Recently my fiancée, Dan, sent me this summary (in his own words) of a reading he had done for a class that went to design infrastucture for slums outside of Lima Peru – offered through his Landscape Architecture grad program at University of Washington in Seattle.
“community participatory design can be used as a means of gathering information for a designer to then make their "expert" design, or (the better option), it can be used as a means and an ends at once, by empowering the community by seeking their skills, not just their knowledge. By seeking their skills, that means identifying what things people in the community are good at, what things they have a drive to accomplish, and thereby making a project that empowers the community through the very act of engaging their participation, instead of using participation as an information gathering tool for the designer. Its also implies that the most relevant and potentially successful projects are the ones that ‘want’ to happen anyway, and the designer/ facilitator just facilitates.”
As time passes, and I try to contemplate my design process, I’m realizing that there is very little design whatsoever involved in the way Dominicans do things. I’ve experienced dozens of examples of this, so I will try to relay just a few. On my second day here, I was invited to go to choir practice at the church in the center of town by Catarina, the 19-year-old secretary at the hogar. There was no written music, nor a music director. There was a kid (Catarina’s brother) who played guitar and seemed the most musically inclined of the group, and there were two young guys that would take turns playing simple rhythms on the drumset. All the songs were memorized and if there was a dispute among the group about how the song went, they would take turns listening to the song on someone’s cell phone. There was one song that was really dissonant, and they kept trying to fix it by singing it over and over again. It got a little better, but there was one guy who was consistently flat and I didn’t want to be the one to tell him, since I was just watching, so it never really got resolved.
Another example of the lack of design, or maybe I should call it spontaneity, is the way we were going to build the tool shed – using the existing structure and building off of it. No design plans, no permission, we were just going to throw it together on the spot from whatever material was cheapest. And that’s how a lot of stuff gets built here, including our newest projects – the compost pile and the garden beds, but more on that later.
My first day here, in the car ride from the airport, we stopped at one of the sidewalk fruit vendors, who literally stack their plantains, bananas and yams in large piles right on the sidewalk. I told Madrina, “In the US we don’t do this,” and Maria Elena commented, “Yes, they just put themselves wherever they want. Here there are no rules.”
Yet another example: It was a few days ago when I saw the first garbage truck since my arrival. They stopped outside the hogar’s gate and two guys actually came inside the gate, and asked for the garbage. Mami, the cook showed them where it was and they waited while she collected the remaining trash from inside the house. Maria Elena told me that the garbage guys just come whenever they want so you can’t count on them coming every week. I asked her why they come all the way up to the house and she said they can’t leave it on the sidewalk because the dogs will go through it and throw it everywhere. So the process of collecting trash here becomes more personal, but much less organized. One can’t depend on having their trash picked up with any regularity.
I feel I am learning to use the spontaneity of the Dominican culture as part of a collaborative design process. I haven’t made one drawing or map of how I want the garden to look, and to be honest, I don’t even have a picture of what it will look like in my head. Seeking people’s skills here inevitably means being flexible enough to have an evolving design, and that works well for me because I’m not the kind of person that can envision everything before any work has been started. I am inspired and fed by the work we have already done, which gives me yet more ideas. I just have to be watching our worker, William, to make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy, but so far everything looks great. There is no doubt that this project “wants” to happen. Yesterday I found the girls outside collecting fallen leaves to compost and watering the beds we planted all on their own accord.
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