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. (See The Responsible Object, Design for Consumer Society, van Marjanne Helvert and Enzo Mari on the Sofa/Bed public failure) In order to offer an alternative to that model, the Social Shelf project would like to test the following assumption: can social innovation and intervention be supported by giving the tools directly to the users for them 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, I 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?
I hence imagine my thesis to take the shape of an essayistic conversation, addressing in an intimate tone, but not a personal one. It will take on a more mundane and private character, without being directly about me, Gersande Schellinx, as a narrator. Throughout the research a critical and fictional dialogue between the non-human and human actors of the Social Shelf project will unravel. I do not intend to be the subject of the paper, but rather act as a critical bystander to the protagonists that are the shelves and the communities that they create/support/invite.
Thus, a conversation between the different voices within the project will arise: the voices of the shelves, a more technical one reviewing each making-process and their relation to social contexts, references and influences. Here fiction will provide a way to speculate about past and future of the Social Shelf without the evident restrictions that one would encounters in a journalistic setting.
Therefor the paper will share Social Shelf process in a fully transparent manner: what is that worked and what is it that did not? It will constitute an archive put up for show in a vitrine for all to understand: how were these shelves produced and what was their intentions? I want to make the implicit explicit. Let the material reality un-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
Offer the resources to understand the steps that are required and taken in any kind of manufacture, is the first step in inviting people to think through making. We do not assume others’ 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 can we 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
a) Design
b) Production
c) Assembling
d) Curation
e) 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 made? Why are they 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 them? Can we claim spaces for ourselves? If yes, how can we do so? This chapter wants to take apart the politics in the making: make them more relatable and accessible. Expose all that can be learned through the process of making.
2. The process of material thinking
a) Custom production for custom needs instead of mass production for massive waste
b) Circular education as a method for social intervention and innovation
c) Bring experience to facts: break down hierarchy of knowledge
This chapter is a natural response to the previous one. It exposes why this learning alternative could be beneficial from a global point of view, then from a local one and finally from a theoretical one. I want to see if breaking down isolated clusters of knowledge can create more alternatives for better consumption, rather than produce overwhelming amounts of alternatives for even more superficial consumption.
3. Open Source Design
a) Methods over outcomes
b) Alternative ways for distribution
c) Performing spaces for ourselves
This third chapter is of a more self-reflective kind, and discloses the methods at use to share these alternatives. The reader is invited to care for process over outcome and bring value to in-between spaces of learning, teaching and sharing. I will look at how knowledge is distributed and how it could be distributed, how we can reflect on our own agency in that process, and the opportunities that we can create for ourselves, by acknowledging the restrictions we encounter, in an attempt to inspire others to continue these circular initiatives for knowledge through practice.