Using the Co-design Process to Build Non-designer Ability in Making Visual Thinking Tools

This research is a case study of using co-design as a way of assisting the capacity building process for an Indianapolis-based community organizer. The community organizer seeks to develop a visual thinking tool for enhancing her engagement with community participants. Community organizers face a wide array of complicated challenges, addressing these kinds of challenges and social issues calls for innovative and inclusive approaches to community problem solving. The author hopes this case study will showcase itself as an example of leveraging design thinking and visual thinking to support and equip more first-line workers who are non-designers to do their community jobs with a more creative problem-solving approach

Revolting from Abroad: The Formation of a Lebanese Transnational Public

Nowadays social movements are driven by networks of people who resort to social media platforms to rally, self-organise and coordinate action around a shared cause, which can be referred to as the formation of publics. Due to years of political instability, conflicts, corruption, sectarianism, economic collapse and declining living conditions, in October 2019 Lebanon witnessed uprisings which transcended into a wider social movement. As the movement unfolded, Lebanese diaspora members living across the world formed their own publics in support of the Lebanese revolution that interfaced with the local Lebanon-based publics. As such, a broader transnational public emerged as a result of the coordinated online and offline efforts between diaspora actors and local actors, which had a crucial role in mitigating the aftermath of the compounded crises that hit Lebanon. In this paper, through observation and interviews with Lebanese diaspora members, we contribute a socio-technical understanding of the formation of a transnational public, with a particular focus on the underlying infrastructures that enabled its creation. Furthermore, we surface the challenges in relation to sustaining such a diaspora public and its interfacing with local publics in Lebanon. We contribute empirical insights that highlight how different technological tools and platforms, coupled with social processes built within diaspora groups and with local actors, led to the formation of such a multilayered transnational public

Sculpting reality from our dreams: Prefigurative design for civic engagement

At their core, organizing and activist work are about envisioning and working towards an alternative, more just political future. Various digital tools are used to support activist work, however these tools engage with values that are at odds with activist practices: where many activists do work in the service of social justice and equity, the digital tools they use are often corporate made, and thus support the status quo, i.e. profit generation, cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, oppression. The ideals underlying activists’ equitable visions—of a more accessible and just future—drive their practices. This intentional alignment falls under the purview of prefigurative politics, where political work “express[es] the political ‘ends’ of their actions through their ‘means.’” [53] If activists envision a more democratic future, they adopt more equitable practices in the present in anticipation of building a more equitable future. This dissertation explores the role of digital tools to contribute to—to prefigure—alternative, more radical political values. My work uses design research and anarchist literature to explore the opportunities that ICTs offer in support of radically progressive political organizing. This work offers prefigurative design as an approach for designers and practitioners who work with communities in service of progressive political change. Prefigurative design is an orientation within HCI design and research that encourages critical reflection of research and design practices to better align design artifacts and processes with anarchist goals of anti-oppression and collective liberation, ultimately building counter-structures to replace existing institutions complicit in violence and oppression.Ph.D

Infrastructuring Yachay: contexts in action, temporalities and expectations in Ecuador's 'Yachay the city of knowledge'

This thesis explores the temporalities involved in the infrastructuring of “Yachay, the city of knowledge” - the most ambitious and controversial public infrastructural project in Ecuador’s history. Yachay, which means wisdom-knowledge in Kichwa, embodies a variety of economic, cultural and political narratives while assembling a variety of heterogeneous actors with particular historical trajectories, motivations and expectations. Yachay is being constructed since 2012 in the valley of Urcuquí, located in the province of Imbabura in the north-central Andean region of Ecuador; it aims to combine a planned sustainable city, a science park with a business orientation, and a research-oriented public university already in operation (YachayTech), in an intervention area of 4500 hectares. Using theoretical tools from the sociology of expectations, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and social studies of time I analyse how a diversity of actors have mobilized expectations during the inception, implementation and reconfiguration of the project. Furthermore, I examine how expectations interact with the infrastructural dynamics of breakdown, and repair/disrepair –materially and symbolically –in the process of shaping Yachay across the project´s life and within a shifting political landscape. To achieve this, I use the Biography of Artefacts and Practices (BOAP) approach to study the dynamics of Yachay throughout time and in practice, in parallel with the diverse range of social relations and settings wherein the project evolves. I aim to follow the life of Yachay in practice along with the contingent elements shaping and being shaped by Yachay. The thesis draws on fieldwork conducted in Yachay for 14 months between 2016 and 2018. Contemporary ethnography is augmented by historical sensibility and methods to analyse documents in archives. The research specifically follows Yachay through four different periods. First, in the course of its intragovernmental scaling-up process from a technical university to a city of knowledge (2006-2011). Second, during the material implementation of some of its fundamental physical infrastructure (2011- 2012). Third, throughout key changes in the operation of its two main institutions (Yachay Empresa Pública and YachayTech) (2012-2017). Fourth, through the radical reinterpretation of Yachay that followed the change of government from Rafael Correa to Lenin Moreno, embodied in the very different context that the latter mobilized (2017-2018). This thesis contributes to the ongoing discussion around futurity and temporalities in STS through an empirical case from a region of the world largely overlooked in STS. It seeks to do it by extending the common use of expectations in two related ways. One, by framing expectations as interfaces between pasts and futures rather than being mostly future oriented, and thus drawing attention into past trajectories in the analysis of futures and infrastructuring processes; and two, by exploring and problematizing the notion of contexts as forms of stabilisation of particular expectations and exploring their intersections with the dynamics of infrastructures