Eventual everydays: infiltrating and opening systems through design by Isabella Brandalise

eventual everydays infiltrating and opening systems through design

isabella von mĂźhlen brandalise

the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent proudly presents...

eventual everydays infiltrating and opening systems through design

Thesis book presented to the MFA Transdisciplinary Design program School of Design Strategies Parsons School of Design â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The New School Isabella von MĂźhlen Brandalise Advised by Lara Penin and Clive Dilnot New York City, 2016

acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to everyone that made this adventure possible. Thank you to my family for all the love and support, and my lovely class for being my family in New York City; my thesis advisors and instructors Clive Dilnot, Eduardo Staszowski, Jamer Hunt, Lara Penin and Patricia Beirne for sharing their knowledge and experience, and asking challenging questions; the Transdisciplinary Design and New School faculty for always keeping me curious; my friends Bernardo, Christopher, Estefania, Laura(s), Leila, Neno, RogĂŠrio, Tamar and Teo for the great ideas, help and fun; Frank for the kindness of proofreading this book; my project partners Amy, Ariel, Carlos, Chisun, Genevieve, Jorge, Leâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;alani and Stephanie for making the work relevant; and CAPES for providing the conditions for me to live and study in the United States. Finally, I am thankful to all infiltrators that daily reimagine what it is to inhabit and transform our cities. Muito obrigada.

Question your tea spoons. Georges Perec

abstract

This thesis is a stimulus for how design can be less a singular solution to a problem and more an opening to possibilities – an experimentation process that keeps open the open. Infiltration – finding and filling holes while navigating a path – is proposed as a method of active appropriation and opening in the urban space, generating prefigurative events rather than actual propositions. The context of the project is the NYC Mayor’s Office, being an instantiation of the public sector, traditionally known as a space of slow decisions, risk aversion, silos and top-down strategies that aim for permanence. From such a scenario emerges the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent, a curatorial lab that advocates and embodies infiltration-opening within and beyond the city government. Their mission is to challenge structures and open processes, allowing residents to imagine new ways of interacting in and with the urban environment. Precisely for this reason, it is both a desired and feared possibility within an official context. The subcommittee’s ultimate goal is to build capacity for self-organizing and dissent, promoting conditions for distributed agency, imagination, alternative forms of governance and a more just society to emerge. As a curatorial lab, they are based on urban experiments and an archive of possibilities. They have been involved in literally thousands of creative and subversive experiments and public programs in NYC. While their experiments are temporary, the possibilities they open are permanent. Therefore, the curatorial branch of the group is in charge of storing ideas of infiltration-opening in decentralized yet connected archives throughout the city.

keywords

systems, opening, infiltration, public sector, ‘Pataphysics

list of figures

Figure 1. Man crossing area around the National Museum in Brasília. 26 Source: author’s photography

Figure 2. NYC Mayor’s Office Organizational. Chart. 41 Source: http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/org-chart.page

Figure 3. Chart that interrelate domains, theories and models studied in each of the main thesis components. 47 Figure 4. Sabine Junginger’s four types of relationship that a design function may have with the larger organization that supports it. 51 Source: http://www.dubberly.com/articles/stevejobs.html

Figure 5. Selected precedents of the infiltration method in a spectrum from direct intervention to experience-based. 52 Figure 6. Diagram of moments in the Infiltration-opening process. 53 Figure 7. Selected precedents of the group itself and its configuration and tone. 54 Figure 8. Layers of precedents, learnings from each and overlappings between them. 55 Figure 9–10. Counter-information and imaginary commands at Washington Square Park. 58 Source: author’s photography

Figure 11–12. Examples of Instagram posts featuring the experiment. 59 Source: @_jamster and @eleemosynarylee

Figure 13. Storyteller using his binoculars in front of the Visitor Center, at Tompkins Square Park. 61 Source: author’s photography

Figures 14–18. Tools, participants and evidence collected in the urban walk of March 9. 63 Source: author’s photography

Figure 19. STOPD logo and adapted NYC seal, based on structure of a NYC agency logo. 64 Figure 20–21. STOPD’s desk flag and pendant. 64 Source: author’s photography

Figure 22–23. STOPD’s website mockup. 65 Figure 24. Twitter posts about STOPD during the Bureau of Imaginative Proposals conference. 66 Source: @BipConference

Figure 25. First workshop in the Transdisciplinary Design studio. 67 Source: Cameron Hanson

Figure 26. Paper cuts for the documentary. 69 Source: author’s photography

Figure 27–46. Storyboard of the documentary. 73 Figure 47–50. STOPD’s report of selected operations. 75 Source: author’s photography

Figure 51. Summary of the components of the thesis. 77

table of contents

overview 12 the nyc subcommittee of temporary operations and public dissent (stopd) 14

organizational structure 15 mission, goal & values 16 office procedure & logistics 17 operations 18 tools and communication 20 press 21 1 a paradoxical condition 26 2 design as an opening process 30 3 infiltration-opening 34 4 the context of nyc mayor’s office 38 5 project brief 42

6 design process 44

theoretical framework 46 precedent analysis 52 partnerships 56 prototypes 57 workshops 66 documentary and report 68 8 project summary and analysis 76 9 assessment 80 10 project’s achievements and limitations 86

moving forward 88 bibliography 90 appendix 96

overview

The goal of this thesis is to understand infiltration as a method of opening in the urban space. The project is an attempt to embody this proposition within a pataphysical approach. The project consists of the narrative of the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent (STOPD). It is a design stimulus with the aim to trigger imagination around a very solid institution and provide a framework for dissent. It is a story with missing chapters and different entry points. The idea is to spark a rhizomatic network instead of concentrating all the details in one single place (this book might be the most encompassing component to tell the story). Here, I start by presenting STOPD. It is the site from which I will explore my bigger questions. From STOPD, I will retrospect to the social condition that motivated its emergence, followed by how I position design in relation to that condition. In sequence, I will explain the design proposition of infiltration-opening as a framework for action, including the project brief I gave myself. I will then explain my methods, and present a summary of the project. Finally, I will analyze both its accomplishments and limitations, according to the assessment criteria I created. I will conclude by discussing the potential implications of my work. Thank you for your time and consideration.

the nyc subcommittee of temporary operations and public dissent (stopd)

NYC seal and STOPD logo.

he NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent (STOPD) is an agency that exists non-existently. It is a curatorial lab infiltrated into the New York City’s Mayor’s Office.

NYC Community Affairs Unit’s Organizational Chart.

organizational structure

STOPD’s parent organization is the Community Affairs Unit (CAU), within the Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. CAU is organized geographically: there is a director for each borough of the city. STOPD lives under the responsibility and outreach of Interstices, which is New York City’s sixth borough. It is made of all the in-between zones of the other five, the spaces that haven’t been addressed and remain overlooked and underused. Put otherwise, STOPD

members take on the pataphysical duty to regulate the rules that govern exceptions. Moreover, Intertices is a pulsating and fluid borough. It is contextual and can increase or decrease its size in response to social, economical and political forces that create borders in neighborhoods. Therefore, STOPD’s responsibilities are also dynamic, and its scope of action can change significantly according to the current size of the interstitial zones.

mission, goal & values

The mission of the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent is to challenge structures and open processes, allowing people to imagine new ways of living and interacting with the urban environment. Its ultimate goal is to build capacity for self-organizing and dissent, promoting conditions for distributed agency, imagination, alternative forms of governance and a more just society to emerge. Above all, the members of the subcommittee practice and advocate for infiltration – a method of active appropriation and opening in the urban space. The infiltration-opening process replaces actual propositions by generating prefigurative events – or “eventual everydays,” as they like to call their results.

STOPD’s values are: a. Prefiguration. Everything they do is temporary, not meant to last; their actions are an autonomous alternative to reality. b. Play. There is an understanding of the rules governing a system, a mental apprehension of the established conditions to take advantage of them, and then make a tactical move. c. Appropriation. They use what is already there, taking constraints as opportunities for creative action. d. Experimentation. They employ active imagination, not only conceptualizing but also putting ideas into practice; they don’t aim for completion, ideas are mostly presented as fragments and moments in the process.

office procedure & logistics

Members of the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent act across all city agencies by filling in for absent employees. In extremes cases, when they need to access an office in a day that everyone is present, they would send one of the office workers to their jury duty, so that a STOPD member can cover their shift. They only meet in the hallways, as a means to get things done quickly and avoid getting trapped by the mazes of bureaucracy. When they need to make inter-agency contact, they use the elevator. They meticulously wait for specific people to enter â&#x20AC;&#x201C; sometimes they wait from inside the machine, going up and down; sometimes they are discretely standing in the lobby of the building â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and jump in with them, quickly finding an opportunity to pitch ideas. STOPD gets its operations funded through a multiplicity of means, which could range from the funds of every 31st person that swipes their Metro Card at Penn Station to controversial financial relations with the Zipper industry.

operations

As a curatorial lab, the subcommittee is based on two main components: urban experiments and an archive of possibilities. The experiments could take a variety of forms: urban interventions, public programs, services, policy proposals, fellowships, and both internal and external consultancies. STOPD has been involved in literally thousands of creative and subversive human interactions in urban space. These actions have ranged from the overtly political to the quietly inquisitive.

While their experiments are temporary, the possibilities they open are permanent. Therefore, the curatorial wing of the group is in charge of storing ideas of infiltration-opening in decentralized yet connected archives throughout the city. It started as a systematic process of burying ideas on the ground, in the cracks of asphalt-paved surfaces, where one can find soil. Nowadays, they have mainly transitioned to digital technologies of storage, and are placing georeferenced USB sticks on small holes of street walls. They also They have supported programs of ocular- encourage the population to do it by disities to observe absences, where partic- tributing kits with the device and a small ipants are provided with tools to inves- portion of cement. tigate the constructed environment and discuss sociopolitical layers embedded in Residents can get in touch with STOPD space. They have also made possible un- through maiboxes identified with their precedented living stations, where peo- logo. The boxes are located on several city ple can try and suggest different forms blocks, more specifically the ones where of inhabiting the city. Additionally, they there is (or there was) a public school, a have an extensive body of work when it church and a bodega. Postmen become comes to infrastructural interactions, by the bridge between New York City resichallenging the uses and regulations that dents and their dissent agency â&#x20AC;&#x201C; once in were imposed by physical elements of a while, the postal workers receive a new the urban landscape. Within that catego- manual that instructs them about the ry, STOPD members created alternative details of this important task. STOPD wayfinding for parks and playful compo- also distributes branded postcards â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as nents within mandatory city infrastruc- well as postcards from neglected spaces ture (such as fire escapes and hydrants), in the city â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that make it easier for resito name just a few. dents to get in touch.

STOPD on the streets.

tools and communication

STOPD members are highly qualified to detect spatial closures and opportunities for interstitial infiltration-opening. They are equipped with instruments that measure the level of rigidness and imposition of spaces and structures. In more recent times, they started placing sensors in public spaces to be aware of suspicious and sudden shifts. In the inter-agency scale, the subcommittee establishes and breaks partnerships through memorandums of understanding and misunderstanding, which are among the official documents mostly employed by subcommittee members. Internally, their activities are documented in their report of operations. As a way of communication and recognition, STOPD members throughout the years have performed a hand gesture. It consists of the right hand with the palm facing forward followed by a quick 90 degrees turn to the left side.

press

Some years ago, a short documentary about the subcommittee was found and presented at a staff meeting at the New York Times. The source of the documentary is unknown; however, it was recentely discovered that the journalist that brought the video (supposedly from the city archives) was in the same cohort of the Strategic Communications graduate program at Columbia University as the current chair of the Press Office of the Senior Advisor Mayor at that time. A picture of the two of them having lunch together in the schoolâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cafeteria was found in personal accounts in social media. To a lesser extent, the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent has been cited in academic papers and scholar lectures. They gained relative attention after their beets harvesting program for acidic soil in-between buildings.

Interstices, NYCâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sixth borough, as represented in the documentary.

Ocularities to observe absences, a public program made possible by STOPD.

STOPDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report of selected operations.

1 a paradoxical condition

Figure 1. Man crossing area around the National Museum in Brasília.

1. James Holston, The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989).

Brasília, the capital of Brazil, is a strange city. Starting as literally two lines on paper, it became one of the main materializations of modernist utopia. During the more than ten years that I lived there, what mostly fascinated me about Brasília was how inhabitants actually lived there, inside the plan, continually updating a very rigid and top-down strategy. By their everyday uses of spaces, people started slowly to “familiarize a defamiliarized city.”1 Be it the use of extra outdoor space by a small restaurant, or an inversion of the entry door by a neighborhood shop, or even living in spaces planned to be commercial, the appropriations are quiet subversions that claim agency and imagination over a space that was initially imposed as the only option. My thoughts began in Brasília.

e constantly define our time as a moment where uncertainty, fluidity and decentralization are embraced. Paradoxically, our social order is still mainly informed by modern urban systems, dictated by determination, hierarchy, permanence and order. We can observe those principles in the organization of different urban structures and institutions in our everyday life, such as schools, hospitals, transportation, armies, regulations and city plans. We can say that they work phenomenally to some extent, and the contemporary city and contemporary urban society are clear evidences of their success: “the streets have been paved, and roads now connect all places; houses shelter virtually everyone; the dread diseases are virtually gone; clean water is piped into nearly every building; sanitary sewers carry wastes from them; schools and hospitals serve virtually every district; and so on.”2

However, as we start acknowledging the interconnectedness and complexities of the structures that surround us, it becomes obvious that, as Rittel and Webber state in their famous paper, “the professionalized cognitive and occupational styles that were refined in the first half of this century, based in Newtonian mechanistic physics, are not readily adapted to contemporary conceptions of interacting open systems and to contemporary concerns with equity.”3 Put otherwise, there is still a search for confronting problems of social order with scientific bases, as if they were easily understandable, isolated and consensual. Nevertheless, social issues are inherently different from problems in the natural and fragmented sciences –

2. Horst W. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning” (Policy sciences 4, no. 2, 1973: 156).

3. Ibid.

they are wicked, uncertain, ill-defined, and “they rely upon elusive political judgment for resolution. (Not ‘solution.’ Social problems are never solved.)”4 To push this modern model of thought further and try to understand it, it is useful to compare it with contemporary principles. Exploring the relation of modernism and contemporary times (in his terms, ‘fordist modernism’ and ‘flexible postmodernism’), David Harvey creates a comparative schema of values of each period, opposing respectively the modern-

4. Ibid., page 160.

5. David Harvey, Condição pós-moderna: Uma pesquisa sobre as Origens da Mudança Cultural (São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1996).

6. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power. Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed Books, 2014).

7. Clive Dilnot, “Thinking the Artificial as the Horizon and Medium of our World” (class lecture, “Design for this century” from Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY, October 2, 2014).

8. Herbert Simon, Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). 9. Giulio C. Argan, História da Arte como História da Cidade (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1998).

ist paranoia to contemporary schizophrenia, purpose (modernist) to play and chance (contemporary), determination to indetermination, universalism to localism, depth to surface, concentration to dispersion, industry to services, permanence to ephemerality.5 There is a clear inconsistency between the times that we live in (contemporaneity), and the many principles that still regulate the structures that support them. Although some level of order and accommodation are basic conditions to living and interacting in a city, these general principles don’t serve us anymore. The disconnection between our constructed environment and our contemporary expectations only contributes to a general context of alienation, lack of agency, power disbalance and crisis of imagination. Further, the disconnect perpetuates a perverse system that “relies on us imagining that the system is the natural expression of human nature, or that it is too powerful to be changed, or that no other system could be desirable.”6 There is a general disbelief in the existence of the future, which leads us to a passive and apathetic de-futuring – the paradoxical condition in which we doubt even the reality of the future.7 Because of our inactivity, it is easy to notice that the old style of top-down, outside-in principle of design is simply not working. However, if we understand design from a broad perspective, as a projectual practice and as a means of changing the existing situations into preferred ones,8 there is an opportunity to challenge and open the given conditions. We can get there by expanding on Giulio Argan’s concept of project, particularly in comparison to program. A project is a process integrated to society’s history that reaches its practical capability precisely in the moment of projecting something to the world.9

As a projectile, a project carries in itself a latent movement: it is a predisposition of the operational means to put into practice imagined processes. In that sense, if there is no imagination, there is no way for a project to exist. A program, on the other hand, is a calculat-

ed preordination that tries to overcome history as order and social existence principles. There is no choice or decision for individuals in a program. It tends to repression and violence against any contradiction to its system. The program attempts to replace the project, closing spaces and structures. As J. C. Jones puts it, “[w]e have somehow accepted, as normal, as ‘in the public interest,’ that industrial life is to be organised to eliminate all opportunities to be.”10 In a context that leads to programs and shutdowns of possibilities (of being), design, as a projectual practice, has the capability to understand and operate over fissures of prescribed spaces, opening zones of imagination and allowing alternative realities to emerge within the given one.

10. John Christopher Jones, Essays in design (Chichester etc.: Wiley, 1984).

2 design as an opening process

In this scenario, how can we think about design less as a singular solution to a problem, which is a classic techno-scientific approach that consolidates modern configurations, and more as an opening to possibilities? How can design be a dynamic and open-ended process, a science of opportunities?

xcept for when it was considered merely a cosmetic element, design has been traditionally associated with models of order and rationality. It has been usually distinguished from art practices precisely for its methods of problem-solving, frameworks, solid plans for action, and its commitment to social transformation. That said, it has correlated in many senses with the scientific mindset of the first half of last century. Although it is a projectual process, in its professional history, design has formally materialized ideas through strategies that try to control outcomes and predict consequences. In regards to methodologies, the classical approach to systems-thinking was a scheme of distinct and sequential phases of work. However, both comprehension and extension of the practice have expanded. Since it is contextual and deals with wicked problems, design is by nature not scientific – making the old approach immediately obsolete; yet its investigative character and attempt of sensemaking and depiction of orders of reality do approximate the field to an open and dynamic science, a science of opportunities.1 Such a science would extrapolate the limits of a single discipline, studying human interactions and coexistence in time and space. There are no more restrictions in the ideas of materiality and artificiality. Latour postulates that today’s matters of fact are becoming matters of concern,2 meaning that we should see matters of fact critically, and not simply as all that is given in experience. Taking matters of concern as a starting point, we can shift from projecting objects to projecting things in a broad sense: now we can design issues, rather than accept them as given facts. Thus, design is a process of making things right, a way of shaping how we live with each other and deal with artifacts. It is a context-based practice that speculates, imagines, and proposes actions; mediates things and persons; and intervenes in the contemporary universe with operations and courses of action.

The proposition here is that design can stretch its capabilities even more and act as an opening process. Instead of creating new things, it can interact with the actual existing context, showing possibilities and taking advantage of given con-

1. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, “Sistema,” Enciclopédia Einaudi 26 (1993). 2. Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)” (lecture, Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008).

3. Martin Heidegger, Basic writings: from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964) (Harper Collins, 1993).

4. Paul Klee, Paul Klee on modern art (London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1966).

5. Simon Critchley, Very Little... Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (London; New York: Routledge, 2004).

straints as opportunities for creative action. Design can then play a role in “keeping open the open.”3 By open, I mean Martin Heidegger’s notion of human beings defined by their ability to constantly reflect on, as well as question, their own conditions of existence and ways of living in the world. In that sense, design can shape the circumstances that foster and keep the enigma’s element of living alive. By engaging with prescribed situations in unexpected and unpredictable ways, design becomes a dissensual way of thinking and acting in the world, leaving room for the contestational and conflictual nature of common life. Each individual is empowered and capable of contributing to daily micropolitical operations and participation, extrapolating the designations and prescriptions of the city. There is, however, a double implication in the concept of design as an opening process. In order to have an opening capacity, design itself needs to be opened. As said above, it is a practice traditionally meant to designate orders of action, testing and predicting implications, and operating under relatively safe assumptions. As it becomes an opening process, there is a shift in the order of actions. Instead of going from prototype to type – or from a working test to the actual implementation of an idea (which is not always true in the design methods, but is helpful in this explanation), an opening process implies the inverse sequence. The course from type to prototype attempts to recuperate the primeval power4 of a designed element or situation, returning to an experimental phase, almost un-designing what has been designed, and looking at it with fresh curiosity. In that sense, it doesn’t have actual propositions as outcomes, but rather early experiments, fragments of ideas that are not meant to be permanent. Ultimately, design as an opening process prompts eventual everydays to take place – or the potentialities intrinsic to the actual everyday.5 By interacting with systems in the city that permeate daily life, especially the ones defined by modern configurations of thought, there is a chance to challenge them and project new imaginative realities. In a small scale, this shift in the concept of progress and linear evolution contributes to a

reconfiguration of common imagination – outside, perhaps, of the reality of these words in a capitalist context. “The common imagination holds that the ‘commons’ are historic precedents, current realities and future objectives all at once, and is courageous in spite of the fact that no common will ever be common enough.”6 To some extent, design as opening is a never finished project – it has to remain open, as the commons are not built on fixed or universal values, but on and out of the never ending negotiations between people and the shared projects of imagination and eventual everydays.

6. Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power. Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons (Zed Books, 2014).

3 infiltration-opening

The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work. Paul Klee

here is no room for revolutions nor destructions – the grand narrative of modernism is gone, we can’t go back in time, and the world can’t be reinvented. Potential transformations in space come rather from below, from the appropriation of given structures and systems. As argued earlier, the approach of design as an opening process comes as a response to our current times, where we have a set of prescribed and imposed urban structures (as well as mindsets supporting them) that don’t coincide with our contemporary expectations and needs. There could be many ways in which design acts as an opening device; in this thesis, however, I am proposing the use of what is already given, an appropriation of the actual existing structures in order to open them. I am calling this process infiltration-opening. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to infiltrate is a “transitive verb. 1. to cause (as a liquid) to permeate something by penetrating its pores or interstices; 2. to pass (troops) singly or in small groups through gaps in the enemy line; 3. to enter or become established in gradually or unobtrusively usually for subversive purposes.”1 In regards to the definition and common use of the word, I understand that an infiltrated agent depends on an initial comprehension of a structure or system and, from there, navigates and takes advantages of the determined and undetermined paths – tubes, pores, gaps. Here, the context of action is the city, the space of the poetics and politics of the everyday, where we practice ways of making and living together. A key concept for infiltration is the idea of constraints, and how one takes advantage of the restrictions imposed by the system as opportunities for creative action.2 Although we usually think of inspiration as requiring “total freedom” and “intuitive explorations,” in reality, those would be closer to the automatism of the mind, the immediate ideas. Constraints actually open up mental categories and allow unintended connections to be made. The assignment of arbitrary constraints in their writing projects was a concept meticulously explored by the group OuLiPo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, workshop of potential literature – which I will discuss in more detail later) in the 60s.

1. “Infiltrate,” Merriam-Webster, http://www.merriamwebster.com/ dictionary/infiltrate.

2. A study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam shows that encountering an obstacle in one task can elicit a more global processing that automatically associates to unrelated tasks, “leading people to broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts.” Janina Marguc, Jens Förster and Gerben A. Van Kleef, “Stepping back to see the big picture: when obstacles elicit global processing”, Journal of personality and social psychology 101, no. 5 (2011: 883).

Along these lines, the scope of this thesis is to understand and explore the potentialities of infiltration as a method for opening new possibilities within imposed realities. For the purposes of this restricted timeframe and academic context, this theoretical framework is applied to a specific situation and project, as a demonstration of the major idea within a relatively controlled scale. Nevertheless, it is an open-ended stimulus that can be translated to many contexts and spectrums of operation, including ones of wider social implications, such as education, transportation, health, criminal justice.

4 the context of nyc mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office

olitical institutions, such as government agencies, are a representative situation of the context presented. More specifically, I am looking at the NYC Mayor’s Office. It is an opportune context for this design thesis to engage with for the current practices and tendencies in the public sector, as well as for the city’s collective social imaginary in the background. Also, the specifics of NYC Mayor’s Office organizational structure illustrate a solid institution that operates under modernist principles.

The public sector has increasingly become a mutual point of interest between designers and the government. The latter’s overall mindset and processes are still heavily influenced by risk aversion and decisions that aim for permanence, stability, social control and order; whereas design approach is human-centered, empathetic and iterative. According to the Global Trends 2030 report, published by the National Intelligence Council, one of the game changers within the megatrends (such as individual empowerment, rise of networks and coalitions, growing global population)1 for the next 15 to 30 years is “whether governments have the capabilities to adapt fast enough to harness change, or they are overwhelmed by the change.”2 Jhen-Yi Lin identified four tendencies in the current research of design and innovation in the public sector, of how design might be helpful in addressing adaptability and responsiveness. First, co-creation and citizen engagement for new policies and service solutions (examples: Participatory Budgeting Project, g0v.tw, iCitizen); second, the setting up of labs to gather user insights during the process of policy implementation and service delivery (examples: MindLab in Denmark, Policy Lab in the U.K. and Design Council’s Design in the Public Sector pilot program); third, the redesign of the physical environment for a more pleasant atmosphere (example: Neighborhood Opportunity Network – NeON); and fourth, technology-enhanced interfaces, platforms, and big data as tools to accelerate feedback and to inform policy analysis and decisions (examples: The United States Internal Revenue Service – IRS, The United States Postal Service – USPS, and New York City’s Business Integrity Commission – BIC). Al-

1. Global Trends, “2030: Alternative Worlds, a publication of the National Intelligence Council” (2012). 2. Jhen-Yi Lin, “Why Design as a set of Capabilities is Relevant in the Public Sector Innovation” (master’s thesis, Parsons The New School for Design, 2015).

though not definitive, this identifies a current movement and precedents of design entering and/or engaging with the public sector in different ways.

3. Arjun Appadurai, Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy in Theory, Culture & Society (1990; 7; 295).

4. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on cities (vol. 63, no. 2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 5. Ibid.

6. “Government of New York City,” https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ Government_of_New_ York_City.

By choosing the context of the city of New York, there is also an opportunity to address a social context of gradual loss of collective imaginary and objectification of the city. As we watch the development of media, transportation and information systems in explosive speed, theories such as the “global village” by Marshall McLuhan seem to have overestimated the communitarian implications of new media – the new media is rather creating communities with no sense of place.3 The politics of global flows, especially concerning leisure and entertainment – and New York City is emblematic in that sense – is built upon alienation and spectacle, slowly dissolving an idea of the social imaginary around the collective production of the city. Henri Lefebvre argues that there is a science of the city, that has the city as an object and investigates it through fragmentary scientific approaches (which have already been discussed as inappropriate for the context). The author argues that that condition of the object – the city as a consummate reality – is also falling apart, as it is no longer understood practically, but as an “object of cultural consumption for tourists, for a aestheticism, avid for spectacles and the picturesque”.4 There is no way to go back to a traditional city; however, there is a call for new approaches to understand and create opportunities for the urban society, which remains as a virtual object, to become a place of encounters, opportunities and participation.5 Narrowing the context down, “[t]he Mayor of the City of New York is head of the executive branch of New York City’s government. The mayor’s office administers all city services, public property, police and fire protection, most public agencies, and enforces all city and state laws within New York City.”6 There are about 50 city departments, and the New York City government employs 325,000 people. Their institutional organizational chart illustrates the overall hierarchical structure and relationships of the internal actors. The arborescent and color-coded diagram evidences silos and isolation, which, con-

cerning its numerous elements and participants, usually leads to redundancy and unintended overlappings.

Finally, as I started developing the project and its specificities, the governmental context revealed itself more problematic and controversial than it seemed. That aspect made it even more interesting, and informed some design decisions, as I will explain further.

Figure 2. NYC Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office Organizational. Chart.

5 project brief

It needs a discipline, obviously. A discipline of process. An architecture, of being. A way to share control. Here we are. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve got the wrong disciplines. (...) We need a little recklessness. J. C. Jones

he project consists of the conceptualization of an infiltrated agency in the NYC Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Office. It is a subcommittee committed to build capacity around and practice infiltration-opening. Besides the experiments and programs, they also collect ideas from the public in decentralized yet connected archives throughout the city. The subcommittee represents a challenge of the current processes of decision making and lack of experimentation in the government, and it comes precisely from inside it. It questions the controlled structure of officiality, creating a temporary autonomous zone,1 an agency that is deliberately slippery. Being slippery, and thus relating to different audiences and approaches, the project explores the interconnections and mutual influences of zones of fiction, reality and in-between narratives that coexist in the project.

1. Hakim Bey, TAZ: The temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism (Autonomedia, 2003).

6 design process

he research started as a follow up to a personal academic journey. I took it as an opportunity to further develop topics that are not only dear to me, but to also meaningfully expand the conversation and practices in a variety of different fields. This thesis is also developed in parallel to a Master of Arts at the University of Brasília, where I investigated the topics of operations and narratives in space through the poetics and politics of infiltration. The focus there is not to have a practical project as an outcome, but rather to combine theory and practice in a more exploratory approach. There is no commitment to a finalized product, preferring instead experimental exercises that are complementary to the theoretical frameworks. The present research took different forms. Initial and broad questions that guided the following steps are: – What does it mean to design in and for the contemporary times? – How can design challenge the current systems, including design itself? – How can design encourage new forms of interactions in the city? – Who is already doing this and how can design learn from them? – What is the role that design can play to support dissent and otherness?

This is a brief summary of my process. Taking a chronological perspective, there was initially a relatively long step of exploration and discovery, especially through secondary research. It created theoretical evidence and argument for the initial thoughts, and also deepened the discussion in unprecedented ways. In parallel, I was doing some non-structured observations through walking around the city. There were early site-specific interventions, in a very small scale, to learn about the possibilities and public reactions to determined actions. The process was permeated by meetings with experts, both related to the theoretical field and the specific context of action, in addition to an endless search analysis of precedents. Each step led to a synthesis moment, that could be in the form of criteria, insight, or a more direct proposition (or fragment of idea). Ideation moments – and the same applies for steps of secondary research, observations and interviews – were not confined to a specific phase of the process, but it became

more intense as the previous steps started slowing down. It was done through drawings, material exploration and workshop sessions. The process seems more blurry at that specific step, especially as it started bleeding into prototypes and the production of materials. That was also when I started creating more stable connections to people to collaborate in the project, established as partners to different extents. The development of the actual materials, as well as crafting the narrative, were also informed by workshop sessions and interviews with experts. Finally, the project led to more questions and controversies. These themselves became a means to discuss the topic and evaluate the desirability (and risk) of the proposition with people directly involved in the context (workers at the Mayor’s Office). What follows are the details of some of the moments of the process, not necessarily in a chronological order: theoretical framework, precedent analysis, partnerships, prototypes, workshops, synthesis and production of materials (documentary and report). theoretical framework

The project benefits from theories and practices of different fields, including social and political theory, philosophy, critical design, urbanism, art and literature. The chart (figure 3) demonstrates the main domains that relate to the social thesis, the design thesis, the design proposition, and the project and artifacts. It works as a cartography of my process’ journey, where the progression is indicated by the arrows – and my entry point (motivation) came from the social thesis. The intersections between those domains informed specific propositions of the work (lighter gray areas relate to theory and framing, whereas the darker gray ones relate to the project). The articulation of the theory, combined with learnings from precedents, contributed to a theoretical framework for action – the method of infiltration-opening. It was translated to practice through the conceptualization of a group that embodies infiltration as a mindset and as a practice. In that sense, they articulate the discourse to the public and practice the theory behind it.

Figure 3. Chart that interrelate domains, theories and models studied in each of the main thesis components.

The sections 1 and 2 of this book (a paradoxical condition and design as an opening process) already presented the theoretical models that informed both social (a) and design thesis (b). As it can be seen in the diagram, they came mostly from the fields of social and urban theory and philosophy, respectively.

1. Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

2. Jilly Traganou, Wall Street Bounded and Unbinding: The Spatial as a Multifocal Lens in Design Studies (2015).

When it comes to the design proposition (c) – the topic of infiltration as a method for opening, I was mostly informed by political theory and activism (although it could be argued that some authors transit between fields of urban theory and art as well). The thought of infiltration – some kind of proactive force that navigates the given context – has a direct correlation with Michel de Certeau’s concepts of strategic and tactical ways of operating in space over time.1 Analyzing forms of poetic and political navigation in the city, Certeau divides schemes of action between strategic and tactical. It is a very useful theoretical framework, since it analyzes acts within a political approach, understanding the tensions and perspectives in the spatial relations. On the one hand, strategic is the formal, panoramic perspective. It deals with the geographical and geometrical space, usually a top-down force coming from institutions, corporations, universities, and armies. On the other hand, tactic is the informal, street level perspective. It is an anthropological space, made of the artifices and everyday acts of common people. It is literally the body that infiltrates, agency in its most genuine meaning, a constant negotiation with the situations in order to transform them into occasions to act. According to Jilly Traganou, “the agentic is based on the belief that engagement with space provides the capacity for resistance to the encompassing coercive function of the very space that was meant to shape its subjects. Agentic design thus describes the productive capacity of those who operate within space, whose voices might be marginalized or excluded from the realm of public deliberation, and whose productive capacities, physical, political or financial, might be limited.”2 By playing with the circumstances and creating opportunities for action (infiltration), the agentic opens the space to what Hakim Bey calls temporary autonomous zones (TAZ): “an up-

rising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.”3 In contrast to a revolution, which conquers a certain permanence and duration, generally following a cycle and perpetuating a powerful and oppressive system, the idea of uprising relates directly to the thesis of design as an opening process. Put otherwise, it is an action not meant to last, where one can’t find progress in its traditional sense. It is an extraordinary and temporary experience that has the experimentation and opening as its main purposes. In that sense, it can be considered a prefigurative movement, where one can prototype a possible way of living. Prefiguration is an alternative social arrangement that embodies the values being sought, an enactment that builds a new world “in the shell of the old.” A very representative case of prefiguration and therefore of a TAZ, was Occupy Wall Street, a protest movement that began on September of 2011, in Zuccotti Park, in New York City’s Financial District. Against social and economic inequality worldwide, protesters encamped in the space and modeled alternative decision-making processes and ways of living together. They were forced out of the park on November of the same year. The strengths of tactics, TAZ and prefiguration lie precisely in their ephemerality, because they constitute an event. For Alain Badiou, “[a] political event today, whatever its scale, is a local opening up of political possibilities.”4 It unsettles the state of things, the power which claims to have the monopoly of possibilities, making the impossible suddenly possible. He elaborates on that:

3. Hakim Bey, TAZ: The temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism (Autonomedia, 2003).

4. Badiou, Alain. Philosophy and the Event. Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press, 2013.

“[t]he power in place doesn’t ask us to be convinced that it does everything very well – moreover there is always an opposition to say that it does everything very badly – but to be convinced that it’s the only thing possible. With a political event, a possibility emerges that escapes the prevailing power’s control over possibles.”5 In the end, infiltration-opening opens up possibilities of dissent.

5. Ibid.

6. Mahmoud Keshavarz and Ramia Maze, “Design and dissensus: framing and staging participation in design research” (Design Philosophy Papers 11, no. 1, 2013: 7-29).

7. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013).

A political scene of dissensus means leaving room for the contestational and conflictual nature of common life. In so doing, it extrapolates the consensual situation, that be seen “merely as a temporary result of a provisional hierarchy, a stabilization of power, which always and inevitably entails some form of exclusion.”6 Dissent not only values differences, but also allows new forms of negotiation, belonging and identity. Here, each individual is empowered and capable of contributing to daily micropolitical operations and participation in a local scale. Finally, the project and its supporting artifacts were inspired by references of critical design, literary art, and studies around social innovation in the government (d). Critical design takes a critical approach to design concerns, often challenging the expectations of the audience and provoking different ways of thinking about the “object” (understood in a broad sense) and its surroundings. It is relevant to this project since it brings a dimension that goes beyond problem-solving and sees design as a means for opening debates. Critical design usually explores the technique of creating scenarios of possible futures, which extrapolate the present and bring up new realities.7 It is disruptive and provocative, close friends to futurology, fiction and literature. Literary art was also an important influence, especially through the work of OuLiPo and the College of ‘Pataphysics. They both served as research of models of thought, as well as precedents for the project’s identity. OuLiPo was a group that brought literature and mathematics together. Founded in 1960, their (paradoxical) working principle was the creation of writing structures based on a system of arbitrary constraints in order to liberate literature. Within a ludic perspective, they would create rules, patterns and axioms that would define a structure to write. It is an embodied process of infiltration-opening, in the sense that it is a group that proposes to open literature through its own restrictions. They not only use the restrictions of the linguist system, but also add new constraints – this time deliberately invented. An example is the famous case of Georg-

es Perec’s novel A Void, which he decided to write without using any word that has the letter e. In that case, if he wanted to talk about any family issue, for instance, he would have to find new ways to mention mother, father, brother and sister. OuLiPo emerged as a subcommittee (term incorporated in the conceptualization of the project) of the College of ‘Pataphysics, founded in 1948. ‘Pataphysics is a term created decades earlier by the French playwright Alfred Jarry to describe the “science of imaginary solutions”8 and the rules that regulate the exceptions. The group’s tone of nonsensical bureaucracy and pseudo-science was a determinant reference to come up with an infiltrated agency within a governmental structure, looking at spaces that are traditionally overlooked by officiality. In regards to the interaction between design and government, I looked at a couple of models of how design can and has been supporting the public sector. Jhen-Yi Lin, as described in the context definition, pointed the four tendencies on how design can be helpful to address adaptability and responsiveness. Concerning positioning, Sabine Junjinger’s model of states of design function in relation to an organization can be adapted to the case of design entering the government. The model ranges from separate to integral, where each can accomplish different sets of results and has different levels of restrictions to act (discussed in the analysis of precedents).

8. Alfred Jarry, Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien (Gallimard, 1980).

Figure 4. Sabine Junginger’s four types of relationship that a design function may have with the larger organization that supports it.

precedent analysis

There were three layers of precedents, concerning method, context and configuration of the group. Each layer informed specific criteria that contributed to define respectively the design proposition, the state of the art (opportunities and limitations) of the context, and the tone and identity of the project. As shown in the intersection areas of the diagram, some precedents were studied for more than one purpose. In relation to the method (infiltration-opening), the precedents that stand out are: Cildo Meireles, Coletivo Transverso, Sub-Plan, Not an alternative and International Situationists. Respectively, they range from direct interventions in space to more experiential situations.

Figure 5. Selected precedents of the infiltration method in a spectrum from direct intervention to experience-based.

The close analysis of their operations informed a synthesis of the moments of an infiltration-opening method, described in the following diagram (figure 6). I will explain the diagram through the example of Cildo Meireles, which lies in the extreme side of the spectrum for direct intervention. Meireles is a Brazilian artist who, during the military dictatorship in Brazil (in 1970, specifically), inscribed subversive political texts on returnable Coke bottles as if they were part of the nutritional information. In that case, he had a preliminary moment of identifying the context (dictatorship in the country); followed by understanding a structure that reinforces that context (distribution of Coke â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there was a strong argument that the US government was sponsoring the authoritarian political scene in Brazil); and combined with an intention to challenge

that structure and context (poetic and political subversion, and authorship in art pieces). By understanding the structure, one can find an opportunity for action, which could be both a gap or a touchpoint (the bottle). And then there is the infiltration itself, manifested in two forms: an invisible, when there is the reproduction of elements of the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s language (graphic choices, appropriation of the returnable system of distribution and the fact that there is no contrast and the text becomes invisible when the bottle is empty), and a visible one, when a novelty is introduced, something unexpected within the situation (the content of the text inscribed). There is no intention of permanence, it is not a solution to a problem nor a real proposition of transformation. It is rather the opening to possibilities, bringing an enigma back to everyday spaces, and enabling dissent to take form. Although the infiltration is temporary, its possibilities need to be made permanent through traces, register, narratives, documentation (in Meireles case, he wrote about it, took pictures, and presented the bottles in galleries and museums).

Concerning the state of the art, the precedents consist of creative initiatives that interact with the field of public management and policy. They are mostly innovation labs that either become part of government agencies or consult from outside. The goal here was to understand the larger picture of what is

Figure 6. Diagram of moments in the Infiltration-opening process.

already happening, and then consider the opportunities and limitations (without going very deep in specific cases). The lesson is that the programs that decide to enter the public sector (going back to Junginger’s model), being directly engaged and having the most potential to transform it, tend to become more restricted in their actions, and take a more incremental approach. They generally apply traditional principles of the design practice – which is itself a big change of paradigm in that sector – responding to the everyday needs in a more utilitarian way, still perpetuating the core scenario of consensus and risk aversion. Positioning themselves outside the circle, in opposition, gives them less barriers to experiment, as well as to question how things are done. However, the lack of constraints from the context reality, in-site experience and direct engagement weakens their potential of action and discourse. That said, a criteria for the project became a positioning in-between outside and inside. In that sense, it would still have the system’s constraints and the possibility to appropriate what is given (which were criteria from the theoretical framework), but less tied to everyday challenges and being able to provoke unexpected reactions.

Figure 7. Selected precedents of the group itself and its configuration and tone.

After defining that the project would be a narrative embodied by an ambiguous agency in the NYC Mayor’s Office, there was a moment of looking at groups and people that had overlaps in regards to performing values or embodying a specific tone. The goal was to borrow desirable attributes – along with understanding what is not adequate to the context. Some elements, such as a more aggressive provocation made by Broodthaers or CARPA, for instance, remain as different scenarios to explore as the project evolves over time, since it is slightly

dissonant from what has been learned so far. What they inform is that adding tension makes the story more powerful. The challenge overall is how to keep a strong narrative and find the effective entry points to engage with real life, outside the museums and books. Finally, when looking at the diagram with precedents, I can see that there is no overlap between the method and the state of the art. Among the cases I am studying, there is no infiltration-opening being embodied in the context of the government. That shows an opportunity, but mostly raises the question of why there is no such thing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is it about risk, image, process? â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and why we would want it to happen there, based on the potentialities of opening systems.

Figure 8. Layers of precedents, learnings from each and overlappings between them.

partnerships

As the project started evolving and taking more clear directions, I tried to include different people as collaborators, including professionals, academics and peers, understanding the value of their expertises and experiences. I believe that adding outside people is a great way to keep accuracy and quality. Yet, at the same time, it makes the process much more slow and sometimes frustrating. From early stages, I was in contact with writer Amy Fusselman. In her latest book, Savage Park, she discusses questions of space, time, play and risk. Here, she brings storytelling and narrative knowledge, helping in a more abstract level of dialogue, as well as in the specificities of the actual production of materials. Another partnership that flourished was with Stephanie Lukito, friend and classmate from the Transdisciplinary Design Program. She came in as the first design fellow of the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent, bringing a specific context to try the method of infiltration and pilot a first public program. Her thesis is around the Anthropocene, and interrelations between what we understand as nature and the constructed environment. It was a time-sensitive partnership, which allowed the subcommittee to start “existing” and engaging with people, as well as producing tools and evidence of the program. Additionally, it was an opportunity to experiment with the establishment of arbitrary constraints as part of the script. An important issue that I became aware of after this partnership is that, by creating the program with Stephanie and prototyping it three times, it became an important part of the agency’s body of work, especially because there was not an amount of projects that exemplified the diversity of what the subcommittee does. With the intentions of creating a feedback channel that gives me credibility and offering me a source of primary inside information, I tried to reach out to people that actually work at the NYC Mayor’s Office. After all, an infiltration-opening pro-

cess has to be site-specific and contextual. It was a decision to engage the project with the actual context, that addresses to some extent the criteria of living in-between the inside and the outside (which could be also understood as between reality and fiction). I had a first conversation with the design team within the Office of Operations to present the concept and consult on options to move forward. They also gave me an overview of their duties and practice. In addition to that team, I was introduced to an employee within the Office of Appointments. He was particularly excited about the project, and gave me more specific information about the details of the daily life at the office, in regards to social interactions, documents, tools, procedures. Both the team and the employee encouraged pushing forward the narrative (versus trying to make it an actual program within the Mayor’s Office), with the argument that it would be more powerful if it was somewhat unusual. In a third moment, two employees of the Department of Parks and Recreation were also consulted, to give more specific feedback on the materials I was producing. In the end, these partners were also key to evaluate the project, as I will talk about later. Besides the partners, I tried to establish conversations with experts and people with interest in the topic during the process. Those included faculty within the New School, alumni, students, community activists. My goal was to be able to have many different perspectives on the ideas proposed, not only as a critique tool to check the quality, but also to guide directions. prototypes

The project had a few occasions of prototyping ideas. There were initial prototypes – or rather experiments – to test the method infiltration-opening. You can park your spaceship here is a small scale experiment with counter-information and imaginary commands in response to the rules and restrictions of uses at Washington Square Park in New York City. They were a series of six handmade signs using the same color codes and basic structure of the official signs, with information of odd or unrealistic permissions.

Figure 9â&#x20AC;&#x201C;10. Counterinformation and imaginary commands at Washington Square Park.

To evaluate public response, I searched for the location of the park in the social media app Instagram, and found several positive posts about the signs. Besides the initial excitement, the tone still felt slightly naive.

Figure 11–12. Examples of Instagram posts featuring the experiment.

Before the idea of the subcommittee took form, one possibility was to create capacity building around infiltration-opening through a series of publications. Following that path, one initial prototype was a simple handmade version of a potential booklet. The form and content were influenced by the winning submission of the project Next Helsinki.9 The booklet was a test of the tone and specific content. Despite not being developed further, it led to a better articulation of the theory through examples, illustrations and categories of infiltration. The idea of having a subcommittee inside the municipal government came as a tactic to embody infiltration-opening and practice different projects in the world. At first, there was a natural negation of creating an official body to incorporate infiltration to autorities; however, as the concept consolidated, the controversy became an important part of the idea around it. The first test of something that the subcommittee could be potentially involved with was an urban walk (initially called urban expedition). It was the materialization of the partnership with Stephanie, a prototype of a public program that was

9. “Next Helsinki,” https://www.dropbox. com/s/vqbz3iezp7ou6kx/189_HelsinkiInac1.pdf?dl=0.

supposedly made possible by the subcommittee. The walk was described as a participatory, collective and performative adventure. The invitation was to explore together relationships in the artificial wilderness through storytelling, exploration, and active imagination. We had a group walking together through East Village, stopping at planned and unplanned stations to tell stories (both real and speculative) and discuss relationships. The five planned stops had a story to be told – for example, there are two hawks named Dora and Christo that recently moved from a building to another, and people can see the evidences of their nest on an air-conditioner at Avenue A. We would stop there, tell the story to the group, and handle some objects that complement the scene, like a transparent lens with the drawing of the two birds, enabling people to see the birds flying or inside their nest. For the subcommittee, the walk was seen as an appropriation of the constructed environment for adventure and discovery. Each person had one given role and tools that supported that role (creating evidence for the walk and complementing each other’s actions) – navigator, storyteller, collector, prompter, capturer and archivist. We tried to add a perspective from a field of knowledge (arts & culture, history & geography, chemistry & physics, business & policy, activism & community organizing, ecology & biology) in the last iteration, but it became too overwhelming and participants would easily forget the one they were assigned. Besides the fixed stops, we had the color yellow as an arbitrary constraint that could inform unplanned stops. Participants had to come to the walk wearing one yellow piece of clothing, and the storyteller could request a stop anytime they saw an yellow element on the way, and then tell the story behind it. We have run the walk three times: the first two only with people that we knew, and the third had also someone from the neighborhood, that saw us during the second adventure, and asked us to participate of the next. There are a lot of iterations to be done on the specific mechanics of the program, as well as in techniques to manage and prompt the group. A positive lesson is that the ambiguous objects produced are very important to give substance to the universe we are trying to create – which is an important learning for the subcommittee’s

existence overall. What would be interesting in the particular case of the subcommittee is to further explore the amount of constraints given, getting closer to an ideal story machine structure. In addition to that, there is room to include more sociopolitical discussions in resonance with each story, as well as with the neighborhood itself. More information about the walk can be found in the appendix.

Figure 13. Storyteller using his binoculars in front of the Visitor Center, at Tompkins Square Park.

Figures 14â&#x20AC;&#x201C;18. Tools, participants and evidence collected in the urban walk of March 9.

In parallel with the walk, a series of institutional materials were produced. The goal was to test the subcommittee’s possible visual identity and manifestations in the world. Some of the materials reproduced formal components of existing documents within the Mayor’s Office, adding the subcommittee’s own information. The name was defined as NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent (also referred as STOPD or simply subcommittee), and a logo and an identity were created. STOPD was an adequate acronym, since it strangely contained the word stop, as well as PD (Police Department). The identity was defined around uneven parallel lines and a monspaced typeface.

Figure 20–21. STOPD’s desk flag and pendant.

Figure 19. STOPD logo and adapted NYC seal, based on structure of a NYC agency logo.

·o

s ti u m ·

·d i s s e n ·p

r a ·1899· i o n efi g r a t u

The initial materials were a website mockup, a letterhead, fellowship application forms, a call for participants and a floorplan. The materials were meant to test the communicability of the idea, as well as the level of credibility they evoked, and thus they were shown to different people to prompt a conversation around the idea of the subcommittee. That first round still felt very empty, and it was not clear what to do with them. There was also a need of more substantial body of materials – both as STOPD’s portfolio and as evidence of their existence.

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Figure 22â&#x20AC;&#x201C;23. STOPDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s website mockup. 65

I also had the opportunity to present STOPD on April 23rd, at the Bureau of Imaginative Proposals, a one-day conference from the creative writing programs at the New York University, Columbia and The New School. The theme of the conference was poetry and politics. It was an opportunity to engage in a conversation from the literary field, and discuss the implications of the project within their practice. Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s response to the presentation was overall very positive. Questions raised were about the constant necessity of a system to infiltrate in, and what would be necessary and compromised for the subcommittee to be implemented. Some of the lines of the presentation were published in the conferenceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Twitter account.

Figure 24. Twitter posts about STOPD during the Bureau of Imaginative Proposals conference.

workshops

Building on the institutional materials and the previous experiments (wayfinding and urban walk), it was necessary to understand the range of work that the subcommittee could practice and be involved with. In that sense, I held two types

of abductive workshop sessions to ideate on how these evidences could take form. The first one, which was done in two sessions, was directed to create projects (past, present or future) for the subcommittee. There were 4â&#x20AC;&#x201C;6 participants (designers) and they were guided through a process of partnering with a city agency, being assigned an issue to deal with, and then chosing an image of the city as context. The second workshop, also held in two sessions, was created to speculate on the supposed involvement of the subcommittee with events and projects that actually happened in the past, as well as to think about possible evidences that prove that fact. I also used the workshop to ask people and gather information about the controversy around the subcommittee.

Both workshops were important to help defining the spectrum of operations of STOPD, and informed arguments and new elements of the narrative. They were important to expose people to the narrative and stimulate their imagination around it. Further information about them can be found in the appendix.

Figure 25. First workshop in the Transdisciplinary Design studio.

documentary and report

The final materials produced tried to synthesize and incorporate the learnings from the other steps of the process. I decided to produce both external and internal media, in order to have different voices and perspectives. The idea is not to have one final object, well-polished and finished, but rather some tentatives and openings to the story. One of the products was a documentary â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a dossier of public interest. I considered it an adequate genre, in the sense that it can be the story from an outside point of view and without a clear opinion. I could also make it more investigative and assign some ambiguity in regards to timeframe and people involved. Following those guidelines, I used the tecnique of stop motion with paper cuts, to give a sense of something that was done without a lot of preparation and possibly from an administrative office. It consists of images cut in paper with a voice over. The plot starts from the city of New York and gradually zooms in in the specificities of its government, until it gets to describing the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent. It is a descriptive video, but it is not meant to be overly revealing, in the sense that some enigma about STOPD remains. The voice over is masculine, somewhat robotic, on top of a projector sound, as if it was a presentation. Stamps, as symbolic elements of bureaucracy and order, permeate the video in different moments, as well as some commentaries on the everyday life of public sector institutions. Irony is used as a tactic of engaging, by no means trying to be demeaning or disrespectful to the context. Another important decision was to use existing projects combined with the urban walk as STOPDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portfolio, in order to be more impactful and create some sense of humor and doubt (by the recognition of facts). Again, I decided not to use any people or a clear sense of exitence in time. The documentary currently lives at the url: https://vimeo.com/163607812. I also produced an internal report of selected operations. It was meant to bring a voice from inside the organization as well. The report, as the documentary, is not absolutely comprehensive and complete â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in fact, there are even some missing chapters. It showcases some activities that STOPD was involved with, 68

by describing conditions, such as duration and location, but also providing data or quotes from the event – which not always necessarily make sense, yet it mimics some governmental or institutional behavior. The pages also collect different kinds of evidence, that could range from flight tickets to visitor pass to enter the building. Again, the projects chosen to be part of the report were a combination of existing projects or facts and experiments that I have done in the process. They all have relevance in the context, by applying principles of infiltration-opening and sharing some common values with STOPD. I used the imagery, but adapted their information to the purposes of this work. The projects presented are: Philippe Petit and his high-wire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974; Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés; Michael Rakowitz’s Parasite; Krzysztof Wodiczko’s homeless vehicle; spray caps in NYC’s fire hydrants; Occupy Wall Street in 2011; Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops project; NYC’s Community Gardens Movement; University of Brasília’s artist group playing the 1 Fluxus Olympic Games in 2016 (references in the bibliography). 69

Figure 26. Paper cuts for the documentary.

Documentary’s plot and storyboard

[1] This is New York City, latitude 40 N, longitude -74 W, Eastern Coast, United States. Organized in 6 boroughs, the city is the most complex in the country.

[2] The Mayor’s Office is the authority responsible for New York City’s government.

[5] The Mayor’s Office is composed of several offices and departments, such as the Community Affairs Unit.

[6] The Community Affairs Unit has the mission to actively engage residents throughout the six boroughs: Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and Interstices.

[9] STOPD’s members operate across all city agencies, by filling in for absent employees. Their internal meetings are in the hallways only, and they use the elevator for pitching ideas to other city agencies.

[10] STOPD practices and advocates for infiltration – a method of active appropriation and opening in the urban space, using constraints as opportunities.

[3] The government is the system by which a society is controlled. It is designed to mitigate uncertainty and provide safety, stability, consent and stamps.

[4] Stamps are official marks that indicate validation and order.

[7] Instertices is the sixth borough, made of all the spaces in-between not addressed by the other borough directors.

[8] It is administered by the Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent, also known as STOPD, an agency that exists nonexistently.

[11] They have been involved in actions and programs that ranged from the overtly subversive to the quietly inquisitive, such as urban ocularities to observe absences, unprecedented living stations, and infrastructural interactions.

[12] Their projects are prefigurative experiences and therefore are not meant to last.

[13] However, the possibilities and ideas opened are permanent through the site specific and georeferenced public archives throughout the city.

[14] The digital files replaced STOPDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s traditional practice of planting ideas in the cracks of asphalt.

[17] It is important to remember that projects which become too established and large in scale will lose their affiliation with STOPD.

[18] Residents can get in touch with the Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent through mailboxes identified with their logo.

[15] This non-traditional gardening ritual actually gave them expertise to lead a training program on how to grow beets in acidic urban soil in-between buildings.

[16] The harvesting grew in scale and mobilization. However, the communities’ goals of territorial permanence conflicted with STOPD’s operational standards.

[19] They have been consistently found in street blocks where there is a school, a church and a bodega.

[20] Thank you for your attention.

Figure 27–46. Storyboard of the documentary.

Figure 47–50. STOPD’s report of selected operations.

8 project summary and analysis

n summary, I started by questioning how design can be an opening process, facing the contemporary conditions; then I propose infiltration-opening as a method for opening; the subcommittee becomes an embodied agent of infiltration-opening in a specific context (public sector); and there are artifacts that create the universe for the project to exist. current conditions

social thesis

design as an opening process

design thesis

design proposition

infiltrationopening

nyc stopd

project

artifacts

evidence of the narrative, experiments, archives

At the end of the day, the NYC Subcommittee of Temporary Operations and Public Dissent is a project that deliberately lives between fiction and reality. More than that, it depends on both aspects: it can’t exist as a real organization, or it would lose its criticality; it can’t also be only fictitious, or it would lose its grounds. It is a story permanently latent. As such, we could call it a situated fiction. It is a fiction because the subcommittee is a “plausible unreality,” as it exists non-existently. It applies design as a “form of cultural thought experimentation,”1 thinking about alter-

Figure 51. Summary of the components of the thesis.

1. Björn Franke, “Design as Inquiry: Prospects for a Material Philosophy” (PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, 2015).

native uses for existing technologies (and not alternative technologies for existing uses, as it is usually the case of science fiction). While there are some odd moments, it has a coherent internal framework – as if we didn’t know if we are concretising imaginations or fictionalising the reality. In this case, it is also situated, since it is engaged with an everyday situation of the city agency. By situating it within a specific context, it becomes possible – not only in terms of the real, but also of the imaginable. At the same time that it is constrained by the reality of the organization, it uses its everyday restrictions (daily routine, space, documentation, tools) not only as a means to pretend a sense of legitimacy and credibility, but also as an opportunity to connect to speculative and unexpected realities. It infiltrates the reality. What made the story powerful though is the inherent tension that it provokes. This is something that only appeared after many iterations of the details of the narrative, when I was trying to find the right tone. The subcommittee is not something that could easily exist, something that would make our lives obviously better. In that sense, it would have been be an actual proposition, a reality that only needs planning, articulation and resources to happen. There is some risk in imagining such an agency in the government. It is almost an absurd idea, returning to the discussion of experimentation and opening as an end. The tension lies in the reasons why we both want/need and fear the existence of the subcommittee – and why the answers might be the same for both sides. On the one hand, the government exists to mitigate uncertainty and guarantee social stability. Its organizational structure is designed to achieve the closest possible to a safe consensus. There is a need to visualize and evaluate results of actions, reporting back to society. Additionally, there are pressures of image construction and aims for reelection. In that situation, it is hard to imagine an agency that has temporary operations and public dissent in its title and reasons for being. It embraces uncertainty and instability, acknowledges dissent as a natural and healthy attribute of a democratic society, and doesn’t see

the traditional quantitative indicators of progress necessarily correlated to success. Also, there is a difficult balance to avoid more powerful agendas to take over and corrupt the main goals. On the other hand, there is a social desirability in making the uncanny subcommittee happen. It is an interesting reconciliation between people and their representatives. More than that, it offers a way of making it safe to dissent â&#x20AC;&#x201C; while today dissent and activism are words that, in their common use, are strongly associated to violence, radicalism and angry people. It encourages experimentation and failure as part of daily micropolitics. It is a self-critical component in a major system of social authority. Finally, it is itself an embodiment of the idea of uprising inside a highly controlled structure. It becomes the Trojan horse, Badiouâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s political event.

9 assessment

here is an intrinsic challenge to evaluate open-ended projects. I decided to assess it in more qualitative terms, by engaging in conversations with people from the context and documenting evidences of shifts of thought. The context is essential here, since infiltration-opening is inherently site-specific. I shared the materials produced about the subcommittee, especially the video and the report. I considered an important measurement of success when people – especially the ones that work in the Mayor’s Office – started imagining the existence of STOPD, and discussing details, implications and controversies from there on. People begin to complete elements of the story, and also to relate to their own work. The artifacts play a very relevant role, as entry points of the narrative. On April 24, I had a conversation with Genevieve Gaudet, from the Design team of the NYC Office of Operations. She watched the video and read the report of operations. In regards to the subcommittee, she said:

“You take this solid institution that is the Mayor’s Office and apply this new layer, making us question if it is real – or rather imagining what would happen if it was real.”1 As she went through the materials, she had immediate ideas and questions to keep on with the story. First, the concept of Interstices prompted her to think about a dynamic and pulsating borough – idea that was actually incorporated to the final narrative presented here. Being the zones in-between, they would change configuration in response to the flows of the city, like gentrification and displacement. “What would happen with the power of STOPD, if its area of operation increases? If there is a bigger gap between neighborhoods, for instance...”2 Moreover, Genevieve started speculating about the organization’s funding: “Maybe they get funded from specific swipes on the subway turnstile, and the user gets notified”. We also talked about potential tools of the subcommittee, such as ocularities to observe and measure magnitude of closures (since there are already the ones to observe absences).

1. Genevieve Gaudet, interview with author, New York City, April 24, 2016.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

She had also comments about the actual information presented: “In some ways, it reminded me that a lot of things get done through meetings in the elevator and informal encounters”,3 referring to all the bureaucratic and hierarchical obstacles inter-agencies. She made a point about the idea of infiltration and finding opportunities in the restrictions: “It made me think about the contraints of my work”, and went on: “Sometimes you come across a constraint that is so powerful that it actually percludes you from being able to implement a solution from within the system, something that would actually be beneficial, but

STOPD is a loop that goes outside government, is filtered through the actual stuff of the world, gains much more momentum, and then comes back to the government.”4 4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Carlos Martinez, interview with author, New York City, April 11, 2016.

7. Jorge Luis Paniagua Valle, interview with author, New York City, May 1, 2016.

8. Ibid.

At the end of the conversation, we discussed the controversies of acknowledging dissent in the government, since it is an attribute of social life. “If we actually took dissent in account, everything would be radically different – and people in power are afraid of radical changes.”5 I heard a similar phrase from Carlos Martinez, Deputy Director of Green Thumb, in the Department of Parks and Recreation. “The word dissent is a red flag in the government, because it means challenging the status quo. And people here are afraid to change.”6 Another conversation happened with Jorge Luis Paniagua Valle, Assistant Director of Outreach at NYC Mayor’s Office of Appointments, prompted by the video and report of operations. He said that the materials helped giving life to the subcommittee: “I can imagine it operating in New York City.”7 What was most effective, in his opinion, were the nuanced choices that are directly related to the actual office culture, such as the absent employees, halways and elevators. “CAU was also a very good choice. It makes perfect sense, anyone from the Mayor’s Office would agree.”8 He also raised the question whether dissent can become consent, if it is actually implemented by the government. He agrees that the project needs to remain between reality and fiction to sustain its relevance. “Your project

operates somewhere in-between government and community, and its biggest value comes from being ephemeral.”9

9. Ibid.

In addition to the conversations in person, I also sent emails with the materials to people that work in the Mayor’s Office. I had some questions for them, that I let them decide which ones they wanted to answer: Does STOPD make you think about your own work? In what way? / Did you start thinking “what if stopd existed...”? What does that thought lead you to? / Do you see any way that the story of STOPD could move forward? / In your opinion, what are the strengths/weaknesses of this method [infiltration-opening] and its relevance to our everyday life? An example of answer came from Le’alani Boykin, Community Visioning & Planning Manager from Partnerships for Parks, part of the Department of Parks and Recreation (complete answers in appendix). She could see practical relations and challenges to her own job. “The idea that our local government could not only support temporary beautification, activation and resolution projects, but make it policy for some temporary projects to be prioritized next to long-term infrastructure, is quite provocative and satisfying.”10 She started to imagine how the subcommittee would look like in the everyday life of the agency:

10. Le’alani Boykin, email message to author, April 30, 2016.

“I imagine a team of highly energized, very quick-thinking, deadline-driven, communications & network-savvy individuals sprinkled throughout the departments of NYC, like busy bees, constantly sharing information to implement these projects.”11 As she started thinking in more practical terms, she could easily foresee the challenges of implementation, if that was the goal for the project to move forward. And the main challenge would be the internal office culture and aversion to change:

11. Ibid.

“The public is ready for this idea, but is the government? Are the government employees?”12 A different kind of validation came from the interest of Eduardo Staszowski, director of Parsons DESIS Lab, to publish some of the materials in their website. In the lab, they have

12. Ibid.

13. “Public and Collaborative NYC,” http://nyc.pubcollab. org/about/.

14. Amy Fusselman, email message to author, April 29, 2016.

been consistently researching and working on projects that apply social innovation in the public sector. More specifically, through the project Public & Collaborative, they aim “to explore how public services in New York City can be improved by incorporating greater citizen collaboration in service design and implementation.”13 An informal feedback emerged from people that interacted with STOPD’s narrative in different moments of the process, and started to relate it to their everyday life. A few participants of the workshop sessions, for instance, reached out to me directly – in person or through email and text message – with images, projects and articles that reminded them of the subcommittee. They would say: “It feels that STOPD was behind this” or “I just saw someone that I am sure is a member of the subcommittee!” It is quite fascinating to see how the story sticks to people’s minds and it begins to take different and unexpected proportions. As mentioned before, I had several conversations with writer Amy Fusselman throughout the process. When I asked her about what she thinks the project achieves, she said: “the feat of helping viewers and participants to envision openings in governmental structure where individual agency can be created, radical ideas can be entertained, and greater freedom can be experienced. It is an important experiment in that its primary aim is to alter an individual’s way of thinking.”14 As a conclusion, I believe I was able to capture some glimpses of validation of the project, in its capacity of creating shifts of thought and small openings.

10 projectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s achievements and limitations

In a personal level, the project reflects some key moments of my journey in the two years of my Transdisciplinary Design program. In different levels and for different reasons, I applied learnings from the majority of courses I took. I had theories and models of thought coming from my Transdisciplinary Design Seminar (Fall 2014), Design for this Century (Fall 2014), Spatial Studies (Spring 2015), and Designing Urban Transformation (Spring 2015); methods, approaches and framings from Studio 1: Public and Private (Fall 2014), Studio 2: Emerging Social Forms (Spring 2015), and Civic Innovation (Spring and Fall 2015). To some extent, the project became one example of my practice, both relating to what I have done and studied in the past and what I am pointing towards in the future. In a small scale, I believe the project was able to engage a design stimulus with a real context. It created an experience of a narrative by producing ambiguous materials. The subcommittee became some kind of working principle of the theories studied. And the consistent combination of this working principle with institutional artifacts and a pretended body of work validates the values and model of society that it proposes in the first place. It was also an attempt to test the idea of infiltration as a method that aims for opening. In a more abstract level and through this specific example, the project opens discussion and imagination about new approaches to government, dissent, and agency over the city. In the longer term, the challenge would be to scale in number of people involved in the context, but also increase the diversity of audiences. Considering the design field, it points towards a more intense discussion about roles of design in the contemporaneity; more specifically, how it can be an opening process; and, finally, if infiltration can be a framework for action. In a self-reflection mode, I can identify many limitations of the project. From an individual level â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and because this is an individual project (with external collaborators), there are my personal limitations and inexperience, which only allow the project to reach a specific point. Also, it is set in an academic

environment, which, albeit all the freedom and support, has its own time, access and resource restrictions. In relation to the project itself, its result is only a simple demonstration, a spark of something. Despite the goal to make the outcome open-ended, it canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be to a point that people put their own expectations of what the subcommittee in fact is or should be. It became a particular struggle to find ways of creating a sense of legitimacy and engaging with audiences in real life. Building on that, but talking more directly about process choices, I am trying to explore a different approach to design (as an opening process), but I am still very constrained to traditional design methods. In that sense, although I argue that constraints can be powerful structures to creativity, there is an inherent difficulty in creating indicators and tools for evaluation, for example. moving forward

As part of the Transdisciplinary Design thesis, the project has to stop at a point that makes sense as a whole; however, it is open-ended enough to keep being iterated in the future. I see different possibilities for the project to move forward. A natural follow up would be to scale the number and diversity of people in contact with the materials, as a means to quantitatively spread the message. In that case, the ideal scenario would be the story becoming and emergent and evolving system. Some movement has been initiated in that regards. The subcommittee was presented at the conference called the Bureau of Imaginative Proposals. It was an opportunity to enter a conversation within the domains of literature and creative writing. Another scenario would be to package the project as a public program, and apply for funding through grants, for example, such as the National Endowment for the Arts or Open Society Foundations. The program could consist of an art or design

residency to generate project proposals (supposedly as part of the subcommittee), debate the tensions around the topic, and potentially put together an exhibit. As for the design field, both the question of design as an opening and the method of infiltration could be suggested as part of a design curriculum. It can move forward the conversation about a less strategic and solution-focused approach to a tactical and pataphysical – maybe even feminine perspective to the field. In that sense, it would be a form of practicing an academic research and testing it in the context of higher education. Also, I personally see education as an exciting field of practice, and because of that I would consider taking the research to a deeper level, maybe as part of a PhD program. I would be interested, as a practitioner, to keep exploring the intersections between the domains of design, art, urban theory and political theory. Finally, I will soon be back to Brasília, where my restless questions started. There is a critical instable political situation happening in Brazil right now, and Brasília is the headquarters of the federal government. The population is divided in polarized sides and experiencing a generalized crisis of institutions. I couldn’t think of a more appropriate momentum for the subcommittee to emerge.

bibliography works cited

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Gaudet, Genevieve. Interview with author. New York City, April 24, 2016. “Government of New York City.” https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Government_of_New_York_City. Haiven, Max. Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power. Capitalism, Creativity and the Commons. Zed Books, 2014. Harvey, David. Condição pós-moderna: Uma pesquisa sobre as Origens da Mudança Cultural. São Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. Basic writings: from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964). Harper Collins, 1993. Holston, James. The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. “Infiltrate.” Merriam-Webster. http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/infiltrate. Jones, John Christopher. Essays in design. Chichester etc.: Wiley, 1984. Keshavarz, Mahmoud, and Ramia Maze. “Design and dissensus: framing and staging participation in design research.” Design Philosophy Papers 11, no. 1 (2013): 7-29. Klee, Paul. Paul Klee on modern art. London; Boston: Faber and Faber, 1966. Latour, Bruno. “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps Toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk)”, Lecture, Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, September 3, 2008. Lefebvre, Henri. Writings on cities. Vol. 63, no. 2. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Lin, Jhen-Yi. “Why Design as a set of Capabilities is Relevant in the Public Sector Innovation.” Master’s thesis, Parsons The New School for Design, 2015. Marguc, Janina, Jens Förster, and Gerben A. Van Kleef. “Stepping back to see the big picture: when obstacles elicit global processing.” Journal of personality and social psychology 101, no. 5 (2011): 883. Martinez, Carlos. Interview with author. New York City, April 11, 2016. “Next Helsinki,” https://www.dropbox.com/s/vqbz3iezp7ou6kx/189_HelsinkiInac1.pdf?dl=0. NYC Mayor’s Office Organizational Chart. Available at: http:// www1.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/reports/2014/ NYC-Organizational-Chart.pdf. Prigogine, I., and I. Stengers. “Sistema.” Enciclopédia Einaudi 26 (1993). “Public and Collaborative NYC,” http://nyc.pubcollab.org/ about/. Rittel, Horst WJ, and Melvin M. Webber. “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Policy sciences 4, no. 2 (1973): 155-169. Simon, Herbert. Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Traganou, Jilly. Wall Street Bounded and Unbinding: The Spatial as a Multifocal Lens in Design Studies. 2015. Trends, Global. “2030: Alternative Worlds, a publication of the National Intelligence Council.” 2012.

Valle, Jorge Luis Paniagua. Interview with author. New York City, May 1, 2016. works consulted

Boyd, Andrew. Prefigurative intervention. Available at: http://beautifultrouble.org/tactic/prefigurative-intervention Calvino, Italo. As cidades invisíveis. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia. São Paulo: Ed. 34, 2000. 1 v. Fux, Jacques. Literatura e Matemática: Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Perec e o OULIPO. KBR, 2013. Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens: o jogo como elemento da cultura. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2010. 6. Ed. Markussen, Thomas. “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics.” MIT DesignIssues, Volume 29, Number 1, Winter 2013. Perec, Georges. A vida modo de usar. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2009. Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers. In: Romano, Ruggiero. Enciclopédia Einaudi. 1993. 26 v. Rancière, Jacques. O dissenso. In: NOVAIS, Adauto (org). A crise da razão. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996. precedents

CARPA – Craft Advanced Research Projects Agency. http://craftresearchagency.com/. Cildo Meireles. Fraga. Marina. Urano, Pedro. Carbono entrevista Cildo Meireles. http://revistacarbono.com/artigos/04carbono-en-

trevista-cildo-meireles/. College of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Pataphysics. Jarry, Alfred. Gestes et opinions du docteur Faustroll, pataphysicien. Gallimard, 1980. Coletivo Transverso. http://coletivotransverso.blogspot. com/2012/07/intervencao-na-ponte-costa-e-silva-em.html. Helsinki Design Lab. http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/. International Situationism. McDonough, Tom. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and documents. London: MIT press, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. The beach beneath the street: the everyday life and glorious times of the situationist international. London; New York: Verso, 2015. La 27e RĂŠgion. http://www.la27eregion.fr/en/. Lab@OPM. https://www.opm.gov/blogs/Director/innovation-lab/. Marcel Broodthaers. http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1542. MindLab. http://mind-lab.dk/en/. Not an alternative. http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org. Policy Lab UK. https://openpolicy.blog.gov.uk/category/policy-lab/. Public Editor. http://www.nytimes.com/topic/person/the-public-editor. Public Policy Lab. http://publicpolicylab.org/. Sub-Plan: A Guide to Permitted Development. http://www.dk-cm.

com/projects/sub-plan-a-guide-to-permitted-development/. USDAC – U.S. Department of Arts and Culture. http://usdac.us/ about/. projects and situations appropriated

Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops. https://deaddrops.com/. Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés. http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/ tate-modern/exhibition/helio-oiticica/helio-oiticica-exhibition-guide/helio-oiticica-5. Krzysztof Wodiczko’s homeless vehicle. http://www.walkerart. org/magazine/2012/krzysztof-wodiczkos-homeless-vehicle-project. Michael Rakowitz’s Parasite. http://www.michaelrakowitz. com/parasite/. NYC’s Community Gardens Movement. http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/community-gardens/movement. Occupy Wall Street. http://occupywallst.org/. Philippe Petit and his high-wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uwbil5puqng. Spray caps in NYC’s fire hydrants. http://www.wnyc.org/story/309912-making-open-fire-hydrants-legal-and-safer/. University of Brasília’s 1st Fluxus Olympic Games. http://campus.fac.unb.br/sociedade/9775/.

appendix

workshop information / general notes 1. February 16th – 1 session, 20min, 6 participants – Goal: test framework and generate ideas for the portfolio of the subcommittee – Framework components (individual): Internal partner (office or department) + issue + image (photographs of New York City) + position in a 2x2 (scale – micro to macro, and type of experiment – experience to intervention) – Comments: well-structured, interesting results, fun, aesthetic quality, 2x2 was too much – Ideas generated: illegal immigrant services on phone booths, events on and under scaffoldings, alternative google maps based on gender safety, multipurposes for boxes for newspapers on the street, hacking of one screen at Times Square for personal discontents 2, 3 and 4. April 2nd

– 3 sessions, 1 hour each, 4 participants each – Goal (session 1): generate ideas for the portfolio of the subcommittee – Goal (sessions 2 and 3): speculate about the involvement of the subcommittee with facts that happened (found in the news) and create evidence – Brief introduction about the STOPD and initial discussion (all sessions): What is the tension? Why do we want and fear the subcommittee? – Framework components (session 1, individual): Internal partner (office or department) + issue + image (photographs of New York City) + wild card (instead of the 2x2, with a quality – invisible, anonymous, dance, water, playful) – Framework components (sessions 2 and 3, individual and one pair): news headline, references for the creation of evidence (existing documents from the Mayor’s Office, such as reports, memorandums of understanding, data visualization, service blueprints, etc) – Comments: initial discussion was essential to set the tone, it is necessary to “curate” participants, the ideas ended up not being the focus of the sessions, but rather the discussion that

the subcommittee prompts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ideas generated (session 1): alternative rules of conduct in the subway based on dance, night events at a park after it closes, subliminal messages in street art, assigning a role for street vendor in the process of registration for the IdNYC â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ideas generated (session 2 and 3): involvement with Botanical Gardens in streets, Haikus in newspapers, environmental protests, discussions about gentrification

Framework for discussion about risks and benefits of STOPD.

Session 3 of the workshop.

Participants and their ideas in workshop 2.

100

Framework and workshop session 2.

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urban walk / general notes

– Walks took place on March 6, March 9 and March 12, and had the approximate duration of 2 hours. – The fountain at Tompkins Square Park was appropriated as the Visitor Center, meeting point of the walk. – Participants were assigned the roles of prompter, navigator, capturer, collector, archivist and storyteller. Each role had a specific set of tools and procedures to collect evidence, and they carried a card with the information, as well as the values of the expedition (imagination, curiosity, playfulness, storytelling, opening, discovery, adventure). The cards had the following information: a. prompter: present objects, tell stories, show relationships; tools: plastiglomerate rocks, bird viewer, cards b. navigator: lead the group through the main stops of the expedition, as well as to document the route and some findings; tools: a clipboard, a map, stickers, a pen and a compass. c. capturer: take pictures, recording, or sketches of the expedition, focusing on capturing fragments of findings from the group; tools: a polaroid camera, a journal, and a pen d. archivist: capture moments (video, interview) of the expedition, gathering perspective of the journey as a whole e. storyteller: point out findings along the route and tell or imagine stories about them; tool: binoculars – Snake tree and Little Garden were among the planned stops, where participants could experience relationships of hybridism and symbiosis of the “artificial wilderness”. – Participants, especially the storyteller, could stop at the sight of yellow elements on the way, and tell their stories. – The Weeping stop had a generative component. Participants were prompted to come up with ideas that could potentially replace the loss of the giant tree that died due to Hurricane Irene.

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Prompts for plastiglomerate rocks and cards with roles.

103

Ideas generated and “yellow” stop.

104

Glimpses of walk on March 9.

105

email response from Leâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;alani Boykin april 30, 2016

â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Does STOPD make you think about your own work? In what way? I love the creativity of the idea and the possibilities that it opens. The idea that our local government could not only support temporary beautification, activation and resolution projects, but make it policy for some temporary projects to be prioritized next to long-term infrastructure, is quite provocative and satisfying. In a city whose public projects are continuously underfunded, I think STOPD is a compelling solution. I could see STOPD applying to my participatory design work with Partnerships for Parks to help Parks & communities identify temporary design solutions for parks, playgrounds & greenspaces (like plantings in asphault cracks!). Of course the implementation of such a partnership with NYC Parks would be challenging (see response to #2)

106

– As you watched the video and looked at the documents, did you start thinking “what if STOPD existed...”? What does that thought lead you to? Yes I did! At first I allowed myself to fantasize about a world with STOPD in it, especially the new structure of public agencies. I imagine a team of highly energized, very quick-thinking, deadline-driven, communications & network-savvy individuals sprinkled throughout the departments of NYC, like busy bees, constantly sharing information to implement these projects. It’s exhilarating just thinking of the dynamism that this team could bring to a department. Then I start thinking of the existing office culture, who supervises them, who determines their scope, who they partner with internally, etc. That’s where my balloon starts to deflate a bit. In the jaded mist that I try to combat everyday as a public servant, I’ve learned a useful lesson: there is never a dearth of great ideas; the deficit lies in the implementation of great ideas. And that implementation needs to be carefully planned and orchestrated, and consider culture & transition as the top factors. The public is ready for this idea, but is the government? Are the government employees? How can you convince someone adverse to change that this kind of change is something they want to support. How can you best prepare that energetic team for the roadblocks they will inevitably encounter?

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mfa transdisciplinary design school of design strategies parsons school of design â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the new school