Guest Speaker

Place It! founder James Rojas worked with the studio on codesign around cities and municipalities. He explained that one of the biggest challenges with urban planning is people and planners speaking different languages. How can planners understand people on their own terms? How do you communicate ideas in public meetings? What are alternative spaces for sharing ideas and working with people? Starting those conversations nonverbally allows participants to move beyond language barriers, perceptions of expertise, and their own cognitive blocks.

Review of Readings

Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development. In Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems
“Codesign in a historical context”
“A software design manifesto”
“Human Centered Design Considered Harmful”

As we enter into the codesign projects and processes, we need to think about it means to develop a project or technology with another group of people?

Much of the conversation revolved around the immediate production of results, which might not involve the community nor have lasting impact, versus long-term and nebulous projects. There are a lot of pressures that push people into short-term unsustainable solutions including time and energy, capital, the fact that solutions to the most complicated problems are often much more messy, personal interest, and individual trajectory. It’s easy to build a portfolio off of such items. This is in juxtaposition to “I worked with this community for three years and we tried to organized and go against this big company…” It’s not easy and really challenging. A balance is projects telling their story around the process of determining and delivering deliverables with things like video and blog posts.

Team Work!

And finally, we formed teams around the 4 community projects for the Codesign Studio. Each group took time to sync schedules and start planning their approach. The four projects are: Zumix, Urbano, City Life/Vida Urbana, and Brazilian Immigrant Center + REV. Each team is responsible for visiting their location at least 3 times over the course and will report their progress on this blog. We’re super excited to see what they come up with!