Paper short abstract:

Highlighting some of the ways in which social and aesthetic change have manifested itself in the process of post-tsunami recovery along the Sri Lankan coastline I explore a conceptualisation of design as an everyday process of change.

Paper long abstract:

In response to the disruption caused by disasters, recovery is a process through which societies experiment with material and social change. Here I employ an understanding of recovery as a collaboration of divergent agents and agencies, each with its own goals, means, and positioning. It consists of everyday confrontations and negotiations; a frontier in which social relations are not (yet) regulated. Therefore it is profoundly unequal, but also creative. A rapidly changing environment requires new practices, experiments, and modes of cultural production. How then does design fit into such complex, uneasy and unequal collaborations? Can we conceptualise recovery as a design process?

Exploring a conceptualisation of design as an everyday process of change, and based on ethnographic fieldwork in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, I discuss how various stakeholders engage a hastily changing environment - but more importantly how they participate, as protagonists of this change. A disaster response can be planned, shaped to certain goals, and used in governmental strategies. However, meaning and significance in design is created at the interface of designers' intentions and users' experiences. Continuous power struggles that take place in recovery thus point us to the questions, who designs for whom? And, whose interests do emerging processes of making serve? I highlight some of the ways in which social and aesthetic change have manifested itself along the Sri Lankan coastline to explore the connection between design anthropology and the anthropology of disaster.