The subject at hand is activism, especially the slacktivism, which according to Gladwell is a powerful mechanism to engage, motivate critical populations and the powerless to collaborate and to coordinate an action.

The success of an action can only be assessed if the goals are clear and, necessarily, the purpose of any action within this context is to address a problem and thus to challenge the [state of affairs]. His arguments are about how deeply these actions go in order to change it.

The author says that slacktivism doesn´t really change the status quo, but recognizes that it has upended the traditional relationships between political authority and popular will. This is already a great change and today there are several researches towards the emergence of a shared [governance/governability].

One of the author´s main arguments is that slacktivism does not attack deeply rooted problems, but there are several deeply rooted problems that are attacked simply by giving voice and distributing the power that otherwise could be more centralized. On the other hand, I agree that it is hard to make “choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has equal say”. This issue could also be addressed by the field of participatory design for example, with new techniques that are emerging.

Another argument presented by the author regarding the distinction between “real activism” and slacktivism is about taking risks (for example, to be arrested or killed) and he points to the need of more research about it, because there is a pattern that indicates that slacktivism is a low-risk strategy. Something to consider is that taking this kind of risk is just a criterion, among others (distinctions between kinds of risks could also be better examined), and it doesn´t mean that some action that started as “slack” can´t be articulated to a variety of other actions.

The characteristic of being self-organizing is not a distinction, according to the author, who uses examples to illustrate movements that did not even depend on social media.

Finally, the author doesn´t emphasize it, but the weak ties are good for diffusion of innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, which in turn are related to culture, education and distribution of power and are key points to changing the status quo.

The online social movement that I´m going to address is the “Vem pra Rua Brasil” (Come to the streets, Brazil), that helped to bring 210,000 people to the streets of Sao Paulo in March 15, according to the Datafolha institute (not counting the thousands in other capitals), and I´m going to describe how I was fooled by it. While doing this, I´ll try to identify how the uses of social media involved the classic principles of political organizing (based on Ganz and Hilton reading) and where they may have transformed these principles into something new.

“Come to the streets” was the battle cry of the movement against corruption in June 2013, which claimed better conditions in the areas of transportation, health, education, among others. Society in general saw no major changes since 2013. In 2014 we had elections for president and Brazil revealed itself divided, but the result was the re-election of the President Dilma Rousseff. In the midst of all that, corruption scandals only increased (ie became public, which is not to say that corruption has increased). In early 2015, the gasoline increased, the Brazilian currency (Real) devalued and there were budget cuts in education. It was the last straw for a population avid for change.

In 2013, “The Giant woke up” (another battle cry, referring to the country), but then the Giant went back to take a nap in 2014. Now it is time to wake up for real. That was (and is) the general feeling of the population.

This is how the Vem Pra Rua movement called on people on twitter and facebook (starting from November 2014): “come to the streets to express your outrage with us. Our flag is democracy, ethics in politics and an efficient and less swollen State”. In their facebook page, they affirmed that they were a non-partisan movement, and were not pro impeachment, but they “could be pro impeachment if there were legal conditions to this (if the corruption of the president was legitimately proven)”.

Why should I distrust?

• Political parties are important for democracy. I´m not sure if it is emerging a new kind of democracy nowadays that could be self-organized and would not need parties anymore. But at this transition moment I should consider that currently there may not be conditions to that, and this particular movement just wasn´t taking a political “side”. Apparently, it was neutral in order to agglomerate the largest possible number of people, even with different views (which could be interesting itself)

• In a social movement, agenda is important. The definition of the claims of this movement were (are) very general, nothing is actually being proposed, much less being detailed. This makes room for happening what happened in 2013, when people started to protest against a mixed sort of themes, losing the focus and thus losing the force of the original movement (which was originally related to public transportation mismanagement).

• Vem Pra Rua Brasil movement didn´t even mention the most important issue of the moment for those concerned with democracy in Brazil: political reform.

Among my social cycles, I do not consider myself as a so uninformed person and even though, I supported the movement, sharing it within my social networks, believing that this movement would create a space of discussion in order to define strategies towards those barely defined goals.

What actually happened

This movement revealed itself as a politically right sided movement, essentially supported by middle and upper classes that are against the policy of wealth distribution, made by the current government, and I daresay that they just fear losing privileges. At the March 15 protests, people claimed for impeachment and military intervention, despite the bloody history of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). Mass media covered the whole day of protests with live broadcast. In Sao Paulo, state government even released the subway turnstiles for people to participate in the protests.

“Impeachment: take out Dilma. Military intervention. SOS Armed Forces. Take out all the bandits”

Also, people were just uninformed: a) people who supported or participated in the movement and did NOT want impeachment or military intervention, and b) people who participated to it, claiming for impeachment and military intervention.  According to Schudson, three types of democracy (the democracy of solid citizen, the democracy of partisanship and the democracy of rights) “offer approaches to citizenship that are not in the first instance information centered models”, but then he highlights that any discussion of digital democracy has to find a place for “expertise and institutions”. This presupposes information.

Disguised as a pro-democracy movement, this movement tries to manipulate public opinion in order to put most Brazilians against the government, creating instability and an impression of weakness of the democratic institutions.

How the uses of social media involved the classic principles of political organizing:

• Build a public narrative: in this case, the narrative is being built by mass media and social networks. According to the Brazilian scholar André Lemos (UFBA), it is not the media itself that can be massive or post-massive. One can make a massive use of a post-massive media (like facebook and twitter) and one can also make a post-massive use of a media that is considered massive (it is the case of the radios, that can be local). So what exists are just functions that can be massive or post-massive. In the case of the analyzed movement, a massive use of a media that is considered post-massive was made in order to construct a narrative that took advantage of the context of a widespread discontent of the population.

• Establish relationships: in this case, the relationships were established in different ways: ‘one-to-one’, ‘one-to-many’, ‘many-to-one’ and ‘many-to-many’. It was also in person and remotely. The relationships were based on trust, but it was broken for some of the members (considering the different types of membership) when this event occurred. It was on March 15th when the movement revealed itself, with the State government support (which party is opposed to the federal government party), and had broad support from traditional media.

• A team approach: in this movement, I did not identify the establishment of discussion teams. I only noticed everybody expressing opinions and nobody listening to each other. I directly questioned the agenda of the movement via facebook, but had no official response. The lack of a team approach may be another disinformation strategy. Due to the fact that some people who participated in the protests were neither pro impeachment nor pro military intervention, the purposes of this movement were not even shared within participants.

• Form a strategy: there was a strategy, but not for democracy. On the contrary: a real strategy for democracy in Brazil should at least discuss political reform. A political reform proposal is to be voted on in the House of Representatives on May 15, without any participation of the population. No one is aware or disclosing this process that should be of number 1 interest of a movement that considers itself for democracy.

• Take action: on the second protest of this movement (on April 12nd), the number of participants was much lower. Politicians started to express opinions against the military intervention and the impeachment of the president. Thus, I’m not sure how this movement is going to reinvent itself.

“Privatize everything”

Where the basic principles of political organizing were transformed into something new:

The shortest answer to this is that in this case, the principles were not transformed into something new, once manipulation of public opinion is not new. The movement was not even created by the population, as it seems. It is a sponsored link on facebook and the domain .net belongs to people linked to one of the richest Brazilian enterprises. The hardest answer would actually be about making questions regarding what´s really going on and then to take a position, either individually or collectively.

Thinking about Jenkins’ approach to a participatory culture, which involves some skills for a full involvement, such as negotiation, collective intelligence, appropriation, among others, and the five forms of inequality identified by DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001), an inclusive civic technology should be able to foster these skills, since they are not found in many communities. It has more to do with education and cultural environment… According to Edgar Morin, for instance, a revolution of the educational system would involve thinking in a transdisciplinary way and reforming the teachers’ education in order to promote the connection between the fields of knowledge (it may take at least one generation… but I tend to be optimistic).

An inclusive technology would be one that the community creates it from the concept (like a bottom-up creation), considering its goals, and collectively design the system and then interpret the results in order to take action. However, the understanding of a problem continues to evolve during an experiment. Even the definition of a common goal is a hard task, considering the variation of individual views about a problem. So the methods of creation (co-creation) of this system should be evolutionary, like a living system (I just need more time to develop this idea in a comprehensive way 🙂 ).

About being bottom-up: actually, it may not be possible that this process of creation is really bottom-up, since the government sets some rules/policies (government as a platform). This is why I think that all these discussions about distributed governance is SO important nowadays.

An example from the real world:
I’m currently negotiating and evaluating the possibility of using a tool originally developed at MIT Media Lab, called “What’s Up System”, to adapt to the ZL Vortice Project (translations here). I’ll explain briefly about how the ZLV project team envisions the ZL Vortice platform first, an then I’ll talk about What’s Up System.

ZL Vortice Platform is a kind of a mapping that allows for an apprehension and understanding of the complexities of the territory (East Zone of Sao Paulo). It is not just about locating events and communities, pointing events on maps, but making the general urban context reveal the characteristics and the potential of local situations.

The platform will serve to indicate the most relevant cultural actors and creative processes in the region, and help local artists and creators to articulate networks and explore possible synergies.

It will also empower people to locate the proposed projects in infrastructure and redevelopment for the region, assess their design and monitor their implementation. It aims to provide everyone – from the technicians in charge of infrastructure and redevelopment to the communities affected by them – a tool that allows one to track / participate in the definition and implementation of urban interventions and public policy.

PLATFORM FUNCTIONS
1. To provide the urban and socio-economic survey of the East Zone, allowing users to view the urban and economic dynamics of the region, linking them to local situations and activities;
2. To make the sociocultural survey available, mapping the cultural activities, experiences, pictures and memories of local communities – a record of the ways of working, predominant materials and creative vocations of each area, assisting in the preparation of workshops with local creators and communities;
3. Regarding the construction of the informational device, it is aimed to co-develop technologies, procedures and design in partnership with the communities, teachers, students and international research institutions.

PLATFORM GOALS
1. To equip citizens and communities to participate in the design and implementation of public policies;
2. To empower local creators and communities to participate in innovative processes of design and production, articulating networks with companies and research centers;
3. To mobilize local creators and communities to participate in artistic interventions to update the aesthetic and operational repertoire of actions in urban areas and to contribute to the perception and renovation of places.

The What’s Up System is an open source city-wide information system that disseminates locally-relevant web content through a variety of “offline” channels that are easily accessible to everyone. Supported channels include digital signs, customized flyers and posters, SMS messages and a voice-based community hotline that is usable with the lowest-end mobile and touch tone phones. With the What’s Up system, one does not need to be connected to the Internet in order to benefit from the power of the Web (the figure below indicates an app, but it wasn’t developed yet).

 (picture taken from this presentation)

For Zona Leste, it is important to do participatory design experimentations in order to adapt the What´s Up System to the needs of this community. It is envisioned the development of the mobile application, since the use of smartphones has been popularized in region.

Now it is important to identify how it could evolve to achieve the goals that were envisioned by the project team, not only from the perspective of the tool, but considering the actions that the project team will have to take regarding the different forms of inequality that exist in that community.

This post is about our final project proposals.

Firstly, I´d like to return to something that was stated in the last week´s readings: that the roots of PD (Participatory Design) were in the 60s, with the growth of the “Norwegian Industrial Democracy Project” (ref: ASARO). And then you´ll see what this has to do with my final project proposal.

Design, in its essence (if one can use that term), is participatory. Taking the user into account is in the heart of this activity, of this field of knowledge. From an engineering point of view, perhaps, that thought may be relatively new. But from the perspective of design as a manifestation of human creativity, it already embraces this principle itself, intrinsically. In Bauhaus (founded in 1919), for example, which is considered a landmark of design activity, there was already a transdisciplinary approach to design and an approach that put real users at the center of the process, considering their real needs. Ergonomics, which existed at Bauhaus, is an example of this thinking.

(See also this paper, that shows episodes of collective inventions since tre 1850s).

Still regarding the notion of participatory design: in a country which is ´in development´ such as Brazil, the notion of designing in an empirical way is quite culturally pervasive: due to the fact that people don´t have everything readily at hand, people are necessarily required to establish a relationship with the means (the means as the environment and the means of accomplishing their designs), without the burden of an environmental rigidity (in terms of what is considered a ´best practice´), since everything is still under construction and deconstruction. In this regard, there are scholars who study the ´gambiarra´ (a sort of ´ugly hack´) as a contemporary utilitarian improvisation in its socioeconomic context. Vilém Flusser also discusses about designing in an empirical way in his book “Philosophy of Design”, using as example the first lever invented.

What it has to do with my proposal: during my studies, design methodologies that were presented to me were very linear, and in a way that should give as much control as possible to the project manager: 1- outlining the problem; 2- accumulation of data; 3- incubation + ideation; 4- production and verification, or, altertatively: analytical phase, creative phase and implementation phase. In practice, I realized that those methodologies were like a utopia: the actual design process was never straight and clean in that way proscribed – even considering the iterations anticipated in these methods – , nor did the manager ever have such a degree of control over the process.

Indeed, the more control, the less openness to the unexpected, to the emergence of languages, that can occur at various levels: the emergence of a new behavior, of a novel cultural expression (since my main references are projects that involve citizens in their spaces); the emergence of a visual, audiovisual and / or interactive pattern (standard?); the incorporation of the unpredictable to the system itself; or the redesign of a sequence of actions in the project development, in order to adapt to new inputs (user interaction, incorporation of content from users, who thereby become co-creators), among others.

(these emergent behaviors, patterns, events – in one word: languages – , might also come from some kind of machine learning. I´m still working on this topic, but it won´t be the focus here).

Actually, processes of creation don´t begin from a well-defined problem: the design problem is constantly redefined in the process, with the entry of new information. Contemporary objects present themselves as complex objects (in the sense that remain open to other functions, to other appropriations by users, uses unforeseen in the initial project).

This is in contrast with an environment that avoids the noise and closes its doors to the unexpected, before AND after the ´product´ is launched (the term ´product´ is understood here as a process in constant evolution, not as an end point).

Focusing on the theme of the proposal: with the growth of collaborative projects, the unexpected has increasingly begun to be understood not as a failure (or noise) of the process, but as something that should be embraced as an opportunity to expand the product´s possibilities. Design solutions became provisional, not final. This approach has an element of opening and it is precisely the nature of this openness that I want to investigate.

From my humble view – as someone who works in design within the market context, and as a teacher – the design process is a living organism, akin to living systems. As a teacher, every time I was required to suggest readings about design methodologies for students, I always had to indicate these traditional concepts, seemingly perfect, as if design processes were in fact developed that way. In fact, I don´t think this is how they work.

ROZENFELD, H.; et al., 2006.

At IDEO, for example, design involves three fields of activities: inspiration, ideation and implementation (BROWN, 2010). I have the impression that this process still appears as a sequence and not as a living organism. Of course I need to study more, to be able to say.

The process outlined below may serve a clue, the role of the designer in this figure may be replaced by regular users, or communities, or even combined with some kind of artificial intelligence:

Generative Design – Onformative Studio

Here at the Media Lab, the apparent absence of a super pre-defined work methodology for all projects (or even: the variety of existing methods) suggests a huge opening.

So, I want to investigate this opening element as a means of revising the traditional design concepts nowadays. The field of practice is already aware about these issues, perhaps theories are slow to catch up. Of course there are authors with different conceptions of creation (mainly in the arts) as a much more flexible process. I hope to meet more authors with this line of thinking, especially in the field of Design (focused on interactive artifacts).

I wonder: what is the design of this process (a live process) like? What are its dynamics? And I recognize that when one tries to grasp it, one loses its pulse. Any explicit representation would destroy its pulse wave. Any truly useful interpretation could not be fit into a defined structure.

However, I´m not interested in philosophizing if it´s not practical. Philosophy is practical. The world demands action. This is why I became involved with the ZL Vortex project. Design serves to that: to contribute to the technological and cultural development and well-being of humanity within its environment.

Translations from the project blog can be found here.

Starting from the definition of the ZL Vórtice project problem (although it will be redefined “N” times during the project), the next step is to conduct a study of similar projects, along with the collection of information for the project. Map Kibera, NGO 2.0 and Promise Tracker are good reference projects for ZL Vórtice. Below, in brief, is how I plan to conduct the studies:

• Seemingly contradictory characteristics of a project used as a reference will be problematized in a complex view: the elements / components that favor the openness of the system will be described, as well as elements that do not, such as their adaptability and self-organization, or even possible constraints, not necessarily related to technology;

• Technologies used for the development of the project will be investigated. This investigation will explore questions like: to what extent can the project be considered as a reprogrammable system, in co-evolution with other involved systems, such as social, cultural and aesthetic systems;

• I will investigate whether the productions (projects used as references), as systems, respond to user interactions in an inventive way.

I would really appreciate suggestions of readings from colleagues, especially when it comes to the approach I outline here, focused on this opening of the system, considering design methodology as a living system.

Adeline Gil – adelineg@mit.edu / adeline@quicadesign.com.br