Cooperation and mutualism among humans and other species has spanned the landscape for thousands of years. This is particularly evident in the silk industry here in the southern Indian State of Karnataka where almost every woman wears a silk sari. The silk industry in Karnataka is massive. Visitors here will find silk shops on most main streets. The city of Mysore is one very well-known production center for silk (akin to Bordeaux for wine or Darjeeling for tea), and although Karnatakan silk production has fallen in recent years (perhaps due to development and water shortage), it still accounts for almost 50% of India’s total silk output.
This semester a group of my students undertook the task of documenting the silk production process as it occurs in Karnataka. They visited several sites ranging from a rural handloom enterprise to industrial mills and retail outlets. They prepared themselves by looking at precedents from similar art and design students looking at how things are made. They also focused their investigations by first reading the Design for Sustainability Guide. In this way, they managed their engagement for the purposes of producing actionable knowledge to foster sustainable design practices.
One of the outputs of their research is this account of silk production. I found it detailed, well-researched (though I would have preferred more footnotes and cited references), and informative. I think it also illuminates the degree to which these students understand their processes and are willing and able to identify parts of the systems for further exploration.
Here is a sketch I made showing the locations and extent of intellectual property claims on 22 chromosomes and the X and Y. These data are from 2005. The extent is larger today.
Screenshot of one of the mapunity community interfaces.
Last week I visited the Mapunity folks who are building projects at NSRCEL in the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. They are a really great, super-keen group dedicated to building IT solutions for the purposes of development…often using geographic systems as a segue to action. I think they are most well-known for their work on the Bangalore Traffic Information System, which, if you’ve visited Bangalore recently, you know how bad the traffic is here.
The Mapunity folks are creating tools for users to make their own maps for whatever purpose they choose. The ones I like the most are these, dealing with innovation in rural parts of India. Here is where local, user based solutions to problems like disease control in cumin crops or remedies for animal wounds can be mapped to particular areas and described.
April 17, 2008 at 7:14 pm · Filed under heterarchy
It took me a long time to warm up to facebook. Eventually it was everyone else’s adoption of the site and its practices that convinced me to once again reaffirm my membership and make connections again. It’s been a good decision in the short-term, if only for the current knowledge of long-lost friends and colleagues.
Another peculiar benefit was seeing my former labmate’s profile and down there at the bottom, her dog’s profile. I had my first introduction to dogbook.
dogbook
Dogbook it seems is the canine equivalent to facebook. Well, it’s not exactly an equivalent mind you. Rather it allows people to add pictures of their dogs to their profiles, for their dogs to join social networks, and for their friends to send ‘pets’ and other gifts. Here’s their description:
Dogbook allows you to create a profile for your dog, tag your dog in photos, find dogs in your area, and much more!
After doing some searches, it seems that dogbook isn’t the only facebook-hosted social networking site for animals out there. Besides dogbook there’s catbook, horsebook, rodentbook, fishbook and, of course, petbook.
More may be on the way as facebook users seem to be requesting ratbook, cowbook, and ferretbook as well.
For me this means that social networking is quick to adopt our companions of other species, or at least to use them as indicators of our own social compatibility. That friends can send gifts such as virtual pets and chew toys ups the ante. The benefit isn’t really for the pets themselves, but it much more for the user own self satisfaction I’m guessing. Of course the ads at the top of dogbook speak volumes. Maybe it’ not for the dogs at all, but rather the people contributing to the billion$+ dog economy…
I asked a friend of mine why she added the application, and here’s what she had to say:
I added dogbook because I love the idea of my dog having friends (and, yes, he does actually visit with and play with the dogs on facebook). I added it since I have so many other friends on facebook with dogs, but so far they are all slackers (or think it is a stupid idea) and so Smudge only has one friend : ( I guess it’s lucky for him he has no clue what it’s all about.
I checked her dogs profile, and it seems he likes, “eating, running, cuddling, gathering all my toys into one pile, barking at chipmunks and pesky cats.” His favorite treats are, “Anything and everything (even carrots and grapes).”
True social physical networking among species is what interests me. How might species engage in ecosystems of care by themselves (with a little intervention from us of course)? What happens when species from different parts of the world are linked by virtual communities of care and neglect? Does it take a village or is a biosphere more appropriate these days? What are the technological links that can make these connections feasible and meaningful for us and our interspecific companions?
I’m reading a book entitled, When Species Meet, by Donna Haraway. She’s one of my favorite authors, not only because of her subject matter, the relationships between ourselves and other organisms, science, and the stories we use to create meaning for how we act in the world, but because her literary style mixes the meanings of words and maintains her constantly questioning presence in the text.
Potamopyrgus antipodarum under the dissecting scope
In the third chapter of the book, she handles suffering, particularly of organisms in highly-constructed laboratory settings, with great care. By pointing out that we are always linked to killing in one form or another, the questions she raises is not if we do it at all, but rather how we approach, encounter, and leave those organisms that we are inextricably bound to.
My favorite passage from that third chapter is the one in which she asks some of her colleagues in the biological sciences how they demonstrate concern for the organisms in the lab as part of their practice. This is a question very close to home for me because it describes so much about my own motivations for doing science in the lab, how ‘reliable’ data are produced, and what kinds of practices can result.
I’m reminded of that famous quote from Barbara McClintock, also the title of Evelyn Fox Keller’s book, that emphasizes how “Getting a Feeling for the Organism” inserts itself so profoundly into daily scientific practice. This is empathy, yes, but the question Haraway asks is how we learn to recognize and therefore intervene in existing situations to show concern and enact strategies for care.
I think back to my own experiences in the lab, or rather, a temperature-controlled cool room. Others had brought snails back from a mountainous lake region in the southern hemisphere, and I was responsible for their care. These snails happened to be an invasive species in the U.S., requiring an extra level of containment to keep them, their offspring, and the parasites out of the regional ecosystem. My relationship with them meant creating the best possible environment for their growth and reproduction. They were, in effect, prisoners (although escape did have a potentially huge payoff). My role in their care meant feeding, finding and installing balanced spectrum lighting to mimic the ambient wavelengths, bringing in local plants to help filter the water in a huge freshwater ecosystem, making sure the water kept moving, installing irrigation systems to distribute a constant flow across many individual containers, adding sterilized rocks to the containers to allow for micronutrients, bacteria and other microorganisms, and even keeping fish and crayfish in the main tank to help condition and scavenge the water. For me, all of these technologies were about care. For one thing we couldn’t maintain the relationship these snails had with their parasites in the lab because we thought they just weren’t being taken care of well enough. There was this very important relationship, then, between how we cared for these snails and how and what kind of data we could collect about their own tight relationship with the parasites they came with.
For design, I’m thinking of how we script care. How can it be made obligatory as part of the function of a service, object, or process? How is it that we find connections and feel compelled to spend our time and energies attempting to make an environment or artifact more comfortable for another? How are we able to recognize what matters in this equation, especially when there are so many possibilities to misinterpret or just plain get it wrong. I suppose we look for signs of health, reproduction, and activity as indicators that we are on the right track. In doing so we create synergies between ourselves and others. By designing for their comfort, we link our vigor and theirs.
Check this: This report is intended to help companies design specifically for the so-called base of the pyramid in Emerging Economies such as Brazil, China, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Egypt and Kenya.
An EMERGING ECONOMY is a country that is experiencing rapid informationalization under conditions of limited or partial industrialization. In the past, some of these regions have been understood as being in the process of industrial development, and were therefore described as ‘developing countries.’ Alternatively, they have been described as ‘emerging markets’ for goods and services created in the industrialized nations of the world. Our conception of Emerging Economies, however, recognizes that these parts of the world are not merely slow to industrialize, nor merely markets, but strategic centers for the emerging networked knowledge economy.
One of the biggest challenges found in India is convincing others about the value of design and design research. On the other hand, I have never been in a better place for learning and conducting research that takes into account the views, perspectives, and voices of others. Call it a post-colonial mandate or whatever, but in terms of making design adaptable and responsive to user needs, the context couldn’t be better for innovation and the creation of appropriate technologies and product service systems.
Cooperation and mutualism among humans and other species has spanned the landscape for thousands of years. This is particularly evident in the silk industry here in the southern Indian State of Karnataka where almost every woman wears a silk sari. The silk industry in Karnataka is massive. Visitors here will find silk shops on most main streets. The city of Mysore is one very well-known production center for silk (akin to Bordeaux for wine or Darjeeling for tea), and although Karnatakan silk production has fallen in recent years (perhaps due to development and water shortage), it still accounts for almost 50% of India’s total silk output.
One of the outputs of their research is this account of silk production. I found it detailed, well-researched (though I would have preferred more footnotes and cited references), and informative. I think it also illuminates the degree to which these students understand their processes and are willing and able to identify parts of the systems for further exploration.
