EREHWON Workshop IV: Moving cartographies. Bodies in alliance* and the collective mapping of political dissent.

Matadero_ Madrid_ 9th March 2017

This workshop was part of the Seminar: Bodies, Disorders and Democracy, curated by ARTEA and hosted by Matadero Madrid, in collaboration with the MA in Performing Arts Practice and Visual Culture (UCLM).


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In this workshop our goal was to:

  • a) Discuss strategies for creating and maintaining an online community drawing on examples, of scientific, political, social, and scholarly use of online platforms as tools for community building.

  • b) Collectively identify design parameters that will improve and refine the modeling of the movement in Erehwon’s cartography, and make visible the displacements, contaminations and transformations of the projects across time and space.

Participants were mainly from the field of the Performing Arts and many of them engage on social political issues in their work.

This workshop was partly a tool to test our design so far and to understand in the framework of performance, dance theatre and music, which are the main elements to be considered and what are the tools that this community are in need of. It was important to the project that the platform and cartography can offer specific features that can contribute to further develop collaborations and mutual support among the community and can be an important tool for collective archiving and research.

We have also discussed how the tool can contribute to the circulation of the projects through connecting small organizations and their alternative modes of production and public presentation outside of mainstream circuits.

The most important thing that was discussed, and one we have been concerned with from the beginning of this project, was how to create a community around the platform – and opening the question – what drives the formation of an online community? There are many views on this topic ranging from pessimistic to very optimistic about new kinds of social platforms. However, it became clear that there is not a specific recipe for forming, growing and maintaining a community.


EREHWON Workshop III: Privacy-aware modelling of data visualisation and search in the visual map.

Invited by the Mapping Colonialism working group

Rosa Luxemburg Foundation_ Berlin_ 21st October 2016

The aim of this workshop was to model collectively the structure of the visual map that will represent the data on the Erehwon digital platform, and define how it will be searched focusing on ethical handling of data. Most of the attendees had an activist background, coming from countries that face intrusive surveillance issues and state control. The participants have greatly contributed to the understanding and have informed the discussions around the thematic of the workshop.


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Some of the key points we addressed through the workshop were:

  • ⚫ What are the most pressing issues that can help us determine the data that needs to be on the map?

  • ⚫ How to ethically handle the data of the map: privacy, security, anonymity when needed?

  • ⚫ What can be archived? What type of data and in what format can be available for e.g. research journalists without compromising security and privacy of their owner(s)?

  • ⚫ How to ethically handle the data of the map: privacy, security, anonymity when needed

  • ⚫ How can we structure the User Experience based on responses on the above?

We run a few design exercises to understand how activists would use the platform based on its current design iteration and also to learn more about their motivations and fears of digital platforms. This workshop was a pivotal point for our design as it challenged some of our designs and paved the way for more interesting interaction mechanisms for the cartography.
The convention with using categories to classify interventions, which had been established shortly after the Lisbon workshop was challenged as inadequate, as there are many projects that can fall in between categories, as well as some which could not be positioned under any category. This led us to move from having a prescriptive categories system to a more free system of tagging.The discussion that followed this led to some useful creative tools to manage the tags within the map.
The participants gave further ideas as to how the map would be used in a secure way when we ran a fictional scenario exercises giving them imaginary activists projects where the location and materials were highly sensitive. After the workshop we ran a very useful synthesis session with some of the participants who had a background in visualisation, architecture, and storytelling. Through that, and having the participants’ feedback fresh, we arrived at what is now the final design of the interaction mechanisms for the cartography.


EREHWON Workshop II: Building the prototype/Designing the prototype.

London Queen Mary University – 25th of May 2016

The London workshop thematic was about determining the visual design of the map that would make Erehwon platform interesting, helpful, and innovative in representing the data, connections, and other elements of the interventions as they become available. The visualisation is the big picture, a snapshot of all projects and activities, interactive and searchable by those inside or outside the Erehwon community.

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Most of the participants had extensive experience in building digital tools or involved in projects which are directly concerned with building tools for community development, or engaged in research about data visualisation. What we learned from the workshop is that designing the map is a quite complex process requiring many iterations and responses to questions we did not have an immediate answer to. The workshop also highlighted the necessity to involve data scientists in the process. Although we didn’t manage to address all the visualisation aspects we did make a very good start.

We shared and discussed a list of ideas and visualisations that were drawn in the third layer activity of the Lisbon workshop. Starting to design different ways of visualising the information participants were drawn to and raised questions about the user onboarding process, the kind of information that would be useful to represent visually, the reasons for people wanting to connect to projects, and the discussion moved towards the relation between the user space and the visualisation space whatever type of visualisation would be created. Some of the main questions raised were:

  • ⚫ Does what the user sees in the landing page change according to whether they are logged in or not? Does it make sense to make these separate snapshots? If so, what will each visualisation contain?

  • ⚫ What are the most pressing issues that can help us determine the data that needs to be on the map?

  • ⚫ Is it worth to show quantitative insights of the activities of each project? Who might be interested? Activists, general public, researchers, journalists?

  • ⚫ How to ethically handle the data of the map: privacy, security, anonymity when needed

  • ⚫ Strategies to foster collaborations between the participants, stressing out that one of the main challenges would be to create and maintain a community of interest that can really engage in each other’s projects and it is participative and self sustainable.

This was a useful refinement of the insights we held so far and served as an initial understanding of the complexity of modelling the data.

Following the workshop, we run a weekend hackathon, a sprint development of the platform’s first prototype based on the designs that came out from all the workshops which we re-worked by doing analysis and synthesis. The hackathon engaged two web developers and a graphic designer who created the visual elements and branding of the platform. The prototype platform is work-in-progress and can be viewed in http://erehwon.herokuapp.com.

We have teamed up with Women Hack For Non Profits (WHFNP), a London-based community of women who volunteer coding and design skills and time to civic causes to contribute on a voluntarily basis to the next phase which is currently under development. The platform is being developed as a Digital Commons, an open-source, free for public use and commonly owned digital space. Once the beta prototype is ready we will invite the participants of our workshops and their networks to online user testing and then iterate based on the new insights.


EREHWON RADIO TALK

Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Sinel de Cordes Palace – 9th of April 2016

Hosted by Stress.fm this was a radio talk, among ourselves and invited panelists – practitioners and academics, about the content, context, and needs of sociopolitical interventions in public spaces over the last few years, and a discussion on future strategies including the development of the Erehwon.

The invited panelists were:

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In the conversation we tackled many issues, regarding the implications of building such tool:

  • ⚫ The real need or expectation for new tools, the possibilities of the digital territories in comparison to the physical ones.

  • ⚫ The need to build communities of interest to support/enhance communication and collaboration.

  • ⚫ Creating narratives or contra-narratives of power, giving space to the invisible.

  • ⚫ The implications of creating and visualising Data.

  • ⚫ Ways of reinforcing the resilience of the physical projects through the digital.

  • ⚫ The concrete aspects of sustainability of such tools, user engagement, aspects of playfulness, accessibility, language, and digital literacy

     

    Podcast part 1: Discussion in English

    Podcast part 2: Discussion in Spanish/Portuguese


EREHWON Workshop I: Context and content

Lisbon Architecture Triennale, Sinel de Cordes Palace – 8th of April 2016

The Lisbon workshop gathered participants involved in collective and single on-going projects with artistic and social-political characteristics.By discussing challenges, best practices, and opportunities, where new online digital tools can make a difference, we focused on the needs of the users, considering issues of privacy and surveillance and how these tools should be developed, so that they can provide meaningful and useful resources to complement current practices.
We also considered essential to understand how people are currently intervening on the physical space, which digital tools are using, what kind of tools are missing, and the properties of these tools including those that make them useful in supporting action in the physical space. Conversations revealed that it is crucial to identify design strategies to facilitate and strengthen the connection between the physical activity and the digital tool.

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The Lisbon workshop topic was about digital tools to enhance sociopolitical actions in the physical space and gathered participants involved in collective and single on-going projects with artistic and social-political characteristics. The focus was to understand how people are currently intervening on the physical space, which digital tools are using, what kind of tools are missing, and the properties of these tools including those that make them useful in supporting action in the physical space. We focused on the needs of the users, considering issues of privacy and surveillance and how these tools should be developed, so that they can provide meaningful and useful resources to complement current practices.

We used an updated layered mapping method for this workshop in order to both create possible visual representations of the participants activities on the physical spaces, as well as to trigger discussions regarding strategies, best practices and effective modes of intervention while articulating the digital tools and their application on the territories of intervention. Participants were divided in four groups and each group had three layers to fill in, represented in transparent paper laid one on top of the other. In this way the previous layer was to be taken in consideration for the next one so one could keep track of the interconnections of the different layers. Groups were rotating tables each time a new layer was added leaving only one person behind to explain the previous drawing to the next group. For each layer we used an action verb as best translator for their practice:

  • First layer – to do: In this layer they identified the tools that they are already using into their interventions, possible combinations for those existent tools and identified their needs, expectations, and frustrations they face.

  • Second Layer – to communicate/to show: Current strategies for communication with the communities they work with and the wider audience, ‘making the invisible visible’. What kind of digital tools they use and what challenges these tools have?

  • Third layer – To cartograph: How can the above two layers inform the interface of Erehwon platform?

Synthesising suggestions, drawings, and designs post-workshop, we identified the following functionalities for the User space: the ability to add and share a project, add an idea and invite people to collaborate, post a call for Action, have a contacts list with people you are interested in following their project, and a simple way for messaging. Quite important point was the nature of the ‘User’: Is it a person or is it a project? How one signs up? As Erehwon is about creating a community through the activities, our main concern are the projects, and the methods and value they create. People behind them have to remain anonymous, if they choose so, but connectable to other members of the community. There is considerable work to be done on the aspect of moderation which we suspect will be an ongoing process to ensure the platform is clear of bots, trolls and other unwanted ‘users’. One option will be to use secure identities via distributed architectures, such as those used by Democracy.earth. We also discussed the potential for the community to regulate the space itself though this will need to be tested live when there will be a community around the tool.

Some of the exercises slid into thinking about the visualisation and how to categorize the projects in order to start creating some sort of taxonomy. The result was eight categories which will act as the labels of the interventions once they are created, followed by free tags that interventionists can create and assign freely to projects. The eight categories were:

  • Citizen movements
  • Activism
  • Digital activism
  • Alternative economies
  • Community development
  • Urban planning
  • New ecologies
  • Artistic interventions

The main functionalities for the user space that came out of the workshop was the ability to add and share a project, create an idea and invite other members to collaborate, and send out calls for action. It was also useful to have a list of contacts, and a simple way of messaging.
In this workshop we did not focus on the design of the Main space leaving this to be the main exercise for the London workshop. The Main space is the big picture, a snapshot of all projects and activities, interactive and searchable by those inside or outside the Erehwon community. For this reason, we used the zoom-in/zoom-out metaphor for switching between the two spaces.


EREHWON workshop at Transeuropa Festival [Belgrade,October 2015]

From the 1st to the 6th October we participated in the Transeuropa Festival, an annual festival of culture, arts and politics held simultaneously in different European cities since 2010. The festival is transnational in its fabric, concept and content. Its main objective is to create a temporary space for people from throughout Europe to exchange, co-create and find common ground for future actions to call for democracy, equality and culture beyond the nation state. This year it was held in Belgrade, Serbia and the programme was about creating alternative, better, approaches of being a European citizen, and constructing society on its myriad levels: political, cultural, social. It focused on community-generated democratic practices, grassroot movements, and the need for digital approaches that can enable and support community-led change to ways of communicating, governing and living. The festival challenged all of us who are involved in it to bring artistic practices and approaches to political thinking.

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It was also a great setting for the third workshop. The city of Belgrade because of its recent history and geographic location offers a wide view of what might be understand as the multiple perceptions of what might constitute an european project. The rapid growth of the city and institutional neo-liberal approach, the fact that it is at the present one of the main routes for the refugees situation, its historical and present connection to the east and the vibrant activity of some artistic collectives and social movements made it an ideal location to explore concepts of tracing psychogeographical maps, engaging in socio-political dialogues, exploring different routes and trajectories; social, political, cultural, historical, and economical.

We were lucky to have attracted interest from people who are actively involved in different types of civic engagement projects from designers to urban developers and curators (examples of them).

We took the opportunity to refine our methods implementing ludic design elements, narrative and fun in the workshop being inspired by artistic methods, in particular memory and improvisation. We invited people to play a visual game of memory where we asked them to draw different kinds of maps in layers, starting from the geographical map of Belgrade and moving on to visible and invisible maps of the city, of the city the participants are local to, and of any city in the world. They drew places, spaces, actions, connections and concepts both of the present, of the past and of the future. From this activity, many interesting patterns emerged, patterns of values, practices, and lines of thought that will help us start structuring the interface collectively.

Related literature / projects:

:: oginoknauss

:: modernutopias