question that cannot be answered in abstract. In the project that you are asking me to reflect upon dissent came when I realized that engineers wanted to solve embroiderers problems (as a mandate that is very much expected from them, to make things work) ... and I wanted them to "forget" about figuring out solutions and focus on learning about realities, in a more experimental manner. Their initial resistance to not follow their cultural mandate was seen by me as an opportunity to grasp that mandate in practice, but meant in a way to distance myself from design, to observe design decisions taken by others, but not to be part of them. I was faced then with the need to question that mandate, to dissent with it through the offering of new spaces for them to imagine differently what they do. Using the metaphor of embroidery it was in a way an act of mending engineering imaginaries about themselves. Mending leaves traces, as dissent does, the goal of mending is to repair something broken, <i>dissenting within</i> has, in a way, a similar purpose. </p>
<p dir="ltr">I would like to continue with this metaphor about mending in order to move to your concern about the temporalities of learning which shape the embodied practices of embroidery and the implications of them for my own learning process (understanding here that research and ethnography in particular is nothing else but a learning process). More than time and temporalities, I would like to invite you to think about rhythms. The rhythms of learning a craft are very much attached to daily life rhythms. One learns in the interstices of other daily tasks, as a way to think, to process, to entertain, to meditate ... embroiderers see this process as therapeutic, that is why I find the metaphor of mending useful (mending is a practice that takes place both factually and symbolically while embroidering). Now learning this way takes time, sometimes a complete lifetime, you become a master through a continuous process of embroidering and originally that happens while embroidering for others you care about. Those rhythms are not the rhythms of the market for sure, which we know are usually not in harmony with life. So when embroidery stops being a practice performed deliberately to produce social ties, to tell stories, to process thoughts, and becomes a commodity, the rhythms of life embedded in it, in its learning are reshaped and sometimes collapsed, complex stitches disappear, collectivities are disolved ... What I am not sure yet, and not sure if I want to be sure (to experiment, to think about to give a chance), is if one can dissent within this context of commodification of daily life rhythms ... </p><p dir="ltr">I wonder (and I have my own response to this) which relationalities does this metaphors of dissenting within, mending, rhythms... perform when thinking about engineering universities?</p><p dir="ltr"> <br></p>
<div style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
Apreciada Tania<br>
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I welcome this account of your ethnographic work as a way to start our dialogue!.<br>
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I recognize the shift you present, from embroidery as a precarious labor to a language that could embroider the technology, has bonds with the kind of dialogues that took place in this specific case. I started to compare it with other methods which highlight consensual participation as the primary goal. However, some other approaches to design stresses the disparities in terms of power relations, or as Helen Verran suggests, in terms of collective memories of knowledge. From my understanding, I found that your proposal put dissent as a productive practice and, in the context of global design, also as an ethical approach that instead of thinking for others, invites to thinking with others.<br>
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Also, I'm interested in the temporal dimension of this whole process, mostly because it could also be compared, with other uses of ethnography in design. I'm fascinated on how you introduce the expertise of women. I wonder about the time that they had expended in learning and embodying their techniques, and how this was translated into your process.<br>
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Do you think we can discuss the links between this embodiment of technique and the invitation to thinking with others?<br>
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<br>
Fellow Research "Learning to see Systems" INTERSECT Program<br>
<a href="http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/" target="_blank">http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/</a><br>
PhD student, Institute of Communications Research<br>
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign<br>
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________________________________________<br>
De: <a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a> [<a href="mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au" target="_blank">empyre-bounces@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a>] en nombre de Tania Pérez Bustos [<a href="mailto:tpbustos@gmail.com" target="_blank">tpbustos@gmail.com</a>]<br>
Enviado: martes, 24 de marzo de 2015 12:28<br>
Para: soft_skinned_space<br>
Asunto: Re: [-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos<br>
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