The way we understand glitches we believe that they represent efforts from the community itself to coexist with the waterways that surround them. Nevertheless, we understand that they can be understood as indicators and ways in which we can work with communities to build up empowerment within them. Having researched about social capital previously, we also were able to establish a relationship between it and resilience, as both are attributes that apply to individuals and communities. This led us to question if resilience took into account differential factor between communities, as the social, economical and cultural practices that defined each of them at the moment of establishing new resilient strategies. After a bibliographic research, we found the following: in a paper by Quinn Bernier and Ruth Meinzen-Dick, they say that they “explore the contribution of local forms of social capital to building and strengthening the resilience of individuals and communities, focusing on their contributions to coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities. This paper argues that understanding clearly the role that existing social capital can play in building resilience is a necessary first step for policymakers” (Bernier, Q. & Meinzen-Dick, R. 2014). Through the publication, they use a case study in Ethiopia to understand how social networks and community organizations pose the first step into understanding how a group of people are taking action toward resilience, and how it can be taken by policymakers as a first step into a design process. This was interesting because it showed us it was very important to take into account the actions of the community as the first approach toward resilient design. After understanding this, we formulated our methodology around the importante of what the community is already doing, and how this social capital might be useful for resilient design.
After the first two phases of our project, we understood that the focus of our investigation was led by a research through design process. “Research through design” is a rather new concept introduced by Christopher Frayling in 1993, and it show how designing can be a way to research in an investigation project. Historically, research and design have been two terms taken into account separately, as follows: However, “Research through Design” (RtD) talks about doing design as a part of doing research. “When we talk about RtD, we indicate design activities that play a formative role in the generation of knowledge, typically actions that we’d recognize as design activities from one of the design professions, that depend on the professional skills of designers such as gaining actionable understanding of a complex situation, framing and reframing it, and iteratively developing prototypes that address it. This designerly contribution may be as simple as making stimulus material for use in somebody else’s research” (Interaction Design Foundation). As such, this process provides insights and opportunities that are later to be used by someone else.
By creating a methodology with our glitches, we started to realize that we were creating a research through design project, in that designing the process we were testing it. |
About usWe are a group of interdisciplinary students researching about the perception of water in the city of Cartagena, Colombia. |