[-empyre-] Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez and Pérez-Bustos

[Tania Pérez Bustos]

Of course we can, between other things because it is not possible to* think
with others*, 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.

Far is this process from a consensus ... the question is then how we deal
with dissent, how we recognize it and think *with* it as well, in order to
make it part of design and its processes and practices. Puig dela Bellacasa
(again, same reference) calls this *dissenting within*, 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, *dissenting within* has, in a way, a similar purpose.

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 ...

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?


----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Apreciada Tania

I welcome this account of your ethnographic work as a way to start our
dialogue!.

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.

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.

Do you think we can discuss the links between this embodiment of technique
and the invitation to thinking with others?


Fellow Research "Learning to see Systems" INTERSECT Program
http://seeingsystems.illinois.edu/
PhD student, Institute of Communications Research
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

________________________________________
De: empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au [
empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au] en nombre de Tania Pérez Bustos
[tpbustos at gmail.com]
Enviado: martes, 24 de marzo de 2015 12:28
Para: soft_skinned_space
Asunto: Re: [-empyre-]  Engineering the University : Week 04 : Prieto-Nanez
and Pérez-Bustos

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
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