Gersande Thesis Outline

What do you want to write?

Global manufacture or making without specific awareness of what the production is aimed for, tends to lack in adequateness or create needs that often are of temporary nature, which in turn produces waste and inequalities in terms of access and use. The immense gap between production and consumption creates this helplessness in options and control over our very direct surroundings. In order to offer an alternative to that model, the Social Shelf project would like to test the following assumption: to support social innovation and intervention tools must be given directly to the users to build the confidence to learn and to do by themselves. How can we use materials in order to respond to custom needs instead of consuming their global making? In disclosing the process behind making, we hope to create a bond with people and the material reality of their surroundings, to understand and thus act directly on the political, social and economical features of their spaces.

With the Social Shelf project I want to investigate topics of circular education, open source interfaces, crafts as a form of discourse and the communities created or supported in these different contexts.

Concretely, I find learning through material practice a valuable and empowering channel. Material awareness and experience can lead us to be more critical of our environment on social, economical and communal levels. I would like to try to offer a methodology for entering those spaces of material experience. Can social innovations be inspired by creating more spaces for thinking through making? Is it possible to create tools and methods that enable others to create their own communities, and care for their own custom needs without reproducing oppressive forms of learning in which impediments are default? Can we create more methods for others to learn better and by themselves, rather than provide enclosed knowledge of facts?

While my graduation project is a rather more material investigation and a fictional narration from the point of view of the targeted objects, with the Social Shelves I’d like to focus my thesis on the more practical aspects of the Social Shelf’s making: what materials are being used? Which social environment is it targeting? Who does it concern? What are the politics behind these choices?

What mode of address?

Therefore, I imagine the thesis around the Social Shelf project to take the shape of an essayistic transcript, addressed with an intimate tone, but not a personal one. Meaning, it would embrace a more mundane and private tone, without revolving around me, Gersande Schellinx, as a narrator. A critical dialogue between the non-human and human actors of the Social Shelf project will unravel throughout the research. I do not wish to be the subject of the paper, rather take a somehow journalistic tone, act as a critical bystander to the protagonists that are the shelves and the communities they create/support/invite.

A conversation between the different voices of the project will take place: the voices of the shelves, a more technical one reviewing each making-process and their relation to social contexts, references and influences. Fiction will be a way to speculate about past and future of the Social Shelf without the restrictions one would encounter in a journalistic process. A journalistic tone will be taken in the assessment of the making and performing of each social shelf, re-editing designs, documents, re-viewing material choices and costs.

This paper will share with full transparency the whole Social Shelf process, what worked or didn’t. An archive put in a vitrine for all to understand how the shelves have been produced and what were the intentions behind. Make the implicit explicit. Let the material reality not- speak for itself through constant critical fictional innovation.

3 key issues

• material thinking and performative materiality
• open source design/methodology
• circular educational proposal to support and motivate social intervention/innovation

To offer the resources to understand the steps required and taken in any kind of manufacture is the first step in inviting people to think through making. We do not assume other’s needs, nor skills, we invite others to learn how to respond to those needs by themselves with their own means, thus teaching us what those needs are and what they signify: how to engage in an educational process with a circular structure rather than a linear one? The aim is to get others to be confident about their own potential and claim agency on their direct surroundings. The full disclosure of the research and making process wants to desacralise manufacture, share material practice and the practice of knowledge.

Chapters’ outline

1. The features of the Social Shelf

Design Production Assembling Curation Performance

To describe the features of the Social Shelf is to describe what practically and conceptually it implies to make something: how and specifically why? What are the choices that need to be taken? Why are those choices necessary? Are all choices up to us? Who are the different agents involved in that process? What should be taken into account? Are there time, material, spatial, technical restrictions in the making? What do these restrictions tell us about our surroundings? And how can we act on those restrictions? Can we claim spaces for ourselves? If yes, how to do so? This chapter aims to take apart the politics in the making: make them more relatable and accessible. Expose all that can be learned through the making process.

2. The process of material thinking

Custom production for custom needs instead of mass production for massive waste Circular education as a method for social intervention and innovation Bring experience to facts: break down hierarchy of knowledge

This chapter as a natural response to the previous one, exposes why this learning alternative could be beneficial on a global point of view, then on a local one and finally on a theoretical one. See if to break down isolated cluster of knowledge is to create more alternatives for better consumption rather than produce overwhelming amount of alternatives for more superficial consumption.

3. Open Source Design

Looking for methods over outcomes Alternative ways for distribution Performing spaces for ourselves

The third chapter is a more self-reflective part in which are disclosed the methods at use to share these alternatives. One is invited to care for process over outcome, bring value to in-between spaces of learning, teaching and sharing. Look at how knowledge is distributed and how it could be distributed, reflect on our own agency in that process and the opportunities we can create for ourselves, acknowledging the restrictions we encounter. In an attempt to inspire others to continue these circular initiatives for knowledge through practice.