Funcionamientos. Open Designs and Social Remix. Selected Projects

On the Chair

by Alida Díaz, Rai Vilatovà and Antonio Centeno (Barcelona)

A wheelchair should not be a chair plus a set of wheels, i.e., a static object that merely moves that act of “being seated”. A wheelchair is a space, it is an environment, it is even a little agora where the chair’s user and the people he or she interacts with - at home, on the streets, in bars, classrooms and every place where human relations take place - gather.

The project consists of the design and prototyping of three objects that will form a kit that, attached to a chair, will enable other possibilities for the user: a portable ramp, a collapsible table and an armrest-suitcase. The idea is to be able to design a basic template of the objects and a scheme of montage that will facilitate its construction and adaptation to the technical possibilities at hand.

The idea is to provide a method that anybody can experiment with on the very process of rethinking, and create their own agora on wheels according to their experience, interests and necessities.

Profile for collaborators: knowledge in industrial design, occupational theory and diverse fields such as carpentry, mechanics, ironwork, electronics and domotics.

Contact this project through the Studiolab Community 

CrossingDesign: Use and Create Accessible

by the work group on Functional Diversity 15M Sol (Madrid)

This project is motivated by the reflection on the difficult access of diversely functional people to the different support products that, during their lives, facilitate their participation in every way. Economic issues, the rapid aging of products, and the evolution of their needs are the main reasons why looking for, counting with, the appropriate adjustments might turn out to be an annoying consumption of time, money and patience. We propose the creation of a physical and virtual space where technical knowledge, experience and the needs of the user can meet in order to design and produce a personalized product, made of alternative and low-cost materials. The project is thought in the long term, the objective of this first stage is to work on 4 products of different characteristics in order to analyze the response to the multiple necessities of people with diverse functionality.

Profile for collaborators:
-Legal advice: specialists in Creative Commons, Data Protection Laws, Patents and Trademarks, recruitment…
-Technical support: specialists in electricity, design, engineering, architecture, illustration, construction, welding, IT, etc.
-“Specialists” in pedagogy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, teaching, speech therapy, sign language interpreters, etc.
-Web developers, net developers, communicators, interaction facilitators, etc.
Other profiles will be taken into consideration depending on the product to be designed.

Contact this project through the Studiolab Community 

Operation Bat

by César García Saez (Madrid)

Operation Bat aims to create a new sense, similar to sonar, using open technological devices. The goal is to use a glove that is able to measure distance by ultrasounds and that can offer haptic feedback in real time to the person wearing it.

The idea is that this device might enable blind people move more comfortably and for those not visibly impaired to be able to experiment space in a new way without using their sight, the way bats do.

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GARDEN-IIIG

By the PINHA Association (Madrid)

The project considers starting up the tools necessary for GARDEN-3G to be self-managed by the elder community. In addition to the net of Friends of the Garden and the necessary groups, we want to design an online platform to collect the users’ stories about the space. This way the confluence between the physical and virtual space will create, day by day, a singular memory of the experience that, like every memory, can contribute to replicas and future projects.

The project is meant to take place over a year and a half: a year for its execution and half a year to follow its development, during this last half year the management will be transferred to the destined collective. At Medialab-Prado we would like to develop the part destined to generate the NET of friends and initiate the design of the online platforms.

Profile for collaborators: Participants with experience in the following fields would enhance the project: citizen participation, public intervention, experience with the elder community, and experience in narratives of confluence between physical and virtual spaces.

Contact this project through the Studiolab Community 

Cyborg_game: Tapper Kombucha

By the Minipimer.tv collective (Barcelona)

The "Cyborg Game" research intends to use game design methodologies as tools to facilitate research and production processes, as well as the distribution of concepts linked to cyborg theory. Using this investigation as a starting point, Tapper Kombucha wants to generate a game within the public space that works as a research-action dynamic of the urban and as a distribution tool for critical consciousness.

Following Donna Haraway’s analysis, as well as other feminist Sci-Fi authors, we will work their contextual transposition, analyzing the role of the figure of the cyborg in nowadays.

In the manner of a great agora, the urban is constructed by uses, social practices, and interactions among agents. This vision of the urban is confronted by the idea of "public space" as a structure configured by rules: self-regulating mechanisms that maintain an order in interaction, reflecting the economical and political relations where it is inscribed. This created space, conceived with certain interests, is different to the real urban space. What we are interested in is recuperating the real of the urban, which is not just the humane, but the spaces, flows, trajectories, the relations between city and technology. Understanding the cyber city as a SimCity that has to be drawn from the aesthetics of everyday life, of the real of the urban and not of the reality fostered by the civic.

Profiles for collaborators: we would like to make an open call to everybody who is interested in the project, regardless of their shape, arterial tension or body mass. During the entire process, we will be very interested in its registry, for that reason one of us will be an observing participant committed to the creation of a field diary. It is important that the collaborators be informed that they will partake in a research (not on them but with them) on collaborative processes in the production of critical artifacts.

Contact this project through the Studiolab Community

ZeroStigma

By TOXIC LESBIAN collective. By Elena Tóxica (García-Oliveros) (Madrid)

This project deals with the situation of people with mental health issues in working environments. During the workshop, and using the dialogues generated by different agents (people with mental health issues, psychologists, designers, etc.), we will design several ambiance prototypes for diverse working environments. These prototypes might be of a technical nature, related to messages about the stigma of mental health issues in the work place, they might be designed spaces habilitated for those same contexts thought to encourage encounters and dialogue or, ultimately, they could be documentaries gathering recommendations directed to companies and corporations.

Profile for collaborators: psychologists, industrial engineers, programmers, entrepreneurs and people related to the field of mental health in general.

Creative Writing in Medialab-Prado for the Residents of CAMF in Leganés + The Imperfect as Virtue and Opportunity to Evolutionize 

By Montserrat Rodríguez Herrero and Alba Fernández Alba (Madrid and Barcelona respectively)

"Escribir Adrede" (Writing on purpose) is a creative writing workshop that takes place in CAMF, Centro de Atención a Personas con Discapacidad Física (Center for People with Physical Impairments) of Leganés. The way this workshop works is that Andrés Mencía proposes a different word each Monday, explains its meaning, etimology... Based on that word participants create a story with the technical support of a voluteer.

On this occasion the workshop will be one of the activities within the call. We will be working on a collaborative project with the ballerina and educator Alba Fernández, who through “The imperfect as virtue and opportunity to revolutionize” explores the idea of horizontality in social links from the poetics of imperfection.

The project, the sum of both initiatives, will serve as a field of experimentation in the re-working of the barriers that produce the fiction of “normality”, and create or distribute new fictions connected with the concept of diversity, which might enable the emergence of new artistic proposals that can be elaborated in the future by the collective working in the CAMF workshop.

The proposal will be centered on an audiovisual piece that will be used as a tool for the formal construction and distribution of the project.

Profiles for collaborators: people with knowledge in audiovisual recording and montage, as well as anybody interested in exploring the concept of functional diversity.    

Contact this project through the Studiolab Community