This is a critique of the overall idea of any type of “social design” or “development”,
as it subjects any participant to the ideological control of the organizer, however
benevolent the intentions. To some extent it is indeed correct, as any organizer of a
project can easily become a helpful dictator using soft power to realize a project in
accordance to the initial ideas. Processes of proposed empowerment can certainly
engage the wrong persons in the wrong way, carelessly overriding subtle social bor-
ders and upsetting or weakening the whole community, rather than strengthening
it. Likewise, it can bring old conflicts to the surface, personal, domestic or commu-
nity-wise. It requires a lot of previous knowledge, highly skilled collaborators, lo-
cally engaged participants, tons of shared motivation, as well as oceans of time to
pull a successful project through. Unfortunately these things rarely come together
at a simple command and the designer will mostly have to work with the material
ready at hand and make the best from it.
Yet, to be able to “talk back” is the best option we have to oppose oppression and
find ways to engage a wider range of people in the formation of our world. To do
this we need to open new interfaces and create not only one big public but a mul-
tiplicity of shared “publics”, of people, objects and skills, addressing all forms of
issues in our world (Dewey 1991). Dewey sees a public
as a grouping of actors who are affected by human actions but who do not have direct
influence on those actions. Lacking such influence, these indirectly affected actors
must get organized into a public if they are to address the problems ensuing from
these actions. (Marres 2005: 213)Especially the organization of forums for debate is of crucial value for forming
publics, and certainly the base communities are forms of publics as they assemble
issues for debate. Yet, for Dewey, the public forms around a specific political issue,
and does not exist independent of it. This means that the public is not the social
community itself, but the assemblage of forces around an issue; institutional, per-
sonal and material. From a design perspective, here craft can play a crucial role,
uniting collaborative production into a heterogeneous assemblage of both people
and products, what sociologist Noortje Masses calls “material publics” (Marres
2008).
As we saw in the introduction chapter, Sennett means that craft makes people an-
chored in tangible reality, and they can take pride in their work. The objects them-
selves, produced by the participants, also help “talking back” and echo of newly
won pride. As argued by Latour,
Each object gathers around itself a different assembly of relevant parties. Each object
triggers new occasions to passionately differ and dispute. Each object may also offer
new ways of achieving closure without having to agree on much else. In other words,
objects - taken as so many issues - bind all of us in ways that map out a public space
profoundly different from what is usually recognized under the label of “the political”.
(Latour 2005: 15)The crafted object and its creator sets a physical grounding for the public to arise
from, from pride in itself, not from the social circumstances surrounding the par-
ticipatory event. As in the examples of Italyan Avlusu and Merimetsa it is the craft-
ed objects and their production context that produces new social issues of discus-
sion and something that is “stronger” than a discursive statement. Where there
before was no public and no issue was brought to the surface, now a grounded
testimony can be made. Here, Latour’s notion of the ‘matter of concern’ (2004)