PROTOTYPING

Abstract

The prototyping of method calls for, at a minimum, three operations of design: rethinking the proprietary and legal economy of research; rethinking the frontiers that separate those who use methods from those to whom methods are applied to; designing infrastructures of apprenticeships for every problem.

Re-sourcing

The website and digital database of the Spanish guerrilla architectural platform Inteligencia Colectiva (IC) showcases hundreds of designs of do-it-yourself, retrofitted, community-driven, grassroots technological and architectural solutions and adaptations from all over the world.[1] These designs, which include diagrams and architectural sketches, 3D renders, text, photographs and even videos, are all licensed freely with creative commons licenses. They are open-source prototypes, as IC likes to think of them: designs that are at once gratis and ‘free’ to access, but also technical templates that simultaneously ‘free’ the very practice of design by enabling third parties to extend, modify, adapt or simply share the original source code. They are prototypes that liberate design as both a technical and cultural practice.

The prototypes that IC documents in their website offer an example of how the philosophy of free and open-source (F/OS) software has taken root in domains of practice that extend well beyond the digital realm. Architects, artists, designers, engineers, activists and grassroots organisations have found in the philosophy F/OS a toolkit for reimagining the material, aesthetic and environmental affordances of their work. Every component and aspect of their work, whether it be the infrastructural systems that support it or the aesthetic languages and registers that frame it, whether the dimensions of its material exchanges or its collaborative dynamics, are held to examination as both resources and re-sources: that is, for their capacity to work as foundations and support-structures but also as springs and openings for future extensions and modifications. In this sense we may think of the concept of open-source prototyping as a figure of complexity that is ‘less than one and more than many’: a prototype is always less than itself, in the sense that the source code enables expansions and bifurcations to the original design. Therefore, the design never reaches closure, it is never ‘one’ properly speaking. At the same time, the very possibility of having new additions and modifications defines the infra-ontology of prototyping as ‘more than many’, for the source code remains forever open to ‘more’ designs being added to the ‘many’ already in existence (Corsín Jiménez 2014).[2]

In this guise, the language and praxis of open-source prototyping provides an instance of complex, adaptive, self-organized systems whose heuristic and metaphoric vectors are not drawn from biology, chemistry or physics (cf. Barad 2007; Stengers 2010). These are emergent socio-infrastructural assemblages that re-source themselves through an inventive and on-going exploration of how human and nonhuman sources and resources – including legal licenses, technical specifications, organic and inorganic processes, or social relations – work on each other. They delineate the contours of ecologies that are forever ‘in beta’ (Corsín Jiménez and Estalella 2017).

Such an understanding of how open-source prototypes work differs in important and significant ways from how the concept has historically been used in design and engineering contexts. As the standard dictionary definition has it, a prototype is an original on which something is modelled; that is, an exemplar or first model. In the history of science and technology, the process of prototyping has traditionally been marginalized as a backstage operation. Prototypes were hid inside the ‘black boxes’ of engineering and design processes (Winner 1993): the prototyping phase of a design project indexed that stage where decisions regarding the use of components, materials, protocols or standards were thought-of as residual and of secondary importance; processes whose very subjection to on-going revision and reassembling, whose inhabiting a space of messiness and uncertainty invited no interest or curiosity. Prototypes were thought to be little more than drafts, provisional templates whose bodies functioned as tests grounds for trials and errors, groundwork and experimental assays whose efforts pointed somewhat unremarkably to things-that-were-not-quite-objects-yet.

White-boxing

Recent interest in the material semiotics and biographies of modelling practices has allowed us to unpack and recuperate the prototype from its relegation within the black boxes of the history of science and technology (Chadarevian and Hopwood 2004; Daston 2000). In particular, scholarship on critical making and open source design invites us to reconsider prototyping from a white-boxing perspective, where the emphasis is on how socio-technical practices constantly exfoliate, disclose and re-source their capacities for agency and relation (Corsín Jiménez, Estalella, and Zoohaus Collective 2014).

As both method and epistemic orientation, white-boxing opens up novel vistas for social theory. First, it shows us how the work of prototyping has traditionally been tensed against the proprietorial boundaries of technology. It makes evident the role that the opacity of black boxes has played in keeping industrial designs secret. Prototypes were only allowed to upgrade from the ‘proto’ phase to the final ‘type’ stage once properly locked into an intellectual and industrial property regime (Biagioli 2011). Theirs was therefore an existence before and/or in suspension of property: where the relations between persons and things remained as yet unmediated by the entanglements of ownership or authorship. Similarly, black boxes contributed towards keeping knowledge ‘in places’ (in boxes, so to speak), such that it became meaningful to speak of the places and geographies of technoscience: university and industry laboratories, science parks, etc. (Smith and Agar 1998). In their place, from the perspective of white-boxing, we can ask instead about the recursive processes through which the ‘proto’ and the ‘type’ have been parenthesized with respect to each other: what tensions and practices traverse such states of suspension?; why is there a parenthesis to start with?, what is it about a prototype that makes us imagine it as being ‘stuck’ in a permanent state of anteriority?; and finally, how does form finally emerge out from the parenthesis, what drives the extraction of the proto-type?

White-boxing further allows us to understand how prototyping has demarcated a political economy for the circulation of expert knowledge. Prototypes have signalled to the umbra separating experts from lay people, scientists from amateurs, insiders and outsiders to the technoscientific black box. In this sense, a perspective focused on white-boxing challenges how expert knowledge travels and circulates in society by destabilizing the epistemic status of technology itself as a sociological vector. The sources and resources most often associated with technoscientific expertise – laboratory equipment, scientific authority and credentials, university settings, intellectual property – are seen, when looked at from a white-boxing perspective, to be constantly unfolding, hacked and re-sourced. If ‘technology is society made durable’, as Latour famously put it (1991), prototyping and white-boxing would therefore seem to make technology un-durable, fragmented and dispersed. Or perhaps it is ‘the social’ that we should be looking at unboxing and destabilizing? Chris Kelty speaks for instance of how F/OS software ‘modulates’ anew the relation between power and knowledge: free software programmers work on themselves as a social and political community by working on (writing code, editing, patching, compiling, improving) the infrastructure that enables their coming into being in the first place. As an expression of a prototyping culture such ‘recursive publics’, as Kelty calls them (2008), would indeed seem to point to how white-boxing allows for novel forms and new locations of social durability to emerge – new expressions of cultural, political and aesthetic materiality and critique.

White-boxing finally comes full circle in helping us unpack and interrogate the very sources and resources through which we, as social scientists, take presence in the world. It invites us to reconsider the infrastructures, spaces and times that give shape to our research methodologies: What would social scientific inquiry look like if it were an open-source design?, if it were modulated recursively as it responded and accommodated to the disturbances, challenges and co-inventions of the fieldwork process? How does research wireframe itself into suspension? What would method look like as a prototype?

I have pointed at three re-sources through which the prototyping of method might take shape. First, by reconsidering the proprietary and, more amply, legal economy of research. In other words, making sure that we open access (consultation, readership, editing) to our work. There are a number of ways in which this can be done: licensing our work with Creative Commons licenses, avoiding publication in subscription journals, promoting the use of Open Access institutional repositories, as well as helping define the terms of discoverability (the algorithms, the metrics) that will shape the future public sphere of scholarly communication.

Secondly, the method of prototyping invites us to reconsider how the process of research separates ‘researchers’ from ‘informants’, experts from amateurs, knowledge-makers from knowledge-users. For instance, we may wish to ask about the role that methods play in the design of inquiry and analysis. What technologies, spaces, materials and social relations are bundled together in the production of method? Who gets to question our methods, when and in what terms, and do our methods have the capacity to incorporate such voices? In other words, is there scope for white-boxing our methods, making the people with whom we work party to our methodological agenda and design?

Finally, this explicit self-grounding of the problem of method as something that is constantly ‘prototyping’ itself calls for re-examining the multiple and criss-crossing ‘trajectories of apprenticeship’ through which research comes into being (Pignarre and Stengers 2011). We prototype by designing an ecology for every method: one where we stake stock of our mutual competences and constrains, our respective obligations and requirements, the resources and the conditions through which we each, collectively and individually, operate. We prototype every method when we come to the realisation that the organisation of research calls for nothing less than the design of an infrastructure of apprenticeships.

References

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.

Biagioli, Mario. 2011. «Patent specification and political representation». En Making and unmaking intellectual property: creative production in legal and cultural perspective, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, 25-39. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Chadarevian, Soraya de, and Nick Hopwood, eds. 2004. Models: The Third Dimension of Science. 1.^a ed. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. 2014. «Introduction. The prototype: more than many and less than one.» Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (4): 381-98. doi:10.1080/17530350.2013.858059.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, and Adolfo Estalella. 2017. «Ecologies in beta: the city as infrastructure of apprenticeships». In Infrastructures and social complexity, edited by Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen, and Atsuro Morita. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 141-156.

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, Adolfo Estalella, and Zoohaus Collective. 2014. «The Interior Design of [Free] Knowledge». Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (4): 493-515. doi:10.1080/17530350.2013.859632.

Daston, Lorraine. 2000. Biographies of Scientific Objects. University of Chicago Press.

Kelty, Christopher M. 2008. Two bits: the cultural significance of free software. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Latour, Bruno. 1991. «Technology is society made durable». En A sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination, edited by John Law, 103-31. London: Routledge.

Pignarre, Phillipe, and Isabella Stengers. 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Crosbie, and Jon Agar, eds. 1998. Making space for science : territorial themes in the shaping of knowledge. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2004. Partial connections. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press.

Winner, Langdon. 1993. «Upon Opening the Black Box and Finding It Empty: Social Constructivism and the Philosophy of Technology». Science, Technology, & Human Values 18 (3): 362-78.

Notes

[1] Inteligencias Colectiva, http://www.inteligenciascolectivas.org/

[2] A playful take on the ‘more than one and less than many’ that Marilyn Strathern (2004) suggested characterises fractality as a figure of contemporary complexity.

We have written a piece on our long-term collaborative project with “free culture activists” in Madrid, which reports on our work with Lagaleriademagdalena, Zuloark, Basurama, Alfonso Sánchez Uzábal, and Domenico di Siena, among many others. In a nutshell, the piece describes how our work with open-source urban activists re-functioned our own ethnographic project into an open-source methodological prototype of sorts.

You can read the pre-print version of the article below.

In my own talk I have decided to displace the question of ‘openness’ in anthropology slightly, from issues of ‘open access’ to issues of ‘open source’. I will be taking the work that Adolfo and I have been carrying out with guerrilla and open source architectural collectives Basurama and Zuloark in Madrid as a guide and example.

The conference organizers have asked us to produce a c. 3 page text which will be used to produce a pre-conference publication / provocation – and which presumably will contribute towards framing the debate to be had at the workshop itself.

This is the text I have sent to the organizers:

EPISTEMIC ECOLOGIES IN BETA

As I see it, the question of open access in the academy, and in anthropology in particular, raises at least three types of issues:

1. Questions of infrastructure and technical systems, and how they underpin, facilitate and/or modulate collaboration – for editors, authors and librarians, but also, sometimes, for readers too, including our informants and collaborators.

2. Questions of intellectual property, licensing and law.

3. Questions of epistemic ethics: access, distributive justice, and freedom.

Now when we talk about the work that goes into publishing anthropology (be that as a journal operation or a press) there is some consensus as to how these various issues play out. By consensus I do not mean to imply that we know how to solve the issues, only that we know were the problems lie: for example, we know that we need to work and figure out a business model for our operations (through patronage, subscriptions, subsidies, alliances, etc.); we know of the important role that university libraries and green OA repositories play; we know of the thorny issue of free and volunteer labour, which all too often falls upon the shoulders of students; we know of the increasingly important role that graphic and web design play, as well social media, for it is through these that reputational and symbolic capital are often managed, especially in the early days of a new journal’s operation.

However, I will not be going into any of these issues here because I think others, not least those who have successfully set in motion and run successful and pioneering OA operations, can do so much better and intelligently than I can.

Instead I will offer some remarks on my own experience in working with open access, in this case, a brief account of the work that along with my colleague Adolfo Estalella I have been carrying out with open-source guerrilla architectural collectives Basurama and Zuloark in Madrid.

I believe this experience is worth recounting because the issues I mentioned above –infrastructure and technical systems, property and legality, and epistemic ethics – are ones that we have confronted in our work too. Importantly, however, our work with guerrilla architectural collectives has shown us the difference between making anthropology open-access and making open-source anthropology. I want very briefly to explore what this open-sourcing of our anthropological project has entailed for us – and what implications it may have for the discipline at large.

First, though, a quick word about open-source architecture.

Open source architecture

Open source architecture poses challenges of a rather different nature to the digital projects, not least of all free and open-source software (F/OS) developments, that have become flagships of the open-source movement worldwide.

For example, open source architecture is different from F/OS in that the work of design is different from the final output. Design and output do not coincide in the same object. Thus, what makes an architectural work ‘open’ is its design process – this is very much the definition that applies to all open source hardware projects (OSHW – Definition of Free Cultural Works 2014).

This is important because unlike software, where writing code is at once a form of self-grounding design and infrastructure, in the case of architecture one can make designs freely accessible (architectural drawings, sketches, templates, renders) yet the actual process of building the infrastructure may still be carried out behind closed doors. In other words, whereas for some digital projects opening access is tantamount to opening the sources, in the case of hardware projects, opening access and opening sources are in fact different operations.

In this light, when guerrilla architectural collectives speak of open-sourcing their practice, they don’t just mean granting access to their designs. What they mean, rather, is that every stage in the process of designing and building an architectural project should be open. This is easier said than done – and just so you can get a sense of what is at stake, let me go over some of the problems that these collectives are standing up to (for a detailed account see Corsín Jiménez, Estalella, and Zoohaus Collective 2014):

– Iconographic challenges, involving how to make designs intelligible to people who are likely never to have seen or worked with an architectural drawing before.

– Technical and legal design challenges, involving the protocols, standards and systems of certification (if any) to be applied to the infrastructure in question. Who is going to sign-off the installation, under what authority or whose responsibility?

– Sociological challenges, involving the design, development and infrastructures of collaborative work: how does an infrastructure / architectural work become a ‘source’ of community concerns? How are these various interests and agendas negotiated, mediated and ‘mattered’ into a project management programme: resources, materials, skills, competences, capacities, tools, availabilities, deadlines, etc.? Who has a say over what matters? What decision-making mechanisms are employed?

– Political challenges, involving local authorities, legal permits, public liability insurance, tenure rights over public land holdings, waste disposal, access to electricity and water, etc.

– Plus of course funding and financial challenges, involving both obvious accounting ambiguities (how to account for cooperative and community work, for instance), but also unsuspected openings and opportunities, such as crowdfunding, local patronage or community sponsorship, or quite simply tapping into and re-circuiting local communities’ recycling and waste management systems.

Altogether, then, you can see that the work of designing and building an open source architectural project is a rather daunting endeavour. In fact, elsewhere I have described such projects as epistemic ‘ecologies in beta’ (Corsín Jiménez forthcoming), for they fare in effect as investigations into, as well re-modulations of what a social research environment might look like. The way in which these projects take residence in the city truly re-dimensions what cityness might mean today (Corsín Jiménez 2014). For instance:

(i) The iconographic challenges result in inventive explorations of the genres, formats, languages and media used for describing and documenting the nature of collaborative infrastructures.

(ii) These documentary practices often demand setting up in turn archival technologies and repositories where the technical specifications, standards, certificates and controversies surrounding architectural works are filed and made available for others to consult, edit or keep contributing to. Designing these archives can become a challenge in its own right – and in many respects the archives become not just placeholders of documentary legacies and legal ritual, but spaces themselves of political debate and exchange. There are some grounds to think of these novel archival spaces as the agoras of the contemporary polis.

(iii) Further, guerrilla archiectural collectives spend not inconsiderable amounts of time opening-up spaces for political interlocution between and within all manner of urban agencies, including neighbourhood associations, state administrations, social movements, professional associations, politicians, technical experts, etc. Theirs is a rather unique point of view on the ‘urban empirical’ as at once a complex object of governance, a specific methodological disposition, and a particular cultural habitus and sensorium, inflected by fragility and care.

Epistemic ecology in beta

The challenges of open-source architecture are also the challenges that I see ‘open-source’ bringing to the academy. A challenge that invites – some would even say, presses – the social sciences to re-imagine and re-function their methodological, collaborative and epistemic equipment.

To put it bluntly, I want to suggest that the challenge of open-sourcing anthropology effectively entails re-designing and re-functioning the ethnographic project as a collaborative infrastructure and ‘prototype’ (Corsín Jiménez 2013; Marcus 2013).

This is, in fact, is what happened to us during the course of our ethnography. It got to a point where to keep carrying out our work with guerrilla architects we had to devise ways in which to collaboratively ‘infrastructure’ our presence – that is, our ethnographic toolbox and sensorium – in the city.

Let me bring this brief piece to a close, then, by introducing the infrastructure that has become the epistemic ecology through which we reach out ethnographically these days.

About two years ago we came to the realisation that much of the work we were carrying out – ‘we’ standing here both for the architects and ourselves – involved elucidating and granting visibility to what Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers have called ‘trajectories of apprenticeship’ (Pignarre and Stengers 2011). Every new project we embarked on with a local community ‘liberated’ pedagocial capacities that sourced anew the iconographic, archival, documentary, medial or negotiating skills, instruments and sensibilities that stocked our urban tool-box. This of course was predictable. One is always learning from the people one works with.

What we realised, however, was that perhaps there was some virtue in ‘open-sourcing’ the trajectories of apprenticeship themselves. We wondered thus what the city would look like if reimagined as a pedagogy sourced (open-sourced) on grassroots and community projects.

This is how Ciudad Escuela (The City as School, http://ciudad-escuela.org) came about. We have described Ciudad Escuela rather bombastically as the world’s first open source urban pedagogy: a platform and interface where grassroots community projects showcase their work, use digital certificating technology to liberate the educational dimensions of their projects, and in so doing contribute towards shaping and infrastructuring a sustainable environment for minor politics in the city.

Ciudad Escuela is built using Mozilla’s Open Badges technology. Open Badges have been designed by Mozilla to help people learn skills that might otherwise not easily be ‘certified’ in the age of the Internet. Although badges can be put to many different uses, they are particularly useful for showcasing pedagogical capacities that escape the disciplinary and normative canons of traditional schooling systems. Badges are of course ideal for experimenting with in an urban context. From urban community gardens to Occupy assemblies, from free and open source Wi-Fi networks to recycling communities, urban projects are pregnant with relational capacities through which people learn to turn their cities into more hospitable and sustainable environments.

At Ciudad Escuela we have initially designed 15 badges. Our badges may be thought-of as grassroots urban skills: skills, abilities or tools that have proven useful for specific community projects. To-date some of the activities that communities have participated in to earn badges have included auto-construction workshops by guerrilla architectural collectives, online digital literacy workshops, academic seminars, or a negotiation table attended by municipal delegates and various citizen initiatives.

We are currently working with some community projects to have them design their own badges – to have them ‘source’ their own technical, legal, pedagogical and political needs. It is in this sense that I speak of Ciudad Escuela as an example of an epistemic ecology in beta: an infrastructure that enables the mobilization of relations, media surfaces and devices, and urban sites in novel contingent and productive arrangements for community projects themselves. Ciudad Escuela is therefore not quite a ‘Citizen School’ (Escola Cidada), as in Paulo Freire’s well-known pedagogy of urban liberation (Freire 1993). For us, rather, the city is the school, and it is our challenge to measure-up to its own forms of openness, to open-source its technical, legal, material and associative capacities.

References

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto. forthcoming. «Spiderweb anthropologies: relational worlds trapped out». In Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Dialogues about the Reconstitution of Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser. Durham: Duke University Press.

———. 2014. «The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open-source urbanism». Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2).

———. «Introduction. The prototype: more than many and less than one». Journal of Cultural Economy 0 (0): 1-18. doi:10.1080/17530350.2013.858059

Corsín Jiménez, Alberto, Adolfo Estalella, and Zoohaus Collective. 2014. «The Interior Design of [Free] Knowledge». Journal of Cultural Economy 0 (0): 1-23. doi:10.1080/17530350.2013.859632.

Freire, Paulo. 1993. Pedagogy of the city. Translated by Donald Macedo. New York: Continuum.

Marcus, George. 2013. «Prototyping and Contemporary Anthropological Experiments With Ethnographic Method». Journal of Cultural Economy 0 (0): 1-12. doi:10.1080/17530350.2013.858061.

OSHW – Definition of Free Cultural Works. 2014. Accessed September 15. http://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Open_Source_Hardware_.28OSHW.29_Statement_of_Principles_1.0.

Pignarre, Phillipe, and Isabelle Stengers. 2011. Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell. Palgrave Macmillan.

Miércoles 8 de enero (16.00-19.oo), La esperanza del método (y la crisis de la sociología empírica)

I. La esperanza del método (y la crisis de la sociología empírica)

La figura genérica de los métodos digitales servirá en la primera sesión para situar el espacio de tensión donde conviven al mismo tiempo la expectativa de transformar los métodos sociales de investigación a través de la incorporación de las tecnologías digitales junto con el augurio de una crisis en la sociología empírica (Savage y Burrosws, 2007). Esta última se atribuye a la emergencia de nuevas técnicas e infraestructuras materiales a través de las cuales nuevos actores desarrollan novísimas formas de investigación social. Lo que Norrje Marres (2012) ha designado como una redistribución de los métodos es leído por diferentes autores como una crisis marcada por la evidencia de una progresiva irrelevancia pública de la ciencia social o una oportunidad para la invención metodológica y el desarrollo de nuevas formas de intervención política. Esta primera sesión contextualiza las tensiones, transformaciones e invención que se ha desplegado en torno a los métodos de investigación social a lo largo de la última década como consecuencia del encuentro empírico con las tecnologías digitales.

Lecturas
Marres, N. (2012). The redistribution of methods: on intervention in digital social research, broadly conceived. The Sociological Review, 60(S1), 139–165.

Savage, M., & Burrows, R. (2007). The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology. Sociology, 45(5), 885-889.

Rogers, R. (2007). Digital Method.

II. Etnografía de lo digital: remediación y recursividad metodológica

La segunda sesión discute una propuesta específica que resulta en el encuentro etnográfico con lo digital: la etnografía de lo digital. Frente a la exotización y singularización de propuestas como la etnografía de lo virtual, la propuesta que haré de una etnografía ‘de’ lo digital mantiene como horizonte metodológico las convenciones de la etnografía sin asumir a priori una ruptura con ellas (Estalella, s/d). El argumento que presentaré es que lo digital aparece como una oportunidad para ensanchar el horizonte metodológico de la etnografía a través de un ejercicio de remediación de propuestas metodológicas previas como la etnografía de lo visual, la etnografía de los media o la etnografía de la globalización. El seminario propone dos estrategias para la invención metodológica (Lury y Wakeford, 2012): la ‘empirización’ del método, es decir, un esfuerzo por tornar este en un objeto empírico antes que un canon normativo y la conversión del vocabulario vernáculo de los mundos sociales investigados en la fuente recursiva para redescribir nuestras metodologías. Elaboro la argumentación a través de una discusión de las tensiones que emergen en el trabajo de campo etnográfico sobre/con las tecnologías digitales, entre otras: la construcción del campo, el establecimiento de relaciones etnográficas, el registro y archivo de los datos y los problemas éticos de la investigación.

Lecturas
Lury, C., & Wakeford, N. (2012). Introduction: a perpetual inventory. In C. Lury & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive Methods. The happening of the social (pp. 1-24). Oxon: Routledge.

Kelty, C. (2008). Introduction, en Two Bits. The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hine, C. (2005). Virtual Methods and the Sociology of Cyber-Social-Scientific Knowledge. In C. Hine (Ed.), Virtual Methods. Issues in Social Research on the Internet (pp. 1-13). Oxford: Berg.

III. Materiales para la intervención: ambientaciones epistémicas de un prototipo de investigación social

La tercera sesión aborda la condición política de la investigación a partir de la figura de la intervención. Para ello describiré el itinerario seguido por una amplia investigación etnográfica en colaboración con Alberto Corsín Jiménez centrada en formas de experimentación urbana en Madrid a lo largo de cuatro años (entre 2010 y 2013). Reflexionaré a través de ese recorrido sobre las transformaciones en los modos de producción de conocimiento social que tienen lugar en ciertas condiciones contemporáneas del trabajo de campo realizado en contextos expertos. A través de la descripción de un proyecto colaborativo de intervención urbana donde dialogan arquitectura, arte y antropología (15Muebles.org) discutiré la posibilidad de pensar las formas de intervención de la academia como un ejercicio de lo que denomino ‘ambientación epistémica’: un esfuerzo infraestructural que acondiciona como objetos epistémicos de experimentación las infraestructuras materiales que despliega para su subsistencia. La reconfiguración material y conceptual de nuestra etnografía a través de los ensamblajes, prácticas y categorías vernáculas de nuestro campo se torna entonces en un ejercicio experimental donde el encuentro del trabajo de campo constituye la fuente para reimaginar y refuncionar el modo de producción de conocimiento social como un prototipo etnográfico.

Lecturas
Marcus, G. (2012). The Legacies of Writing Culture and the Near Future of the Ethnographic Form: a Sketch. Cultural Anthropology, 27(3), 427–445.

Corsín Jiménez, A. (en imprenta). The prototype: more than many and less than one, Journal of Cultural Economy.

Corsín Jiménez, A. y Estalella, A. (en imprenta) The interior design of free knowledge, Journal of Cultural Economy.

En el texto contamos la historia de la Offfficina, desde sus orígenes como experimento pedagógico sobre técnicas auto-constructivas (experimento que viaja por la península y América Latina), hasta su llegada a Matadero y re-invención allí como gigantesco mobiliario de conocimiento abierto. Uno de los desafíos que nos planteamos en el texto es, precisamente, pensar qué pueda ser eso del ‘conocimiento abierto’ cuando nos lo encontramos en 3D: ¿cómo mantener abierta una obra cuyos componentes son materiales, no intangibles? En otras palabras, ¿qué pueda ser un prototipo de arquitectura open-source?

Es en estos términos que desarrollamos la propuesta de pensar el Dinosaurio/Offfficina como una extraordinaria máquina de producir ambientes: una infraestructura-evento que sostiene – no sin dificultad, claro – las atmósferas del conocimiento libre.

Os dejamos con el texto, que podéis también descargar:

1. m. Arquetipo o punto de referencia para imitarlo o reproducirlo.

3. m. Representación en pequeño de alguna cosa.

4. m. Esquema teórico, generalmente en forma matemática, de un sistema o de una realidad compleja, como la evolución económica de un país, que se elabora para facilitar su comprensión y el estudio de su comportamiento.

Prototipo (Del gr. πρωτότυπος).

1. m. Ejemplar original o primer molde en que se fabrica una figura u otra cosa.

Durante los últimos veinte años las ciencias sociales, y en particular los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, han desarrollado un interés particular por las ‘cosas’: por la manera en que los archivos, los papeles, la documentación, la cacharrería en general, enturbia y ensucia cualquier descripción de un evento o situación social.

No basta con saber lo que hacen las personas; es necesario también conocer cómo y con qué lo hacen: cómo circulan los papeles, dónde se guardan los archivos, qué formatos se usan para registrar las comunicaciones. Las cosas y las personas se formatean mutuamente.

La economía, por ejemplo, es un formato: un ensamblaje de mesas, computadoras, números, archivos, señores con traje y corbata. Qué objetos y qué personas participan de este ‘formateo’ define, en buena medida, quiénes y qué queda dentro de la economía y quiénes y qué quedamos fuera.

También la política es un formato. La política se hace con documentos, infraestructuras, fotografías, papeles, discursos, clips, bases de datos, hojas de cálculo, cacharros, tecnologías. La política es un parlamento de cosas; un ensamblaje constantes de objetos abiertos a otros objetos.

Parlamento pneumático. Diseño del filósofo Peter Sloterdijk para Global Instant Objects (http://www.g-i-o.com/pp1.htm)

Como en casi todo, los formatos y los ensamblajes de las cosas pueden ser abiertos o pueden ser cerrados. Hay cosas que se formatean para ser reproducidas; hay cosas que se formatean para ser modificadas. Hay formatos que funcionan como modelos; los hay que funcionan como prototipos.

Por ejemplo:

El software libre es un prototipo: un proyecto abierto de organización, diseño, desarrollo y producción de infraestructuras colaborativas. Todo aquél que contribuye a un proyecto de software libre, contribuye a un tiempo a su desarrollo como ‘producto’ y como ‘infraestructura’. Se dice así del software libre que es ‘recursivo’: que avanza re-escribiendo su propia infraestructura. El software libre tiene por tanto siempre el estatus de un ‘primer molde’, de un prototipo. Es un ejemplar, no tanto a seguir, como a seguir construyendo.

Un proyecto de software libre pone a disposición de la comunidad toda la documentación relativa al proyecto: listas de correo abiertas; documentación técnica; foros de discusión; archivos históricos donde es posible rastrear las decisiones que llevaron a la bifurcación de un proyecto; etc. Todos y cada uno de estos componentes (listas, archivos, documentación técnica, foros) constituyen la infraestructura política del software libre. Las personas y las cosas se formatean abiertamente: conocen, o hacen todo lo posible por conocer, el enjambre de recursos y herramientas en torno a los cuales van construyendo su prototipo.

El parlamento, por el contrario, es un modelo: en el mejor de los casos, una reproducción en pequeño de juegos representativos; en el peor, una proyección ficticia o imaginaria de escenarios democráticos; simplificación matemática con señores sentados.

La infraestructura política de nuestra Cámara de Representantes nos es totalmente desconocida. Por ejemplo: ¿qué formatos usan en la redacción de sus informes nuestros representantes? ¿Qué estructura narrativa tiene un ‘resumen ejecutivo’? ¿Qué clase de comunicaciones circulan por correo electrónico? ¿Y son las listas de correo internas abiertas o cerradas? ¿Qué organización temática tienen los foros de debate interno, si los hubiere? ¿Qué estructura se sigue en la redacción de las actas de una reunión? ¿Cuántas copias es necesario hacer de qué tipo de documentos? ¿Dónde se guarda la información: en discos duros personales, en la nube, en papel? ¿Quién guarda qué? ¿Y cómo se gestionan los permisos de acceso?

La política parlamentaria no sólo es un formato cerrado (desconocemos las cosas que la conforman) sino que lo es despreocupándose de su propia estructura en tanto que formato. Los políticos creen que hacer política es otra cosa que formatear. (Quizás piensen que hacer política consiste en dar discursos, hacer entrevistas o conspirar en los pasillos.)

Interior y exterior del parlamento pneumático, http://www.g-i-o.com/pp4.htm

Por todo ello, a la vista de la forma en que la política y la economía se ‘formatean’ hoy en día, no nos debiera resultar extraño, dice el sociólogo Bruno Latour, si a uno y otro lado escuchamos a la gente quejarse por la ‘falta de representatividad’ de la política. No podemos pedirle a los políticos representatividad si no les pedimos re-presentación: es decir, presentación a través de las res, de las cosas. (1)

Por tanto, cuando los movimientos de indignación ciudadana gritan el ya famoso “No nos representan”, el rechazo no es tanto a la ‘forma’ política como al ‘formateo’ que de ella han hecho nuestros representantes. Hoy en día el primer parlamento democrático no es – no puede seguir siéndolo – un parlamento de señores escogidos, sino un parlamento de las cosas.

Y es que mientras la clase política siga en el convencimiento de que sus ‘cosas’ no nos incumben, que es posible una democracia ‘sin cosas’, no es de extrañar que otros muchos pensemos que los políticos habitan un espacio exterior, desconectado del mundo, cuyo formato es incompatible con el nuestro.

Necesitamos políticos dispuestos a diseñar el parlamento de las cosas. Un parlamento en permanente apertura y recursión. Un prototipo de parlamento para una política ejemplar (o primer molde) — una política prototipo.

Notas

1. Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik or How to Make Things Public’, en Making things public: atmospheres of democracy, p. 26

Todos quieren ser digitales porque lo digital parece ofrecer la posibilidad de un futuro distinto. El mismo diario que acoge este blog parece en su nombre una invocación de la virtualidad de lo digital, ese carácter potencial que se abre a infinitas posibilidades: Eldiario.es,  ‘El diario es…’ parece conminar a que cada uno dé continuidad a la promesa de un nombre inacabado. Así que todos quieren ser digitales porque lo digital ofrece la promesa de poder pensar (y hacer) el mundo de nuevo. La política se digitaliza y amplía a Internet, los movimientos sociales hacen de la red su lugar de residencia, los gobiernos se tornan electrónicos, los libros se evaporan en bits y, claro está, el periodismo también se reencarna. He aquí un ejemplo en este mismo diario ( Ignacio Escolar entraba esta semana a discutir el tema). También la academia, que es nuestro lugar, quiere digitalizarse (humanidades digitales, e-research, técnicas digitales…). La academia que es el modo de estar en el mundo de quien esto escribe y de Alberto Corsín, compañero de aventuras académicas.

Hace dos años comenzamos una investigación en un lugar donde se piensa y experimenta de una manera singular con las transformaciones que la cultura digital está introduciendo en nuestra contemporaneidad: Medialab-Prado, el mismo centro que ahora acoge este texto con su habitual hospitalidad. Lo primero que aprendimos es que Medialab-Prado se aproxima a la experimentación de diferentes dominios a través de figuras como el procomún, los laboratorios ciudadanos, la ciencia de garaje o la producción colaborativa de cultura. Y nos encontramos con una figura excepcional que había atraído la atención de Alberto Corsín, la de los prototipos. La cultura de los prototipos constituye uno de los elementos salientes del modo de hacer de Medialab.

Antes de volver sobre los prototipos un comentario sobre la cultura digital que quizás nos ayude a poner en contexto la singularidad de esos objetos. Eso que llamamos cultura digital es antes que un todo coherente un entramado de formas de hacer distintas, lenguajes excluyentes habitualmente e imaginarios en no pocas ocasiones incompatibles. O dicho de otra manera y con más claridad, mejor sería pensar no en una cultura digital sino a través de múltiples culturas digitales; un plural de importancia radical. Me explico. El iPhone, Microsoft o Facebook nos proponen mundos radicalmente distintos e inconmensurables frente a otras tecnologías y proyectos como los blogs, el Software libre o la Wikipedia. No voy a entrar ahora a discutir las virtudes particulares y la inclinación personal por unos proyectos y tecnologías en detrimento de otros; me basta con hacer explícito que nos encontramos ante tecnologías y sus culturas (digitales) que nos proponen modos de organizar la sociedad y hacer mundos radicalmente distintos.

La cultura de los prototipos es la piedra de toque sobre la cual Medialab-Prado sostiene su particular realización de la cultura digital. Los prototipos se piensan convencionalmente como tecnologías de prueba, pero en Medialab-Prado son algo completamente distinto que desborda los estrechos límites de un cacharro que se encuentra en un estado beta, en una fase promisoria a punto del colapso (o del éxito). Los prototipos son en Medialab-Prado un contexto para la experimentación ciudadana, un modo de relacionalidad y una particular manera de explorar otros formas de producir sociedad mediante la tecnología. El prototipo no es ese cacharro frágil que en cualquier momento puede fallar sino todo aquello que se convoca a su alrededor y es parte de él.Quizá el software libre es el prototipo por excelencia: una tecnología en permanente desarrollo, en la que se publican las nuevas versiones para ser mejoradas, que nunca parece estar clausurada sino que permanece abierta en un proceso de mejora. Y en esa apertura permanente sostiene en torno a sí a toda una comunidad. Se produce software mientras se crea una comunidad, se produce una comunidad que crea software.

Los prototipos, de esta manera, nos permiten pensar en todos esos proyectos que hacen de la experimentación y de los estados provisionales su razón de ser. El software libre, los servicios en beta, los wikis como paradigma de la edición permanente… figuras todas ellas ‘prototípicas’ que hacen de la fragilidad, la apertura, la legitimación del fracaso y la experimentación un espacio productivo. El prototipo se nos aparece como una singular tecnología y forma social que plantea otros modos de organizarse socialmente, de regular la propiedad intelectual, de intervenir en la sociedad… Y se nos aparece también como una singular figura para pensar en nuestra contemporaneidad.

Aprendimos mucho, y seguimos haciéndolo, en nuestra relación con Medialab-Prado. A través de Medialab transitamos hacia las asambleas del 15M y desde ellas llegamos a algunos de los proyectos ciudadanos más innovadores de Madrid, como La Tabacalera, el Campo de Cebada,Esta es una plaza y cada una de las asambleas del 15M que han poblado la ciudad; y llegamos también a otros proyectos públicos excepcionales como Intermediae. No nos cansaremos de agradecer a unos y otros el tiempo compartido. Todos ellos son experimentos que proponen nuevas formas de imaginar y practicar la ciudad, una manera de producir lo urbano a través de la experimentación ciudadana y que toman inspiración en no pocas ocasiones de la cultura digital. Otros prototipos urbanos.

El aprendizaje realizado a lo largo de todo ese tiempo en lugares tan distintos ha impregnado nuestra práctica de investigación. Recurriendo al lenguaje del 15M, aunque no hemos llegado a tomar (u ocupar) la academia lo hemos intentado. En las próximas semanas queremos dar cuenta aquí de ese aprendizaje y de cómo nos ayuda a pensar nuestro lugar en el mundo académico y, de vuelta, cómo desde el mundo académico podemos pensar algunos de los temas de actualidad. Trataremos de pensar en las transformaciones que la academia está experimentando en diversas geografías como consecuencia de un proceso creciente de neoliberalización, y a través de ello nos aproximaremos al progresivo desmantelamiento de lo público intensificado en los tiempos recientes. Tomaremos como pretexto la incorporación de las tecnologías digitales en la práctica científica y educativa para considerar la posibilidad de proponer formas de reorganizar institucionalmente la academia, repensar los lugares de creación de conocimiento y la responsabilidad social de los científicos. Hackear la investigación, como hemos intentado en el Estudio de hackeos de la academia, es una manera de poner todo eso en práctica, abrir la academia a nuevos contextos de diálogo y pensar en la renovación de sus métodos de producción de conocimiento tomando inspiración de los lugares más insospechados. En definitiva, nuestra intención es abrir un diálogo que esperemos que sea productivo.

It is an unsually long entry, but we thought it was worth embedding it here too:

PROTOTYPING: A SOCIOLOGY IN ABEYANCE
Alberto Corsín Jiménez and Adolfo Estalella (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas)

Could we speak of a saint as a prototype for a religious movement or of a clue as a prototype for a crime?

Writing in the early 20th century, philosopher Max Scheler thought that heroes, saints and geniuses played a prototypical role for larger models of social organisation.[1] Scheler was interested in the distribution of ethical values across societies. Insofar as a saint was a role model for society, his character and charisma would indeed count as prototypical of certain value structures. The prototype carried a combined sociology of leadership and organisation. It released charismatic and transcendental values of significance for society as a whole. It spilled-over or ‘externalised’, as today’s economists might put it, ethical goodies. The prototype as a public good.[2]

Externalisation is not of course an idiom that Scheler employed. He used instead the term ‘functionalisation’. A prototype functionalised ethical values. Scheler had studied closely Charles Peirce pragmatic philosophy of meaning and this notion of functionalisation echoed Peirce’s famous notion of ‘abduction’. For Peirce, to speak of heroism, for instance, would require the prior abduction of received ideas about courage and valour and prowess from the common stock of moral judgments. Thus, to speak of the prototype as releasing or externalising a cohort of transcendental or virtuous values was not enough. One had first to understand how the process of release actually took place – the ‘heroic’ had first to ascent or emerge as a positive quality through a complex process of meaning-making. Such ascension is what Peirce called abduction. It was different from induction and deduction; indeed Peirce thought it was the only creative act of mind.[3] Whatever a hero may turn out to stand for, it does so because it can function as an abductor of certain prototypical qualities. In the case of criminal investigations, the prototypical value of clues lies in them functioning as ‘ampliative inferences’ for the reconstruction of a crime scene.[4] The prototype gestures towards larger or amplified effects.

Amplification and release both make prototypes work as abductors of sociological effects: the hero is the abductor of heroism; the clue is an abductor of amplified criminal motivations. The process of abduction is also a propeller of certain forms of agency and patience – ‘ideas and hopes’, as Lina Dib puts it in her contribution to this Episode. The process of abduction prototypes agencies and patiences whose sociology is, for lack of a better word, in abeyance: a charismatic or a criminological or a hopeful society, which in all cases is impending materialization. The prototype as an abductor of futurity.[5]

The public, the effectual, the future: the prototype displays a magnificent repertoire of possibilities. Perhaps the currency of prototyping as a language of and reference for a techno-political consciousness of craft, skill and communal self-organisation gestures indeed to a sociology of futurity, hope and abeyance: a sociology of communities suspended on their own prototyping as social forms. If so, prototypes would seem to prototype sociological moratoriums, ‘when the distinction between means and ends’, as Alain Pottage puts it in his contribution, ‘folds into itself, so that what is means and what is end becomes an effect of interest or strategy.’ Where the experimental, as we put it in our call for papers, shifts from knowledge-site to social process. The prototype as the paradigmatic ‘symbol that stands for itself’ in the 21st century’s quest for innovation.[6]

When we first encountered the notion of ‘prototyping’ in our fieldwork, we immediately fell under its spell. In an age of audit justifications, of social impact and ethical certainties, the seductiveness of the prototype was not hard to miss. Here is an epistemic culture built on collaboration and participation, provisionality, recycling and reuse, experimentation, creativity.[7] If the culture of prototyping indeed prototypes hope, shouldn’t we all hope for prototyping cultures more generally?

As fieldwork progressed, however, it did not take long to realise that, notwithstanding its political purchase and promise, the investment that went into making this ‘abeyance-moment’ productive for social experience remained to be explained: What is going on when we allow prototypes to hold a sociological imagination in suspension for us, regardless of it turning on hopeful / liberating / communitarian abeyance? What in other words gets detached, disappeared, in the contemporary elision between the proto and the type?

Our putting together of the conference aspired to interrogate the work of such elisions, and to elicit some tentative answers. We anticipated (we prototyped or rehearsed, in Strathern’s turn) some possible themes. They grew from our ethnographic insights at the time. We copy-edit from the original call for papers:

(i) Openness / closure: Prototypes are defined as dispositifs-in-the-making. They are open to scrutiny and re-adaptation; they are structurally unstable. They have not yet been ‘black-boxed’. What, then, goes into black-boxing a technology: how are the proto and the type parenthesised with respect to each other? Does ‘failure’, for example, play a role in such parenthetical exercises? If so, what kind of failure, and whose?

(ii) Engagement: Because prototypes do not aim for stabilization, initiators of prototyping experiments are known for making room for non-experts in the process of production. How is the role of the public thus redefined in prototyping practices – as users, stakeholders, militants?

(iii) Durability: If technology is society made durable, as Latour had it[8], what does it mean to make prototypes that are not durable? Is indeed the production of non-stable artefacts a way of destabilizing society? Perhaps a focus on prototyping cultures allows novel forms of social durability to emerge – new expressions of cultural, political and aesthetic materiality and critique. What is opened-up in a prototyping intervention?

(iv) Organisation: What forms of organisation does prototyping promote or allow? How are institutions to measure the failure/success of their interventions if they are no longer to be evaluated by their robustness or durability? What consequences may it have for state and public institutions (say, in the art, museum or scientific worlds) whose jobs may now be reconceived as process-facilitators rather than artefact-producers?

(v) Property: Prototyping practices generate novel and challenging social claims and entitlements over the ownership and management of the prototype and/or derivative products: Who owns something that is inappropriately finished – that apparently remains outside the proprietary?

(vi) Critique: Is there scope for using prototyping as a tool for critical theory and praxis? What can prototyping do to/for theory?

To our surprise and delight, Chris Kelty’s invitation to prototype the conference before it happened offered a first point of reference to our question about critique: In our case, Chris’ prototyping experiment indeed provided a tentative placeholder for reinventing the culture of conferencing and research. We are grateful to Chris for helping us explore the productivity of a sociology in abeyance.

Notes

[1] Scheler, M. 1961. El santo, el genio, el héroe [Spanish translation of Vorbilder und Führer]. Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova.

[2] Contemporary economic theory speaks of ‘externalities’ as public goods. See Cornes, R. & T. Sandler. 1996. The theory of externalities, public goods, and club goods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 6

[3] Merrell, F. 1997. Peirce, signs and meaning. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, pp. 290-291

[4] Innis, M. 2003. Investigating murder: detective work and the police response to criminal homicide. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, p. 179

[5] Alfred Gell’s deservedly famous theory of artistic agency may be read in this light too. For Gell, it is the abduction of social agency that lies at the heart of what is distinctive about an artwork as a social form. Whatever else a piece of art does, it generates a complex of effects in its vicinity. It may move our emotions and our intellect, as in the case of a painting by Velazquez. Or it may set in motion a number of ritualistic effects, as in the case of an iconic representation of a god. One way or another, it triggers an atmosphere of inter-agency and inter-patience in its immediate vicinity. Gell ascribes the term ‘prototype’ to those entities capable of generating such an ambience of neighbourly futurity. See Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, pp. 15, 25-26

[6] Wagner, R. 1986. Symbols that stand for themselves. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

[7] Kuznetsov, S. & E. Paulos. 2010. Rise of the expert amateur: DIY projects, communities and culture. Paper presented to the ACM NordiCHI, Reykjavík http://www.paulos.net/papers/2010/DIY_NordiCHI2010.pdf, 2010.

[8] Latour, B. 1991. Technology is society made durable. In A sociology of monsters: essays on power, technology and domination (ed.) J. Law. London: Routledge.

an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. Arduino can sense the environment by receiving input from a variety of sensors and can affect its surroundings by controlling lights, motors, and other actuators…

The main idea of free/open source software (this of free flow of knowledge without the restriction imposed by copyright; ok, it is much more than this) has been translated into very different domains like music, books and movies (I wrote about it when I worked as a journalist, even on open source hardware seven years ago!). In all these cases we are dealing with non-material objects that circulate easily on the Internet; but what happens when the political economy of open source is translated to the production and circulation of material objects that cannot travel instantly and so easily around the globe? This situation is closer to the classical work (v.g. Mauss) that has sometimes been used for approaching the analysis of free software. But while there is a huge literature of social analysis of free/open source software there is still very limited work on open source hardware. It is not so strange if we consider that the first Open Source Hardware Definition was published last week! But leaving this aside, I guess that there are many issues to be discussed. A small example of the implications of the physicality of objects: one of the advantages of Arduino is the reduced price of their electronic boards: around 30 dollars (sometimes three or four times below the price of similar products); however, when you send a board to some countries in South America it is taxed with 100 dollars in the custom. The price advantaged is lost.

‘Arduino. The documentary’ is a good starting point to get into the history of Arduino, directed by a friend Rodrigo Calvo and Raúl Alejos and produced by the art centre LABoral. But after attending the premiere I can say that I was most interested by David Cuartielles, one of the initial developers of Arduino (together with Massimo Banzi and Tom Igoe, David Mellis y Nicholas Zambetti) than by the documentary itself. And I left the place with a bunch of questions. While the documentary shows Arduino in non controversial terms, in a few minutes Cuartielles made very explicit the difficulties of sustaining a project like this mentioning the small details and nuances that make of a successful project a living entity with small battles that have to be fought everyday. Two details: Cuartielles is a showman, he knew very well how to connected with all the people in the room, but his humorous style could sometimes be a problem, as he recognized: a joke in a mainlining list could delay a line of work in Arduino for months; another example: difficulties in the style of work of the promoters of the project as a consequence, he attributed, to their national cultures (Italian, Spanish, US American).

However, it seems that Arduino have become a success in the world of electronics with something like 120.000 users in their website since the project was launched in 2005. A recent article published in the website of the magazine Make (the Bible of DIY enthusiasts that devote its January issue to Arduino) celebrated this success under the title: Why the Arduino Won and Why It’s Here to Stay. It pointed to two interesting issues of the project that Cuartielles mentioned in his intervention at Medialab-Prado. The first is that Arduino has ‘opened’ the electronic to social groups that were not traditionally involved with electronic: young people and artists. The second issue is the community around it. They are indeed one and the same dimension of Arduino as the community that Banzi and Cuartielles initially targeted for the project were students and artists. For getting these groups involved Arduino has been designed under the maxim of simplicity, a simplicity interpreted by hardcore electronic engineers as a technical limitations (if not failure): “Arduino: baby-talk programming for pothead” – ArnoldB, AVRfreaks.net, quoted in the Make magazine article.

But coming but to the issue of the community, anytime I listen to people like Marcos García of Medialab-Prado, Hernani Díaz of re:farm the city or even David Cuartielles, I get more convinced that they are not speaking of cultural centers, urban farms or electronic but of building communities. Community, community, community is the word repeated once and again. But, how are these communities grown?

I guess that we tend to think in these projects as something that is done (a electronic board, a cultural centre…) and around which a community is gathered in response; but I have the feeling that things work the other way around. It is not a community that crystallizes around a project, but a project that is brought into life as the consequence of building a community.

An example from re:farm the city, a project of ‘urban farms’ based on (guess what?) Arduino and free software that was partly developed at Medialab-Prado. Hernani Días has been travelling around the globe for the last two years building communities of ‘urban farmers’ in different cities (Barcelona, París, New York, Buenos Aires…) as part of his project. I remember a conversation with Hernani in which by the way he talked seemed to me that the aim of the project was not really growing plants but cultivating communities. Or put in a different way, Hernani was cultivating communities of people that were cultivating plants. So, could be said that re:farm the city is more a project for re-farming the city with communities than with plants?

A second issue related to the growing of communities. As I have said, Cuartielles is a showman (in a good sense), and I remember a passage in Chris Kelty’s Two Bits in which he tells how in an occasion he had to tell the story of the project Connexion he was researching (an open textbook project) because Richard Baraniuk, one of their creators, had not arrived on time to the conference: “I’m trying to tell a story to the assembled group—a story that I have heard Rich Baraniuk tell a hundred times—but I’m screwing it up. Rich always gets enthusiastic stares of wonder, light-bulbs going off everywhere, a subvocalized “Aha!” or a vigorous nod. I, on the other hand, am clearly making it too complicated” (247). So the question is: how important for these projects to grow is the ability of their promoters to be good storytellers? How relevant is their ability to tell a good story of what they are doing and transmit their passion and hope? Many questions. A good starting point.