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- Convenors:
-
Tomas Errazuriz
(Universidad Andres Bello)
Juan Sanin (RMIT University)
Ricardo Greene (Universidad San Sebastián)
Melisa Duque (Monash University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Material Culture and Museums
- Sessions:
- Monday 21 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
In the context of a world in crisis, this panel invites to explore the effects of social, economic, environmental, political or spiritual ruptures in our material lives and how in response people are breaking the rules that condition our relationships with everyday things and environments.
Long Abstract:
Our material world - from urban spaces to mundane objects - is the result of complex frameworks that rule our ways of living. We are expected to cross the road at the traffic light, read user manuals of new appliances, get rid of things if they stop working, sit down properly. These basic actions constitute a system of rules and conventions that reveal the power that material culture exercises on our behaviour. Already in the 1970s, De Certeau noted that in everyday life these rules are tactically appropriated. It is well known that people constantly transgrede regulatory frameworks that attempt to rule our relationship with objects and environments. These forms of disobedient participation transform the meanings, shapes and functions of things and liberate our ways of living. This panel aims to explore how people are breaking the rules of the material world in response to current multilayered crises produced by pandemics, migration, waste, social discontent, political oppression, etc. The panel invites discussions around (but not limited to): What happens when everyday objects make no sense due to current crises? How has COVID-19 changed the use of things and shifted perceptions of cleanliness and contamination? How are reuse, thrift and other sustainable behaviours contesting throwaway society? How is queerness challenging gendered objects? How is immigration reshaping urban and domestic spaces around the world? How are online and offline protests shaping new visual cultures by mixing-up political and commercial imagery? How are these transformations in our material lives shaping future post-crisis scenarios?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 21 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
Adaptation strategies in confined living space go with changes removing the idea of monofunctional space of the last century.
Paper long abstract:
. The current health emergency has led to a change in many daily habits due to the established limitations to outdoor mobility and consequent intensive use of indoor living space. In Mexico City, a survey of 500 people between the ages of 18 and 60 reveals an increasing emotional perception about virtues and defects in the living space house.The study also shows the importance of connecting the domestic space with the outside (balconies, terraces, windows) and the attention to cleaning and improving storage (eliminating everything superfluous in order to maximize space).
Environmental comfort, acoustics, light, ventilation or distribution become critical aspects in confined living. Deficiencies in these areas can affect the physical and emotional health necessary for a resilience needed in times of crisis. The aim is to get to know, through questionnaires and interviews, how people have adapted to a new reality in the way they live their home in Mexico City. We want to know if the houses are suited to the current situation and if there are strategies that improve an emotional spatial attachement that makes sustainable the stay at home
Paper short abstract:
The connected home got new meanings during the COVID-19 pandemic. By using the theoretical construct Mundania, an imagined realm based on the process of mundanisation, I will discuss the shifting materialities of everyday life and how domestic worlds were reimagined during times of crisis.
Paper long abstract:
The everyday realm Mundania is generated through the process of mundanisation. When new technologies are introduced, they can appear as utterly fascinating, or they can be experienced as awkward, even disquieting. If successful however, they soon disappear in the muddle of everyday life.
Mundanisation addresses how an imaginary layer between overwhelming, even ominous complexity and commonplace everyday life is engendered when technologies are habitually used. The concept moves beyond understandings of technologies as something that become domesticated. It is not about something wild becoming tamed and domesticated or converted step-by-step into controlled parts of everyday life. Instead it captures how complex arrangements of technologies and human organisation maintain its incomprehensible unmanageability while still being transmuted into the ordinary, the mundane, the commonplace in people’s everyday lives. There is a tension between supposed technological smartness and smooth interfaces with happy colours at the prominent foreground and the uncanny lurking beneath and beyond interfaces and screens, in the background noise of speakers and headphones.
During the isolation and quarantine restrictions during the pandemic, digital media were integrated in people’s lives in unprecedented ways. By using the Mundania-concept I will take domestic everyday life as point of departure to discuss the emergence of practices evoked by the pandemic, but also the meaning of rule-breaking and how mundanisation can be challenged. The presentation is based on my work mainly in Sweden within the research project “Connected Homes and Distant Infrastructures”. I will also discuss how I use artistic practice in combination with ethnographic cultural analysis.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the notion of 'use' as design iteration, and the agency of'users' as everyday designers who through forms of reuse continually transgress the rules determined by the objects materiality. In doing so pushing the boundaries of their significance and prototyping futures otherwise.
Paper long abstract:
This paper interrogates the explicit and implicit rules imposed by designers through the uses that they attribute to their designed products. After unpacking some of the design limitations and politics of these rules, the paper problematises the social and material implications of these in sustainability terms. Building on Redström (2008) 'RE: definitions of use', and positioned from a design research perspective at the intersection between Participatory (PD), Anthropological (DA) and Everyday Design (ED) fields, I propose an unbounded redefinition of reuse. While this proposal offers a critical examination of design's professions complicit practices in fostering cultures of disposability, it also offers an open-ended and collaborative counter-narrative illustrated in the everyday design interventions that people make with things as they shift their forms, functions and symbolic values through artful acts of reuse. In doing so, challenging disposability and making possible novel design iterations, prototyping futures otherwise. Drawing from two design ethnographic examples from Colombia and Australia, the paper aims to moreover engage with and contribute to the recent wave in design research that is advancing knowledge with the global souths.
Paper short abstract:
Through the analysis of different cases of repair of domestic objects in the context of social housing located in Santiago de Chile, this study explores the dynamics of repair, through which a path of the object’s social life is built, full of value and meaning.
Paper long abstract:
This research proposes a qualitative assessment of the sociomaterial implications of object repairing practices in low-income areas with scarce resources.
Virtually all objects that surround us go through a life cycle that involves wear, but not necessarily a loss of functionality and usefulness. Hence the need for designers to know the biographies of the devices, whose configuration processes do not end only at the threshold of the designer's study, but extend beyond their production, circulation and consumption.
At present there are also many sustainable practices aimed at extending the life of objects, as repair and reutilization of objects, which are acts of resistance against the current culture of consumption and waste. These actions reevaluate the durability of the design object.
Through the analysis of different cases of repair of domestic objects in the context of social housing located in Santiago de Chile, this study explores the dynamics of repair, through which a path of the object’s social life is built, full of value and meaning. It becomes a challenge to the design discipline to consider the production and innovation strategies that are present in the repair, considering that certain aspects of the current way of designing are not sustainable in environmental terms.
Paper short abstract:
Juxtaposing the top-down governance of the metro and fares in Brussels with bottom-up mobility habits, we argue that fare evasion is not only a practice of breaking formal public transport rules and transgressing infrastructure, but also a tactic of contesting the idealised publicness and appropriating the material environment.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we unravel the dynamics of metro
infrastructure and fare system development in the Brussels-Capital
Region to contrast an inherent idealisation of the publicness of public
transport (PT) with the everyday mobility experiences of its users. We
argue that this tension is reflected in the practice of fare evasion,
which, despite increasing popularity in Brussels, has received little
attention from urban researchers, including ethnographers and
anthropologists. Instead, economists and legal scholars have framed it
as an illegal practice or a dysfunctional customer behaviour calling for
infrastructural fixes. Based on observational studies and qualitative
interviews with fare evaders and transport operator representatives, we
explore the diversity of forms, motives, and implications of fare
evasion, finding that the practice comprises an embodied engagement with
the control and transportation infrastructure that serves to transgress
material and political boundaries and to appropriate the space and
publicness of PT. The extension of our study into the virtual spaces
where PT users meet and exchange real-time information on controls and
evasion tactics shows that fare evasion furthermore enables encounters
between strangers, the (re)negotiation of social norms, forms of
community-building and knowledge-sharing practices. Moreover, we reflect
on the changes and challenges for PT in times of the COVID-19 pandemic,
during which the new measures have led to changed circumstances and
temporary suspension of ticketing and control activities, thus changing
fare evasion practices and opening up discussion around the importance
of mobility rights, common goods, and essential services.