By venturing into the unknown Designerly Research provides a means of increasing awareness of the meshworked and complex realities we live in, and allows for reflective moments through what we might call ‘making a more vascularized collective’. If the metaphorical ‘blood flow’ is our understanding and experience of things, a more vascularized collective might be seen as a collective of things, human and non-human, that is subject to the activity of meshworking; the activity of establishing contact between things, of making things ‘felt’, making them phenomenal.
The work done by the designers in RE-source shed light on such discussions in the humanities regarding agency and participation. For instance the works of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett dealing with assemblages and networks can be related to the RE-source project. Most specifically the notion of vascularization springs to mind (Bennett 2010, p.104):
“The political goal of a vital materialism is not the perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between members. (Latour calls this a more “vascularized” collective.”) There are many practical and conceptual obstacles here: How can communication proceed when many members are nonlinguistic? Can we theorize more closely the various forms of such communicative energies? How can humans learn to hear or enhance our receptivity for “propositions” not expressed in words?”
The RE-source designers’ work shows us a perspective on creating a more vascularized collective. What does this mean? We can think of the polity not only as the political entity formed by a united group of people, but of all things and materials that are mutually bound up in the gathering power of things (as done by Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things or many of Latour’s texts such as Pandora’s Hope). Doing this brings the assemblage forming characteristic of things (we can even include humans as things in this) to the fore. The net- or meshworked nature of things, their assemblage forming characteristic confronts us with a need for communication or at least a need for an increase in visibility. That is at least if we do not want to be caught of guard by the many entanglements and small agencies that emerge as discussed in Emergency elsewhere on RE-source.info.
How does the work by the RE-source designers relate to this? Take Jos Klarenbeek’s ‘ tijdsteen / steentijd ‘ research project performed within RE-source. It reevaluates the BSS pavement and investigates the life of the concrete paving stones and their gathering power. Klarenbeek investigates the people, places, protocols and practices that form entanglements with these stones, and brings specific bundles or knots to the front. In doing so many of those involved, bound up somewhere along the lines of the concrete paving stone, become visible and engage in new conversations or relations.
Klarenbeek’s use of time as a quality and design mechanism not only changes the physical appearance of the streets and depots, but has a more vascularized collective as effect; There is greater engagement of, and communication between, the different people, places and practices connected to the BSS concrete pavement stone.
Regardless of the actual implementation of his provocative design (a two month period is too short of a timeframe to even attempt to design a full fledged, viable system), what the designerly research of Jos Klarenbeek gives us is a knowledge outcome and ‘action’ or ‘movement’. Dialogues have opened up, questions have been asked, people have been poked and disturbed, frictions have moved in plain sight and things previously unnoticed and unseen, potential futures unthinkable before, have moved closer to the present. (See Close Encounters with the Possible for more on this)