DRS2012 Bangkok Proceedings Vol 4 - Design Research Society

Andreas UNTEIDIG, Florian SAMETINGER, Jennifer SCHUBERT,
Veronika AUMANN and Max SCHÄTH, Gesche JOOST
the variation phase is merely the start of the process – or to think that our work is
powerful enough to also cover the subsequent phases that Jonas calls “selection” and
“re-stabilization”, according to the evolutionary process:
“Although design activities desperately attempt to cover / include the selection- and restabilization
phases in their considerations, they are necessarily de-coupled from these
phases”. (Jonas 2006:4)
While we argue that we can set up the design infrastructure in a way that will most likely
withstand the selection process, we are aware of the even more pressing fact that we will
leave the research setting at a given point in the future – and this often is the moment
where a project ends definitively.
In order to cope with these challenges, we were looking for a solution that answers all of
the three questions:
� How can we ensure the creation of real authorship in the inhabitants, as experts
of their daily life/reality?
� How can we involve the largest possible number of actors?
� How can we ensure the sustainability of the project itself, or in other words, how
can we ensure that the project and its results will remain after designers and
researchers leave the community?
We argue that the “ambassador approach” provides us with a holistic solution by
gradually shifting authorship and responsibility from the designers to the actors.
By analyzing the existing structures of social engagement in our local research setting
and its close surroundings, we are currently identifying, activating and interconnecting
players that already have a high level of involvement in the neighborhood.
The designed infrastructure amplifies their work, as well as providing a strong framework
for collaboration, through a series of workshops, tools and organized sharing of ideas.
We argue that by doing so we enable the community to consider different perspectives
and expertise while also ensuring a high level of productivity.
With this transformation of active stakeholders into “Neighborhood Lab Ambassadors” we
plan on creating a self-sustaining infrastructure that carries out the resulting activities of
the project with decreasing necessity for the involvement of designer and researcher. In
addition, we expect the ambassadors to be much more successful in reaching and
involving their fellow citizens in order to turn passivity into action, mainly because they
have lived in this very community for a long time and enjoy an outstanding social status
due to their prior roles as actors.
“Ambassadors Workshop”
As an intermediate milestone we conducted an “ambassadors workshop” which took
place at Kreativhaus in mid-November. Through word-of-mouth, posters and numerous
conversations we were able to mobilize around 25 participants of a broad range of ages,
educations and personal backgrounds.
Through the workshop we managed to gather and interconnect a larger group of
motivated and interested citizens who had not been in conversation before. This
gathering sparked clearly observable dynamics that led to the “open founding” of our firstgeneration
ambassador group.
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