# South Design Proposal

backlink ref: https://hackmd.io/xpOFWPD5RW2q_FpBUbDT3g?view

new doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bt3mrnjywHMTdZnRysBIa0ysRycNPH4S_UF505GSpXg/edit

Our process of valuing indispensability calls for nurturing slowness in South design thinking.

The questions of what a space can mean. What could be a space for community building? What could favour collectivisation? How can the space be intersectional? How can translation happen between different mental models and what sometimes is lost?

Information and communications technologies, research and design inputs that are assistive in bringing a process that appreciates the local skills into possibilities of collective entrepreneurial openings, and catalysing gathering spaces for women to hold the fort are directions we intend to explore in our South design activities.

The Community Owned Wifimesh (COW) community network (CN) that we all have set up for our valley serves as a hyperlocal information platform with a demand driven internet. This has led to a continuous evolution of network and services design prompted by community needs. Our field of view has expanded while bringing focus to the ground realities which prompt us to indulge in "South design activities''. The CN serves as a sharing and dissemination platform that encourages the community to contribute through annotations and help make it an interlinked audio-video archive. It is intended to be a motivating force to bring back cohesiveness within the five villages in the valley. In addition to this, media content is curated and a Community Radio program results from that activity - a community driven community radio.

Our resource mapping exercises have led us to people who lived from forest resources, had areas that used permaculture techniques and rituals that celebrated seasonal flora while at the sametime opening us to cultural conflicts, subjugation and politics of mainstreaming folk narratives. The villages are moving to fertiliser and water intensive agriculture and school systems tend to value job seeking outside of the villages. In this context, we propose to work with (1) an isolated bamboo craftsman to help enlarge his reach and foray into enhancing his practice to attend to architecture and interior designs, (2) engage with women from a varied background to appreciate the vagaries of the handmade, and (3) to game discussions in culturally subjugated areas about the politics of their folk narratives.

Our team lives in the valley (iruway.janastu.org and crafts.janastu.org) and maintains the servers and services for the CN (open.janastu.org/projects/cowmesh). A home portal page provides audio visual content for the community, by the community about their activities. Using credit vouchers, providing access to the Internet will be handed over to a few women. Gaming the vouchers is likely to get the younger generation active in creative and locally focussed community services. A virtuous feedback loop will come about through the audio visual content on the CN where recognition by their own community is seen.

**Crafts to Architecture.**

Vijayalakshmi is an architect and an artist who loves to bring bamboo artisanal work into modern homes. Her ancestral roots are in the nearby town. She is excited to find the last of the bamboo crafts person Ramanna in our village who makes bamboo baskets. These days he works in nearby farms as a daily wage earner and makes baskets during his free time. His family used to live is a house built by themselves using natural material from the forest and the farms such as bamboo and coconut leaves, mud and stones. Vijayalakhsmi was surprised to see him "building a house" with an obsession on concrete for its semblance to urban lifestyle and higher approval rate from neighbours! His personal obsession is bamboo as material of choice.

* Are we at an age where local craft is only affordable in an urban area.
* Are locals rejecting it for societal approval?
* Is it sustainable that we want to consume less or do we understand in a larger sense.
* Mud houses are cool in summer and Ramanna articulates that but rejects it for some reason that he does not want to express.
* Is the only way of convincing that the urban folks use it.
* Terracotta flooring his woman prefers as maintaining it is simpler.

Vijayalakshmi now starts working with Ramanna. Doing bamboo and mud plastered walls. Her idea is to demonstrate and tell the local world that this technology is available locally for the many home builders to have this aesthetic earth friendly component in their homes. She plans to introduce this work in the houses in the local town. This can bring Ramanna new work for his skills and help develop a collective of bamboo workers around this aspect so as to catalyse a locally designed future.

**Openstudio and Crafterspace**

Machines over handcraft is causing loss of skills, experiential knowledge and overall health. How do we make sense of this dependency on machines and money to afford it as opposed to making it with one's own hand and locally available resources. Open Studio and CrafterSpace have indulged in complementary aspects of this exploration. How to develop further design ideas and workshops with the community? Inviting resident artists with a fresh Southern gaze can help foray into exciting community engagement.

Ajmal has been a part of Open Studio work at Shiv Nadar University. 0penstudi0 is an interventionist art collective that sets up 'open' studios in rural and periurban areas as spaces for children from socially or economically weak backgrounds to practise art in a
non-institutionalised, non-hierarchical experimental pedagogic set-up. Among the villages in the valley, he has been investing in development of a process to stimulate the awareness of the cost of objects among the young minds and village women to help implicitly value the objects based on their carbon footprint.

Shalini has observed the development of successes and shortfalls of the CrafterSpace center. She has been kick starting crafts activity by monetization of gathering of women in the neighborhood through many crafts training based futures, in the context of COW - a local wifimesh setup to help catalise activities information reach through the youngsters in the villages. She is part of the COW maintainers and her focus is to help catalise activities for women and monetize information reach through the youngsters in the villages.

Community media gathering, sharing, discovery and navigation need active ideation with the community and our teams. All these activities will come under one umbrella as an archive that interconnects the parts through mapping of resources in the valley and among the villages.
How do these parts - people, processes and places - interconnect? Ramanna's bamboo work, basket weaving, block printing, the different techniques, reusing and preserving food, other daily life practices mesh with architectural structure, gardening, drawings, etc.. giving these techniques a broader platform. How do we encourage a nonlinear way of exhibiting or browsing of audio, video and text (yes text) for the many who are low-literate.

**Feminist Technology Playground**
A gentle multi pronged approach that brings together young people from social discriminated background, artists, inclusive games that support the rights of women and labour. A celebration of labor, care, local rituals and coming out in various forms.
"Playground" is intended to be playful, to bring many people and youth together, to open a socially disadvantaged hamlet to outsiders, to initiate progressive communications and to indulge in creative engagement. A sample of our friends who have interacted and helped with creating a space for engagement are [AC3, Chiguru, open studio, janastu team along with artists such as Devanjali]