Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article is part of the discussion section "Sport and COVID-19" of Volume 1, Number 1, of Sports Sociology (SD).

This paper presents the approach and tools created to critically investigate the roles and relationships among city stakeholders regarding data-related processes, in order to inform future design solutions for open data portals. The approach to explore the relational dimension of data in local activities is based on mapping the operational roles of the organizations involved in the city data ecosystem throughout a set of archetypes readapted from the characters found in Propp's theory on the narrative structure. A probes toolkit associated with storytelling techniques helped to test the proposed approach during a workshop organized in the city of Milton Keynes. The authors present their motivations and constraints, as well as the rationale regarding the definition of the approach and the construction of the toolkit as part of a design-oriented strategy of inquiry, and discuss the insights gained in the testing experience.

What can writing as creative practice teach us about writing as a research method? By examining the technique of ‘writing on writing’ in the textual theory of Ursula K. Le Guin, this article investigates writing as a dynamic and open-ended tool that gathers author(s) and text(s), and inquiry and world. This technique motivates ‘correspondence’, in the twofold sense of learned exchange and conceptual alignment. We analyze and enact ‘writing on writing’ by making one version of our argument (the spoken script of a conference presentation) into the starting point for another (the written text of the present article). Layered annotations and comments show how revision, review, response, and exchange collapse the form and content of research, pulling focus on its presence (for the ‘author’ in action) and consequence (for the ‘world’ under description). If writing is a tool for thinking, what is learned in the spacetime of hesitation between draft and text? What kind of reading practice follows when a text is finite and open-ended, provisional and iterative?

Since contemporary Western visual culture constitutes its reality in images, reality can be post-produced through editing techniques — as artist and writer Hito Steyerl suggested. Departing from this hypothesis, this paper explores post-production as both a conceptual tool as well as a concrete design method and practice in order to change the Anthropocene’s actualities. It illustrates the assembling gesture of post-production as a tool of knowledge creation and presents furthermore the preconditions of a scenario with the capacity to alternate already post-produced contemporary worlds. The ongoing project New Weather TV focuses on the production, diffusion, and reception of the Anthropocene through the image. In considers that, given that the Earth has been transformed into a television studio, a design studio, weather is an everyday screen practice that incorporates modern and Anthropocene ideologies into our daily realities. The project aims to re-design the images of the weather report in order to perform non-colonial and non-Anthropocene attitudes via the technique of chroma keying.

This article describes the design process behind a Virtual Reality movie intended to brief the Security Council of the United Nations about the situation in Iraq, in April 2019. The last couple of years have seen an increase of Virtual Reality movies made by the UN to support advocacy campaigns and provide general public information. But in this case, the goal was to test if the immersive experiences that Virtual Reality movies enable could be used as a political tool. Through a personal reflection upon the peculiar circumstances of this process, this account shows how aiming solely at instrumenting the briefing, which is a typical political situation in the organization, hid the political and transformative potentials of all the other situations of the design process. I will discuss what inhibited these potentials and how they could be enabled, from the perspective of the social interactions and instrumental mediations at play.

Celia Lury is the founder of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, of which she is a professor and researcher. Out of her interest in the way 'live' methods represent social worlds, she works on interdisciplinary methodologies, feminist and cultural theory, sociology of culture, consumer culture, and algorithms. Celia Lury is co-editor of Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (Routledge, 2018), Inventive Methods, (Routledge, 2012), and Measure and Value (Blackwell, 2012), among other volumes. In the following interview, Lury explains how she uses discussion and critical reflection on methods as a means to build interdisciplinarity. She emphasizes that live methods require being activated within a broader assemblage or ecology, and that an ethical orientation is needed when approaching and using methods. For Lury, methods cannot simply be conceived as instruments or tools. Instead, they should be perceived as practices. In this sense, one of the contributions that design makes to the debate on methodology is the specific relationship that designers have with practices and processes. In fact, emphasis on making allows designers to think about the material and semiotic properties of methods in a very enabling way.  

  Personal dilemmas are inspiring phenomena, which can stimulate design creativity and reflection on users’ goals and values. This paper aims to provide an overview of the main challenges involved in Dilemma-Driven Design (DDD). We first introduce three main activities performed when designing with dilemmas: Identifying dilemmas (discovery), selecting a target dilemma (definition), and generating ideas to address the selected dilemma (application). Next, we present a design case in which thirty novice designers responded to a project briefing in three consecutive workshops. Their experiences were evaluated through a questionnaire and a group discussion, resulting in an overview of five challenges involved in designing with dilemmas and recommendations on how to tackle each challenge. Based on our findings, we discuss how DDD is positioned as an emerging, conflict-inspired design approach. Altogether, this paper acts as an ‘introductory course’ on DDD.

Array-based remote sensing has been influencing knowledge practices across many fields, from geology, military planning, and archaeology to landscape architecture and artistic research. These uses have been made possible by declassified image-data and the proliferation of sensing technologies, enabling myriad interpretations of a single landscape. Following a series of remotely-sensed landscape visualizations created via training and conversation with archaeologists, in this article I reflect on using satellite remote sensing for analyzing the impact of militarization on archaeological landscapes in Afghanistan. The article surveys techniques of image generation using exploratory practices that reveal how obscurity is overcome in the process of image interpretation and visualization. In doing so, it tackles the liminality of digital, image-like worlds where mediated perceptions of landscapes aid the creation of evidence for sites that are physically inaccessible to fieldwork. The entanglement of aesthetics and objective knowledge marks this foray into a landscape of data that is composed of digital, virtual, and computable surfaces with imaginations of territory, topography, and terrain that have a materiality of their own, despite being intangible.

This article discusses academic (Open Access) publishing as a tool. On the one hand, with regards to a commercial publishing industry that ties in its inequalities in the institutional legitimation of knowledges with a neoliberal, competitive, and individualizing world view; as well as with regards to current models of policy and funding driven initiatives considering Open Access (OA) publishing as a business capitalizing on inequalities based on gender, class, and race embedded in systems of scholarly knowledge production. On the other hand, this article reviews current strands of scholar-led OA publishing initiatives that use publishing as a base for an interventionist practice geared at unsettling institutional and neoliberal frameworks of scholarly knowledge production and communication — conceptionally, formally, and organizationally. These initiatives are discussed within more speculative text sections unfolding around feminist and intersectional epistemologies, highlighting the performative, material, and relational character of publishing and publications. Thereby, this text aims to performatively point out possible different publishing formats, activities, and institutions, as well as different perspectives for and on publishing that might be instrumental for instantiating more horizontal and inclusive scholarly forms of knowledge production.

Novel materials with hybrid, dynamic, and interactive qualities are emerging due to the cross-pollination between biology and electronics. In this exploratory article, we propose an original and tentative definition and taxonomy of Bio-Synergistic materials. By analyzing the best examples within the taxonomy, we argue that they elicit emerging materials experiences related to being alive, provocative, and surprising, unfolding a unique set of emotions, feelings, and experiences for users. Such experiences promote a shift in values in society, addressing a complex system of values related to interdependence, environmental consciousness, multi-species collaborations, caring, transience, and imperfection, and re-centering design approaches from being anthropocentric to becoming more-than-human. The findings are articulated in an original framework of Bio-Synergistic materials for socially meaningful design. This preliminary investigation may be extended into a solid research theme, catalyzing positive implications for nature, technology, and society.