I wrote a long post about this in 2024. The short version is that the standard for this already exists, it is called IIIF, it is genuinely good, and almost everything built around it assumes there is an institution behind you. There were four parts to get through: serving the image, making the manifest, storing the annotations, and hosting the result. Each part has a decent tool. BIIIF, Wax, Tropy with the Tropiiify plugin, Canopy. Each one is someone’s earnest attempt to make the thing smaller, and each one still ends with the person who has the collection holding a pipeline of GitHub repositories, scripts and manifest URLs. When our collective did this, we self-hosted it on a server we owned. The four years mostly bought me a clearer picture of the problem. I am fairly sure the shape of the answer is something like this, and much less sure that this is it.

Archie is my attempt at those four parts in one window. It is a web app - media goes in, notes go on the media, and what comes out is a folder of static files which can be hosted directly on something like Github Pages. Mainly I wanted to offer multiple ways of annotating the same objects and creating inter-relationships between objects, annotations using the Open web standard W3C and IIIF.

The Authoring Parts - the Studio

The unit is an exhibit, which is a set of media with notes on it. Media comes in by dragging files in, or by pasting a IIIF manifest URL, in which case Archie pulls the folios in as objects to annotate.

Annotating is drawing a region and writing into a popover anchored where the region was drawn. The note is markdown and it takes tags, and the marker stays put through panning and zooming. A note with no region attaches to the whole object instead.

Audio and video work the same way along time - drag across the waveform to mark a range, or pause a video frame and draw a box on it, which anchors the note to that place at that moment.

Maps are a fourth kind of object, where regions attach to real longitude and latitude, so re-framing the basemap leaves them where they were on the Earth.

The part I find most interesting is Readings. A Reading is an interpretation of the object. Each note belongs to a way of reading the thing.

A narrative is a sequence of sections. Each section is prose bound to an object and a framed region, so the reader’s view moves as they read down.

Cmd-K inside a note searches everything in the library and inserts a live reference to another note, object or exhibit.

What comes out - the Viewer

Publishing produces static HTML, JSON and media files. That folder goes on any host, or the .archie.zip gets handed over with no host at all. The viewer side also offers a full gallery but this can also be viewed in a IIIF viewer like Mirador.

The published site leads with the narrative if there is one, prose beside the canvas, with the Readings legend in reach throughout. If there is no narrative it leads with the objects instead. Every note has its own URL, so a link opens to that note, framed.

The annotations are W3C Web Annotations and the exhibits are IIIF Presentation 3 manifests.

In Are.na, the channel is the unit of arrangement: blocks that have types (Image, Text, Embed, Attachment, Link, Channel) in whatever order you give them, sub-channels nested inside, every block showing its lateral connections to other people’s channels. Also storage is important for a portfolio and Are.na can be a backend that can also standalone as a research artifact.

Borrowing the shape

Clement Valla’s Binder, which I found sometime in 2024, was the shape that I wanted. A single static page that read from an info.json. A menu of Websites, rendered as a draggable monospace table of contents panel that you can click through. Almost like a slidedeck, I liked the simplicity.

But Binder’s data model was a curated flat list and different from what use Are.na can offer. Are.na brought the structure of block types, nesting blocks, pagination. It reads the are.na API at runtime, so reordering blocks or connecting channels differently updates the portfolio without touching code. This meant curation and long-term maintenance would be easier since Are.na has cross-platform extensions and fully featured desktop and phone apps. It also meant that research and curation work could also be part of the portfolio.

So I rebuilt it and named it Commonplace. It has a Svelte 5 frontend, Are.na is the backend and Github Pages as the build target.

There is a canonical are.na channel that can be added to config.json. This is the root channel. But as I started exploring, I realised how powerful the hyperlinking in Are.na is. Even though I only addded one channel as the root channel, the linkages were taking me to various other channels almost in a test of the six degrees of separation rule.

I come from the land of hero-worship, where posters of action heroes are bathed in milk and the death of a celebrity causes nationwide mourning and subsequent fan deaths like an aftershock. A relevant idiom back then was “Never meet your heroes”. But this proverb became less and less relevant as I started growing into the Big Brother Tech(BBT) era.

As I was confronted by the excesses of fame and fortune, I started to embody more of the “No heroes, no gods” mindset. This changed the way that I consume media.

A youngin Micah brought as much reverence to good music and movies as the process of self-flagellation and “repentance” that my ex-religion required. It made me develop a taste for things that were foundational in the person I am today.

This is a screen recorded from that time - Your mom on instagram

None of the user comments show the behaviour anymore. But everyone expected this to be quickly patched because this had the potential to be a PR disaster for Instagram. However, it’s December of 2023 and still didn’t seem to be patched.

Understanding virtual worlds is important because “we increasingly live in a world in which opting out of technological systems is more and more difficult and yet participation within those systems pushes us to accept structures we might oppose” (Taylor 2006a:135). - Tom Boellstorff (Coming of Age in Second life: An Anthropologist explores the Virtually Human)

Back in 2020, memewhile.mp3 and I facilitated a discussion with a small group over a Design Baithak, about how the culture of livestreaming was meeting the world of political campaigning. We tried to put together a sense-making exercise deriving from the affordances of a Twitch-like platform and its associated subculture to try to understand how manufactured authenticity was about to become the new wave of algorithmic manipulation. Since then, corporate social media…

“The phenomenon of communication depends on not what is transmitted, but on what happens to the person who receives it. And this is a very different matter than transmitting information” (Maturana & Varela, 1987)

My line of thinking has since veered toward how affordances on these digital publics drive and manipulate behaviour. The ways in which platforms manufacture “truth” and “ignorance” are deeply tied to interface design. If we don’t identify the hostile architectures of these spaces we inhabit, we lose sense of how these spaces are being constructed. Beta-testing different versions of the site to influence behaviour has existed for a long time. However, as we experience the maturation of these sites, the beta testing behaviour has become a part of the influencer, IT team, propoganda machine, PR team toolkit as well. Youtube creators have long professed to changing titles and thumbnails regularly for every video. Some of the obsessive ones like the disgraced Mr. Beast even change their thumbnails and titles every day. ️

Interfaces help manipulate you

Sites like Amazon start to feel a little slippy, because there is no way to approach ground truth. Our entire reality on Amazon is on the shaky ground because of its algorithm. There is no accessible way to remember, bookmark prices, no way to mark these prices against dates, no way to know if the prices you are seeing are because you logged in with your account or if they would have been different if you used a private tab first. There is no way to know if you are seeing discounts on some products because other people who have been in your vicinity have them or if others see the same discounts you do. How do you tell what is true on there anymore?

Display technology like E-ink suddenly see a huge capital inflow after stagnating for a decade because the potential to make signs that are dynamic, low-energy and “safe-feeling” is transformational. The North American killing of mom and pop shops are starting to pay dividends. Terms like ‘surge pricing’ which entered the Overton Window of acceptable concepts through other Algorithm abusers like Uber are poised to become a ubiquitous concept in the brick and mortar shopping spaces. It is already hard to tell if all the supply of a certain product is from one single parent brand that has 15 different sub-brands. Now we will be faced with the uncertainty of how the weather forecast will change the prices of goods in the evening. ️ All this to say, interfaces like the E-ink signage, the infinite scroll and Youtube creator tools become spaces on the interface to mask hostile or manipulative behaviour by multiple “stakeholders” of the platform toward the “user”

What should we design then

As with most things, this is easy to get literal about. Infodumping the number of people on your Youtube feed that have changed their thumbnails and how often they change them might be useful to some users. A much harder but effective way, however, is to experience a taste of the iceberg while they are in the water.

What should, then, be the design patterns for sensing and intuiting ground truth while using these platforms. I have been using the concepts below to think about it

Counter Design Patterns

Boundary Objects

Boundary objects are a concept in communication and organisational studies that describe artifacts, documents, terms, or concepts that help different groups work together and communicate across their boundaries, even when they have different perspectives or understanding of the object itself.

For example, a medical chart acts as a boundary object between doctors, nurses, administrators, and insurance companies. Each group interprets and uses the chart differently:

• Doctors use it to track treatment decisions
• Nurses use it for day-to-day patient care
• Administrators use it for resource allocation
• Insurance companies use it for billing purposes

But how do you create an object that helps the plural “user” understand and give labels to digital phenomenon. These are phenomenon that they unintentionally are a part of because of the algorithmic interference.

I think DeArrow (an extension) is an amazing example of this. It replaces the clickbait with crowdsourced thumbnails and titles. This is done non-intrusively but at least in my experience the psychological effect is noticeable. I am not going to describe it here, but it does spin your mind to just glimpse at the scale of the beta testing done on it.

Archival Interface Niches

Let us record the conman who spoke too fast the last time we met him. We paid that time but we will learn. We will listen to the recording. Replay the conversations in our head and practice hard-hitting replies in the shower.

Allow the interface to be archivable and annotable, and we are creating spaces for our future selves to come back and reflect and make meaning. To ruminate on the things we didn’t notice the first time around, to see the warning signs retrospectively.

Antarsam is a thought experiment: what if Subhashchandra Bose had survived in 1943, and India had built decentralised, ant-colony-inspired food systems instead of the Green Revolution? The fiction is a way to treat infrastructure as a choice that could have gone differently, and still could. It draws on hauntology and on the community network work in Bidar.

In Wayanad, after the 2018 floods, I worked with Paniya children to make tapestry stories about their futures. It grew out of research into centuries of enslavement, landlessness, and exclusion from education, and tried to make room for aspirations that dominant narratives had denied.

Counter-design asks the opposite question: not what future to imagine, but how to resist the ones being imposed. How do interfaces manipulate perception, and what would it mean to design against platforms that manufacture engagement and authenticity? The Imposter Among Us looks at the same erosion through Twitch and livestreaming politicians, and what happens when performance and sincerity stop being distinguishable.

Milli lets communities annotate archives instead of only consuming them, layering a scholar’s reading and an elder’s onto the same record through the W3C Web Annotation standard. I presented it at International Archives Week.

IIIF is a way for small archives to host and share images without enterprise systems. Getting there wasn’t clean; years of false starts before a low-code path worked, learned by saturation and osmosis.

The Wikipedia editathon during Dalit History Month worked inside the platform that shapes how millions meet history. Its knowledge gaps are not accidental- they reflect whose histories are considered encyclopaedic.

Papad works with audio, the medium oral communities already use, running on mesh networks in Karnataka villages.

To briefly talk about why I set about looking for such solutions - I am part of few collectives that work with cultural and creative practice-based research in Karnataka, India. As is, in the course of our work, we come across some interesting collections and collectors of images for different purposes.

A few examples include a researcher studying Memes and Dissent in India looking to have large hoards of images annotated as a community, a 70-year old collector with pictures of a place from a time when very very few pictures exist and a group of dargahs with objects of centuries-old storied traditions. A group of community health workers collecting images and stories of locally available foods, diets and mythologies, multimedia annotations created by performance artists for other artists from a different tradition/discipline. Each of these examples, require a hosting and publishing solution customizable and annotable metadata and a relatively simple user-management featureset. Back in 2021, I experienced how arbitrary and niche the process of creating a panable, zoomable and annotable image was.

At that time, I was using OpenSeadragon+Annotorious as a way to create the map in this Compost.mag piece It felt like magic to be able to path that together with whatever little code I knew, like I had cracked it.

“This could be used EVERYWHERE!”

But I found out soon enough - not really!

It felt like every new image I wanted to use this in way would need its own unique pipeline and dedicated resources.

This felt wrong, that something like this wasn’t a native web standard like html. If we are able to annotate text this easily why are images so much harder.

It seemed to be something that could only easily be made in walled-garden platforms.

While working through this problem in 2020, something standing out as having potential was this framework called IIIF (triple-eye-eff) - International Image Interoperability Framework. It was describing a solution that felt a little good to be true.

Yet I saw Archive after Archive listed as examples. I couldn’t believe that these viewing experiences weren’t custom-built monoliths and were based on a standard implementation that I could use if I tried.

I started reading up about it and coming back to it every two months. For a non-technical person like me, it was quite a dense topic to understand. So I tried to learn it by saturation and osmosis.

It was during that time that I started experimenting with Cantaloupe, a IIIF image server. We self-hosted it on a server that our collective owned. After getting to the point of being able to serve singular images, I came across the biggest issue.

How do I actually organize, metadatize, annotate and then serve these images?

Grappling with the complexity of IIIF

• This image is a diagram illustrating how the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) works to manage, display, and secure digital images in an online setting.
• The process begins with the IIIF Image Server, where image files and accompanying metadata files (info.json) are stored.
• This server has the capability to transform images (e.g., resizing, rotating, format conversion) based on user needs and is typically accessible over a network.
• The images are then made available through an Image API that enables users to retrieve images in different sizes and formats without needing separate versions of each file.
• This capability allows users to zoom into detailed sections of images, which is especially useful for high-resolution images of artwork or historical documents.
• In another location on the internet, the users create Manifest.json files and stored as bundles that collect images, metadata (e.g., title, description), and structural information (e.g., page order) to organize images or collections for online display.
• These manifest files are passed to a IIIF viewer in a web browser or application, allowing users to view images with embedded metadata.
• The IIIF viewer can utilise additional APIs, such as the Authentication API for access control to restrict certain content and the Search API to enable text searching within images (e.g., searching for keywords in handwritten documents).
• The manifest.json made according to the Presentation API provides display instructions to the viewer to ensure the images and metadata are presented cohesively. This API supports annotations and custom display settings.

As far as my usecases went, this was overkill and far too complicated of a individual or a small archive. So I was looking for opportunities to simplify the stack of things that had to be put together.

As I saw it there 3 main areas where the complexity was really high

The Image Server

The traditional IIIF image server is a dynamically serving images, cut up into tiles (like maps) - so that they can be viewed at a high resolution. It stores the image, and an accomanying info.json that has instructions about the nature of the image (size, resolution etc.) This has been defined in the Image API.

A simplification that was offered online was to serve static tiles of that don’t do any transformations.

However, if you were able to limit the viewing to 1 or 2 zoom levels, the tiles can be created once and reused again and again. This is hitting the tradeoff between performance and memory usage.

A github repo with the images pre-cut into tiles at different zoom levels and corresponding tiles and info.jsons could behave like an IIIF image server.

Manifest Creation:

Manifest/manifests a JSON file which bundles up all the different elements of an IIIF object (such as a single image, or a series of images) with basic metadata (like title, description, and rights information) and structural information (such as page order). According to the Presentation API, here are a few types of properties that a manifest can hold

• Descriptive and Rights Properties: Include required properties (like label and metadata), with some optional and recommended properties (e.g., rights, language, and navDate).
• Technical Properties: Most properties are required for fundamental elements (like id, type), with other property attributes (e.g., height and width).
• Linking Properties: External and internal links - external include logo, see more info, images part of a range etc.
• Structural Properties: items, structures, annotations
• Behavior Values: Asks to define motivation or purpose

As you can see, putting together these things for every image in every collection without the help of a GUI felt very hard, especially because we also wanted the archivists themselves to be able to manage their archives to a large extent.

The process of putting together Manifests for large quantities of images, is still quite a hard problem. To make matters even more complicated - Manifests are only part of the picture in terms of the structuring required.

Resource Types - Structuring the objects from the image server:

The manifest.json is the part of the object that allows the image to work in a viewer but it is by no means alone. The IIIF Presentation API defines several resource types to structure and present complex multimedia objects. This however means, that it adds to the complexity of the Manifest Creation process.

• At the top level is the Collection, which groups multiple Manifests (representing individual compound objects like books or albums) and/or other Collections in a hierarchical way for navigation or organization.
• Each Manifest describes a single compound object, including its metadata and layout instructions for displaying the content.
• Within a Manifest, Canvases represent individual views or “pages” of the object, providing a space for arranging content resources (e.g., images, audio, or video) through Annotations. Ranges allow Canvases or sections of them to be grouped into logical sections, like chapters or scenes.
• Annotations link content resources to Canvases, creating a flexible and distributed system for adding layers of information such as translations or commentary.
• An Annotation Page organizes a list of Annotations on a Canvas, while Annotation Collections group Annotation Pages at a higher level, allowing different types of commentary or translations to be kept separate.

Read more here

Creating the Manifests - Organizing the collection

The process of bundling the metadata with the images is also a labour-intensive task. Most institutions that are switching to IIIF for their collections use either custom-built or resource-heavy Content management Software to create manifests. They might also use an Archival Content Management Systems like Islandora, Arches or Omeka. This is however, much harder to do for smaller archivists. For years, there existed no generic way to set up metadata in a spreadsheet(as non-technical people will want to do) and have it converted to a manifest.

Creating Annotations - User-generated metadata

A little less intimidating problem but equally as important is the user-generated metadata or Annotations. How do we enable viewers and end users to create Annotations on these images and have these annotations reflect when viewing them.

Hosting the archive itself

In this configuration, there are a few storage locations that we need to solve.

1. Where the images are stored and served from
2. Where the annotations are stored and served from
3. Where the manifests are stored and served from
4. Where is the viewer and archive stored

Is it possible to create a simple user-hosted IIIF archive?

A few attempts have been made to simplify the IIIF archive with different opinions on how to simplify this process. A massive simplification is to use github pages

For Single Images

Digirati Manifest Editor

The editor For a smaller dataset, the Manifest Editor is a great tool, if you are willing to organise the images one after another. You are able to annotate and organize the images all in the editor and download the manifest and host it with the images and the html file with the IIIF viewer. Its fairly simple to use, you create or open a manifest, add canvases, add content to these canvases, add annotations and other metadata - preview what it looks like in different IIIF viewers. The viewers that support text-on-image annotations through this method are Theseus and Annona (as of Nov 2024)

For Image collections

BIIIF (Build IIIF)

Github Repo This method seeks to use folder hierarchy as a way to quickly organise the collection and generate the manifests. The way it does this is to use a naming convention as a symbol of the various resource types defined in the Presentation API

You can read more in detail here

After organising the files and folders, the script should create manifests as ‘index.json’ in each “manifest” folder.

To view these manifests, we need to have it on the internet with a URL. This is possible to do with github pages. However, storing the images on a github repository and the manifest, with an html file in which you pass the url of the manifest to the IIIF viewer embedded in the webpage.

Wax

Wax is an end-to-end workflow for creating exhibitions while following minimal computing principles. It uses a jekyll site with a interesting uses of the ruby plugins like Rake and ready-made jekyll components to create an image exhibition. With github pages, wax is quite extensive and powerful. While tropy would be good for people interested in having a better backend organizing experience, Wax places itself in the better viewing part of the spectrum. It uses the build process to create static tiles, search data as well as creating manifests. The documentation is beautiful and well-thought out as well and is meant for complete beginners to peruse. This doesn’t have any easy method for creating annotations however.

• this are the parts of my config file that I edited, there are more parts but I have removed it - you can see the full version here - https://github.com/micahchoo/bhc-demo/

# ==============================================================
# WAX CONFIGURATION
# ==============================================================
# Jekyll configuration files are written in YAML format.
# Colons, tabs/spacing, and quotes are meaningful in YAML.
# It is recommended you look at the following guide to avoid
# syntax errors in this file:
# ~> https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/yaml/
#
#
# Questions?
# ~> https://minicomp.github.io/wiki/#/
#
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# MAIN SETTINGS
# ---------------------------------------------------------------
# Feel free to change these! For more info, refer to:
# ~> https://jekyllrb.com/docs/configuration/options/

title: 'Bidar Heritage Center'
description: 'A demo for the BHC Archives'
url: 'https://minicomp.github.io'
baseurl: '/wax'
copyright: 'Example copyright org, 2023'
logo: '/assets/logo.png'
default_thumb: '/assets/default.png'

# --------------------------------------------------------------
# COLLECTION SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------------------------
# Wax leverages Jekyll collections for much of its
# functionality, therefor some of the keys below are from
# Jekyll while others are Wax-specific.
# For more info, refer to:
# ~> https://jekyllrb.com/docs/collections/

collections:
  exhibits:
    output: true
  raj_bidri_pn: # name of collection
    output: true # makes sure pages are output as html files
    layout: 'raj_bidri_pn_item' # the layout for the pages to use
    metadata:
      source: 'raj_bidri_pn.csv' # path to the metadata file within `_data`
    images:
      source: 'raw_images/raj_bidri_pn' # path to the directory of images within `_data`

# --------------------------------------------------------------
# SEARCH INDEX SETTINGS
# --------------------------------------------------------------
# You can create multiple search indexes below (though only one is
# recommended!) by specifying
# an `index` file to write it to and some `collections` for it to index
# and running `$ bundle exec rake wax:search`.

search:
  main:
    index: '/search/index.json' # file the index will get written to
    collections:
      raj_bidri_pn:
        content: true # whether or not to index page content
        fields: # the metadata fields to index
          - label
          - subject
          - description
          - creator
          - source
          - publisher
          - _date
          - contributor
          - rights
          - relation
          - format
          - language
          - type
          - coverage
          - collected_by
          - collection_date

Tropy and Tropiiify

This option seems to be the most promising in terms of the performance and flexibility. When combined with github CI/CD, it can be a complete solution on its own. It is able to provide features that allow organising the files, adding metadata, adding annotation and creating manifests.

While the developers of Tropy have repeatedly asserted that tropy’s data model is good enough for non-image sources, they don’t have time to build support for audio-visual items as well. Being a great organisational suite, Tropy would be well-suited as a multiplayer app. However, as of Sept 4, Tropy dev’s main recommendation is to use a shared folder and be carefull to avoid desynced editing. Collaborative project? - Question - forums.tropy.org

There are a few steps to follow

• Install Tropy
• Download the tropiiify plugin as.zip
• Install the plugin to tropy in the Preferences menu
• Create a repo and activate github pages for it
• In the plugin settings change the base ID to the github pages url till 1 level above the index.json

• Import items to Tropy, organize the images add annotations
• For every item, add a unique number in the identifier field
• Export>tropiiify

• Upload this folder to the github repo you created
• Go to Digirati Manifest editor>Open manifest url>Paste the URL of the manifest.json file from your github pages site
• Preview/Edit or download the json (If changed reupload to Github)
• Create an html page with one of the viewers embedded and pass it the url of the manifest.json

See my Tropiiify test demo

Canopy to deploy Tropiiify collection as a static site

There is an in-depth tutorial on using Canopy with a Tropiiify export

There are some other people who have written in-depth guides

• https://literarymachin.es/iiif-tropy-canopy/

• https://electricarchaeology.ca/2024/07/25/make-your-tropy-collection-and-annotations-available-with-canopy/

• Example Repo canopy.json

{
  "collection": "https://micahchoo.github.io/bhc-demo-tropy/index.json",
  "devCollection": "https://micahchoo.github.io/bhc-demo-tropy/index.json",
  "featured": [
    "https://micahchoo.github.io/bhc-demo-tropy/bhc001_hakeem_abdul20170705_pn02/manifest.json",
    "https://micahchoo.github.io/bhc-demo-tropy/bhc001_bid_laxmibai_af_01/manifest.json"
  ],
  "metadata": ["Date", "Subject"],
  "label": { "none": ["Collection Title"] },
  "summary": {
    "none": ["Brief description of the site and its contents."]
  },
  "theme": {
    "defaultTheme": "light",
    "accentColor": "red",
    "grayColor": "mauve",
    "radius": "small",
    "scaling": "100%"
  }
}

1. Recreate some older historical maps to a printable format as re-drawn images
2. Create newer OSM-based retrospective maps that marked these halls by decade in a readable format. The challenge was to create a visually appealing and informative map that highlighted cinema halls with labels, specific localities like Abids, Musheerabad, and Khairatabad. The centerpiece of the map was Hussain Sagar, a landmark that helps orient anyone familiar with Hyderabad to the map.

The Mapping Process

Step 1: Stylizing the Map in Mapbox

The first step involved using Mapbox, a powerful tool for custom map design. The objective was to simplify the map for readability. This was achieved by:

• Colour Stylisation: Choosing a colour palette that was clear yet functional.
• Hiding Unnecessary Layers: Removing layers that cluttered the map, such as minor settlements, road names, and highway icons.
• Filtering Specific Features: Ensuring that important features like Abids, Hussain Sagar, and the Outer Ring Roads were prominently visible.

  

Step 2: Exporting and Georeferencing

Once the map was stylized:

• Export as PNG: The map was exported from Mapbox as a PNG file.
• Georeferencing in QGIS: The PNG file was then imported into QGIS, a free and open-source geographic information system, where it was georeferenced to align with geographical data accurately.

Step 3: Enhancing Map Details in QGIS

In QGIS, further enhancements were made:

• Stylizing Labels: Labels were styled using callouts and offsets to improve visibility amidst a high density of points.
• Manual Adjustments: Labels were manually adjusted to avoid overlap and ensure clarity.
• Creating a Layout: A layout was designed, incorporating a scale and map title for professional presentation.

Step 4: Final Touches in Inkscape

The map underwent final refinements in Inkscape, a vector graphics editor:

• Importing the Map: The QGIS-exported PNG was imported into Inkscape.
• Adding a Legend: For labels that could not fit directly on the map, a legend was created to accommodate them, ensuring no information was lost.

  

Other Maps

A few like this one was redrawn in Procreate using a Telangana State Archive map that Dr. Yamini discovered

The project required balancing institutional communication requirements with usability- making the dense planning datasets navigable for readers with different levels of technical background.

Visit the site

This project grows out of a persistent interest in how the digital has been adopted, adapted, and resisted across the subcontinent- and how archival and cultural materials are being made accessible (or not) through digitisation efforts.

Browse the collection

In Bidar, Janastu’s mesh network ran as an intranet of informal archives: folklore, songs, and oral practices held by women of various communities. The reflection in Compost Digital tried to hold both the limits of the technology and what it opened up.

The COWs (Community-Owned Wifi-Mesh) principles came out of that practice: community networks are about social relationships and trust as much as connectivity. There is also a framework for keeping such a network generative rather than extractive, mapping the roles of builders, maintainers, and creators. The experience fed a piece for the Association for Progressive Communications and a Technoscience Salon panel.

Papad is a community audio archive, built for how oral communities already share knowledge, running on the same kind of mesh networks.

The checklist for selecting digital tools for Indian collectives is shaped by limited resources, mixed literacy, and how collectives actually decide. The Webinar Pi argues for building conferencing on Raspberry Pi hardware, for people the commercial platforms assume do not exist.

In Bidar, the mesh network was inseparable from the communities hosting it. The women whose oral practices it was meant to serve were collaborators, not “users.” In Wayanad, a literature review on the disenfranchisement of the Paniya, centuries of enslavement, landlessness, and exclusion from education, became the ground for a storytelling tool that asked Adivasi children to imagine futures for themselves, using elephants from their own Vattakalli dance tradition.

In rural Bihar, participatory mapping in Kishanganj showed how caste shapes school placement, village infrastructure, and what parents let themselves hope for their children. In Koramangala, the method was just attentiveness: the buffaloes that pass at dawn, the sanitation workers, the garbage trucks, the rhythms of a neighbourhood most people only see as a tech hub.

Mapping the migratory routes of pastoralists across India combined GIS with the shepherds’ own knowledge, making visible land-use patterns that policy is disrupting. The climate resource centre in Bidar collected the seasonal knowledge, care practices, and mythic narratives farming communities use to read ecological change.

Care-full Collectives is the longer, academic version of the same commitment: care as what holds these networks together.

The archives come from various communities in Bidar and their knowledge practices. During the project, we came to see both the limitations of technology and its potential to catalyse spaces of cultural collaboration. The piece presents narratives from the field- possibilities and futures that our network members came across while documenting and creatively engaging with folklore, songs, and oral practices held by women of various communities in Bidar.

Read the full piece on Compost Digital

The proposal draws on Janastu’s years of fieldwork with community networks in rural Karnataka, where we observed first-hand how the gap between available tools and community needs keeps widening. Webinar Pi is an attempt to bridge that gap from the community’s side rather than the platform’s.

Read the full piece on Janastu Blog

Posters

Paintings

Stakeholders in the CoW Network

1. Builders: These participants contribute to the network by adding nodes and devices.
2. Maintainers: Responsible for sustaining the network and rectifying issues.
3. Consumers: This group is subdivided into two:
   • Internet users who access the mesh network
   • Individuals fulfilling requests for gigs, services, and products.
4. Creators: These participants generate, collate, and curate content for local use.
5. Offerors: Stakeholders who provide gigs, service requests, product requests, and more (Knowledge, Processes, Tools, Connections).
6. extraMeshers: Individuals facilitating activities from outside the mesh.

Optimization Actions for Each Role

1. Builders

   • Incentivized Actions: Addition of nodes, Seeking support.

2. Maintainers

   • Incentivized Actions: Encourage non-technical people to join the maintenance routine, Contribute to builders’ activities.

3. Internet Consumers

   • Incentivized Actions: Offer curation capabilities and incentivize it. Improve sharing capabilities outside the local network.
   • Discouraged Actions: Spreading fake news and rumours, Excessive bandwidth usage for games, movies, and other high-traffic media.

4. Local Content Consumers

   • Incentivized Actions: Accessing local content, Curating for others.
   • Associated Actions: Tied to offerors’ activities.

5. Offerors

   • Incentivized Actions: Creating local content, Offering local jobs, Prioritizing smaller first, Offering curation and collection, Establishing local value-adding enterprises.
   • Discouraged Actions: Encouraging ad watching.
   • Associated Actions: Linked to creators and local content consumers’ activities.

Key Considerations and Questions

In these categories, we explore the dynamics of interactions - what is encouraged, what is discouraged, and how different actions feed into each other. This lays the foundation, prompting further important questions:

Phases of the Network Life Cycle

• Preliminary Phase: This involves understanding the metastructure (value systems, stakeholders, data tagging) and designing the system (validating, redesigning).
• Operational Phase: Here, we establish rules of exchange and engagement, enable the necessary technology and integrate necessary elements.

Unveiling the Illusions of Linear Progress:

The notion that we’re constantly moving forward on a straight line of progress is a convenient but deceptive framework. What emerges as dominant in our technological landscape isn’t necessarily superior – it’s often just what existing power structures and random chance have elevated. When we pause to consider the alternatives that never materialized, we open ourselves to radically different possibilities for how things could have been. Speculative design invites us to question these assumptions. It challenges us to imagine the presence of other paths, other technologies, other systems that society neglected or abandoned. By exploring these neglected alternatives, we break free from the constraints of believing our current reality is the only possible or natural one.

Personal Explorations

In my work as a design researcher, I use speculative design to envision alternatives for the Global South. By curating digital history archives, examining data privacy concerns, exploring language and translation, and working alongside marginalized communities, I’m attempting to illuminate potential futures for digital cultures in these regions. This has taken shape through speculative fiction like Antarsam, which imagines a radically different internet born from India’s food sovereignty struggles, as well as applied projects like Speculative Storytelling in Wayanad, where we used narrative tapestry-making with tribal children to build aspirations for the future.

Working directly with communities, I initiated “Fertile Technofutures from Bidar” to understand the realities and aspirations of community networks in areas with limited connectivity and digital literacy. The point was to listen to what people there already wanted, not to speak for them. This project also tackles questions about building and maintaining equitable technologies and establishing repair networks within the Global South.

“The Imposter Among Us” was a panel conversation I facilitated with Paul that investigates how digital livestreaming platforms impact politics. We looked at how livestreaming manufactures consent and fabricates ’truth’ at scale, and what that does to politics when performance and sincerity stop being distinguishable.

Open Source Hacking as Pedagogy recognizes the power of open-source technology. The “Jingle Tales” project explores how open source hacking can serve as a teaching tool for community changemakers. Reconfiguring a cheap, hackable device like a Raspberry Pi is itself the lesson: the tool is yours to open and change.

Over a span of six years, Papad was developed on limited budgets typically available to NGOs in India. I joined the project during a revival of efforts and a push to redesign the tool. It had already been deployed in two primary contexts: on a community network in three Tumkur villages and on a community network in ten Channapatna villages. In Channapatna, a collaborative effort between Design Beku, Maya, and a team of ten Community Health Navigators utilised Papad to document narratives and knowledge related to local health and nutrition practices.

The people who were using the tool

There were two primary contexts where the tool had already been deployed

1. On a community network, in 3 Tumkur villages
2. On a community network in 10 Channapatna villages

In Channapatna, a 3-way collaboration between Design Beku, Maya and a piloting team of 10 Community Health Navigators were using Papad to document narratives and knowledge around local health and nutrition practices.

During this duration, we identified 6 design paths that were being used. The team in Channapatna was using various workshops and paper prototypes to see how to make sense of the recorded audio coming from the community.

Key Insights

My role:

My involvement began with understanding the research conducted by the Channapatna team and engaging with the development team at Janastu. This allowed me to gain insight into the project’s legacy and the goals of all parties involved. Based on discussions with both teams, I compiled a comprehensive feature list and used it to establish the information architecture that would support these features. I made a broad feature list that I had discussed with both teams before. Using this feature list I started to arrive at an Information Architecture that sets up these features.

Designed Prototypes

Next, I focused on wireframing and prototyping one of the most critical components of the design: the audio fragment cards. This process provided invaluable insights into the information arrangement that would extend throughout the rest of the site. Leveraging the open-source PatternFly Design System, I recreated it in Figma and utilised the existing platform data as content for my designs. I developed low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, tailored for different screen widths (1320px and 548px).

Audio Player

Other Web prototypes

Prototypes For Mobile

Sound and Storytelling

Social Justice and Inclusivity

Digital Archives and Annotations

Network and Community Engagement

Media and Politics

These spaces, termed gathering-spaces, serve as focal points where diverse actors collaborate to shape the environment and its functions. Our aim is to uncover how humans interact within these spaces, how their gatherings are influenced by the space itself, and the collective forces at play.

The goal was to explore the process of learning from, existing within, and crafting within gathering spaces. We used metaphors from these environments to shape a practice focused on Human-Centered Design (HCD). Students engaged in diverse activities such as site visits, mapping, reading, crafting, and collaborative work with peers.

The Brief

Adopt a method of learning to be, see and make in the spaces of gathering. Aim to understand the dynamics of human positioning within these environments. By employing auto-ethnographic design, immerse ourselves in these spaces, documenting what we perceive and what remains unseen. Through this process, we’ll unravel key questions:

Our focus will be on cultivating multiple practices of situated making, leveraging the inherent qualities of gathering-spaces to inform our creative endeavors.

By critically evaluating the metaphors extracted from these environments, we aim to enrich our design practice while contributing to a deeper understanding of our relationship with space and its constituents.

Process

1. Observation- What can we learn from what we observe versus what we overlook in these spaces?
2. Introspection- How do we exist within these environments, both present and absent?
3. Reflection- As we engage in creative making, what insights do these spaces offer about ourselves and our design aspirations?
4. Application- What metaphors can we derive from these spaces, and how do we assess their relevance within the broader context of design practice?

Vibes

Student Projects

Gathering Spaces — thetipsyartist.in

The formation of boundaries is an expression of the thought that lines do not affect the identity of the place as there are similar happenings across the lines. With the connection of boundaries with thread explains how they are connected, and yet not as the threads are coloured in different colours indicating the diversity, but by the end, it is white, explaining that every land is the same, and it depends on what colour one chooses to interact for a sense of the place.

Patchwork Pete — B•LORE by BIC (Atheeva)

The city is a patchwork made up of diverse elements from varied origins, all sewn together to make a vibrant, messy and fascinating whole. This film explores the diversity of Chickpete, one of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods… the idea of walking as a way to get to know the city… through the crowded streets and the narrow lanes of the market… Once immersed in its flow, we sway to its dance, enraptured by its movement.

The Pete Project playlist — the brown kid

A collection of sounds from unique places in Pete, a marketplace and community in Bangalore arranged to create an expressive EP.

Seeing, Doing, Being Design — Pallavi Kiragi

It was exciting to venture into the known territory of a marketplace and discover a subject of interest that arose from chickepte, not from personal likes or dislikes. At the same time, it was frustrating to progress and collate insights and thoughts together because the visits would get redundant, and finding newer observations would be challenging. It was an eye opener to the central question of what kind of practitioner I see myself become in the future.

Single Screen Theatres — Sakshi Joshi

The projector acts as a tool to trigger memories of the single screen theatres among the people who have been visiting them. It helps in recalling the stories and experiences one might have and in turn it aids the documentation of a dying space. This artefact attempts to provides an entire experience of the theaters (in Chikpete). The panels have motifs… resembling the art deco style. The projector is manual which represents the bygone age of the old projectors. The reel has illustrations of the places I went to and the people I interacted with.

Field Research as an Introvert — Pronomika

In the world of UX design, primary research is a crucial step in creating user-centric experiences. As introverts, we may approach this task differently, but that doesn’t make our insights any less valuable. Embrace your introverted nature, play to your strengths, and remember that there’s more than one way to gather the user data you need.

The monkey that did everything on his own — Malay Vasa

The first step in working with others is trust. Doing everything on your own can be overwhelming, getting help makes it much easier.

Designing for Gathering Spaces is a course that moves beyond the confines of conventional Human-Centered Design (HCD) to consider the wider environment in which humans and non-human elements interact. It emphasizes on situated making and is taught in an interactive format involving active student engagement with diverse gathering spaces. The course takes a broad view of gathering spaces, incorporating both physical locations such as parks, urban environments, and workplaces, as well as digital spaces and ecosystems. Its approach acknowledges the co-presence of human and non-human actors, encompassing technology, animals, and natural features, among others.

Modes of Engagement

• Reading and Annotating: Students gain understanding of various histories, current scenarios, and narratives.
• Mapping and Seeing: This mode involves discovering and mapping distinct perspectives across various dimensions.
• Participating and Being: Encourages students to understand and experience various roles within a space.
• Making and Bridging: Focuses on the creation of artifacts as a means of communication and collective thinking.
• Archiving and Exhibiting: Students create archival artifacts that capture their engagements.
• Participatory and Collaborative: Students participate in shared decision-making and actions.
• Co-creating and Co-learning: This mode involves collaborative creation of artifacts or knowledge.

Capabilities

• Speculate: Constructing from concepts in the face of complexity, risk and limited information.
• See & Connect: Uncovering and synthesizing diverse experiences and forms of knowledge.
• Be Honest: Being self-aware and transparent in expressing one’s position.
• Make: Creating new artifacts, things, and relationships as tools of critical inquiry.

We wanted to let the children create their own stories using our tapestry tool. However, we also decided to make a sample tapestry just as a test prototype. Gopika and Veda used a simple stitching method with any waste cloth to help the kids create these stories.

We needed cultural context to make the stories relevant and reachable to the kids. We needed to use metaphors that came from within the community and not entirely from our heads. For this reason, we organised and analysed whatever we knew about the community under the Causal Layered Analysis. The CLA helps us identify the invisible threads that run under societies and services. This was where we derived the metaphors that we used in the story.

Their traditional dance, ‘Vattakalli’ is inspired from the movement of elephants, so we wanted to keep the elephants central to the story. The elephants represent their belief in themselves. The rain and the floods were an obvious reference to the 2018 floods.

People Involved: @GopikaVerma, @JahnviVegad, @VedaSeshan, @MicahAlex

My contribution: Literature Review, story writing, story boarding, activity guide, Participatory Design, Speculative Design

At Srishti Manipal I co-taught a semester studio on gathering spaces, asking students to learn from markets, parks, and street corners before reaching for design methods. Designers ACE is a deck of 101 prompt cards that group the traits a designer builds, observation, listening, critical thinking, storytelling, into exercises anyone can pick up without art-school training.

Most of the teaching happened outside institutions, though. In Mirzapur, working with young women from rural Uttar Pradesh, the problem was access, not curriculum: how to make tools usable for people whose modes are oral and visual, and whose relationship to technology is shaped by language, literacy, and connectivity. The Kishori Film Festival gave 11th-grade participants the means to make and screen their own films on reconfigured devices. Jingle Tales let them claim a Raspberry Pi by customising its boot-up sound, a small bit of technical agency that opened onto who technology belongs to.

The Imposter Among Us is a reading list and panel on how platforms manufacture “truth” and “ignorance,” and what media literacy means when the platform itself is built to erode it.

This archive was made available as a knowledge management solution for for further annotation and curation to aid the workers that enabled livelihood training services for different communities of PwDs.

As part of this Pilot, my role was to create participatory ways of recognizing, experimenting and encouraging the use of the archive

Knowledge Assets

A Lived Experience Database that surfaces the knowledge Officers build while setting up jobs for people with disabilities in India

We started off with a few initial insights

• Creating a co-archival space for Lived Experiences meant that archiving has to become a native process to the Officer’s existing workflows
• Understanding the nature and structure of the GarvSe Center Infrastructure to imagine the contents of the archive meant that we had to learn what a good knowledge asset is in an emergent context. How would you discover and re-contextualise it?
• This Lived Experience Archive would contain units of tacit and organisational knowledge that we called “assets”.

As we read through their existing documentation, we prototyped what 1 singular asset in this archive would be structured like.

Additionally, we prototyped an organisational process for the officers to contribute to and benefit from the archive. We used a google sheet, a google form and a Notion Database to demonstrate what the process below could look like

However, we would need to test and iterate to make this archive useful for the Officers that worked with People with Disabilities. We intended to validate and demonstrate how contributing to the archive and using it would directly benefit their work.

This work was done in 3 Phases

Phase 1: Understand and Prototype the Archive

To create this archive as well as make it useful we needed to understand the most interoperable way to set up collecting, curating and archiving workflows. To understand what kind of organisational knowledge is directly applicable to their day to day work

We started with unstructured discussions with the core team (RLM team and founder of Enable India) to familiarise ourselves with the current stores of knowledge.

Reading organisational documentation, reports, circulars and databases to acquire an in-depth understanding of the organisational structure, work practices and case studies of PwDs and enablers.

Phase 2: Workshopping the Archive

After the initial prototype, we decided to facilitate a workshop with the GSCOs for them for a few reasons.

• To test the assetizing workflow to see if it could be valuable enough for them in their daily work.
• To make some assets with their experiences and create some metadata that would be more intuitive for them to use later.
• To annotate and use each others’ assets to see if there was a possibility of the archive could be a co-learning space

The workshop gave us a few outputs and insights that led us to Phase 3. We received validated examples of lived experience-based knowledge assets and examples of a metadata schema that we could use for future assets. It also helped us set up future sessions with a few GSCOs to build more assets.

Phase 3: Populating the Archive

This phase was about us getting to know the journeys of GSCOs better and to record their experiences in various forms. We conducted oral history interviews, created journey maps, annotation exercises to form multiple types of knowledge assets.

Alongside this work, we also processed the journey maps and interviews we conducted. Slicing up audio fragments and populating the Notion Archive. The booklet was designed to be used in tandem with the archive. So we linked single assets with the single record in Notion through a QR code.

These typologies became more useful as we started thinking about publication and dissemination. We created the content for a series of booklets based on our prior qualitative research. During this time, we established a partnership with LadyFinger, a design firm to illustrate these booklets

The article grapples with a persistent tension: while smart devices are increasingly common, the effort required to access, learn, and reconfigure digital tools often outweighs their versatility for communities whose primary modes are oral and visual. Content-making and consumption are constrained not just by physical access but by language, literacy levels, expertise, context, and culture. The piece reflects on how we tried to navigate these constraints.

Read the full piece on Janastu Blog

The central challenge was demonstrating the tactility and adaptability of these open devices while competing with the familiarity of phones and laptops. The recipe focuses on one specific idea: letting the young women customise their device’s boot-up sound as a way to claim ownership over the technology. The process involves learning the device, basic sound editing with Audacity, and adapting Python scripts- a gateway into technical literacy that starts from personal expression.

Read the recipe on Critical Code Recipes

The presentation was part of a workshop titled “Ways of Seeing: Archives and Annotations”, where we showed how the W3C Web Annotation standard could be used to layer community interpretations onto institutional archival records, enabling multiple narratives to coexist around the same materials.

View the workshop page

The mapping work combined GIS tools with participatory research methods, drawing on the knowledge of pastoralist communities themselves. The aim was not just to produce maps but to make visible a pattern of land use that is often invisible to planners- and to do so in a way that centres indigenous knowledge.

Read the project documentation on Janastu Blog

Duration: 2 months

Project Information: Link to the App Website in Excel form

This rapid-response project was an exercise in collective care during crisis. Every tool choice, from the spreadsheet backend to the Glide app frontend, was guided by the constraints we developed for selecting tools in Indian collectives.

The programme aimed to go beyond teaching technical skills. It was about creating space for the participants to tell their own stories using tools they could take apart, understand, and reshape. The films produced were screened at a festival organised by and for the participants.

Wikipedia’s knowledge gaps are not accidental- they reflect whose histories are considered encyclopaedic. Editathons like this are a form of knowledge activism: making visible what dominant editorial cultures have overlooked, and doing so within the infrastructure that shapes how millions encounter history.

View edit statistics

1. knowledge-encoded mythic narratives,
2. seasonal heuristics, and
3. care practices that farming communities use to relate to their environments- knowledge systems that often go unrecorded by formal climate research.

The project sits at the intersection of place-based research and climate practice, asking how communities already know and respond to ecological change as well as set up observatories and political actions for agrarian-centred ecological knowledge. Key Project Actions

1. Observatory: Mapping seasonal water availability, water levels, and monitoring
2. Community led maintenance: Organizing collective maintenance activities
3. Restoration: Reviving and mentioning all the techniques
4. Advocacy: Water conservation and its linkage with health, migration, changing crops, etc.

In the morning, there’s the sound of water rushing through pipes to meet beautiful small gardens A little before that there’s a herd of buffaloes that passes through my area to go to graze They go back before anyone wakes up too The only sign that they did are long lines of moist dung that dries during the day Or gets spread around by tires Only to be topped up in the morning

On the other side of the park is a playground where boys play in the evening Sometimes the pourakarmikas come for meetings I see them in the morning too, shuffling about cleaning up leaves and flowers The garbage truck comes and goes while I’m asleep

Chalapathi, I know his name, because I pay him every two months on Google Pay I can’t seem to remember the names of anyone else because I pay them cash

The Process

Milli started as a platform to connect different archives to each other and open them up to annotation. We were piloting the platform with metadata from the NCBS Archives. Our overarching goal was to create interconnections among diverse archives, be it private, institutional, governmental, or personal. We wanted a community of users who annotate, discover, and narrate stories across collections of annotations.

User Personas and Intentions

We considered various aspects, starting with user stories based on the following hypothesis:

As a [type of user or role], I want [some goal] so that [some reason].

Key Insights

During our user research phase, we gleaned several key insights that shaped our design:

Focus on Metadata

Most archives prefer to share only their metadata. Consequently, we aimed to create an interface that enabled users to annotate this metadata.

Flexible Annotation Mechanism

Users might want to annotate different archival items for various purposes. This was also highlighted in the W3C Standards for Web Annotation.

Metadata Standard Agnostic

We observed that different archives employ different metadata standards, such as EAD, FOAF, and Dublincore. As a result, our import mechanism needed to be agnostic to these varying standards.

Considerations for design

Of these, I worked on making a mechanism for annotating an archival object as well as how the archival object looked. I also helped design the information visible on each search result.

Feature Design Priority Matrix

1. Which fields are annotable,
2. What fields act as access points to other objects in the archive
3. What is the hierarchy of the current object
4. Create user flows for private curation, notetaking, and collection - including a way to subscribe to new annotations, make a private annotation and save objects to a jhola(“metaphor for a bag”)

User Flows

Annotating the archival item

My work also involved designing the Annotation Widget, a vital tool for user interaction, allowing:

• Structuring each annotation as a key-value pair, and
• Annotation of the entire object as well as parts of the object’s description.

Design from Information Architecture

Private Curation

Search Hits

In order to enrich the user experience, I optimised the search hits by:

• Using the metadata categorization from the Archival Object page to add more context in an accordion on the results card, and
• Indicating whether the search had hits on the annotations in the object.

Export Capabilities:

• Does the tool allow for easy export of data or content?

Compatibility with Other Tools:

• Do the export options work well with other tools commonly used by the collectives?

Self-Hosting:

• If the collective has its own server, can the tool be self-hosted?
• Is there someone available to maintain and experiment with it?

Device and Screen Compatibility:

• Is the tool usable on multiple devices and different screen sizes?

Collaboration Features:

• Can the tool facilitate collaborative work among team members?

Affordability:

• Is the tool relatively free or affordable for Indian collectives, with a monthly cost of less than 200-300 INR?

Open Source:

• If the usage involves sensitive data, is the tool open source, providing transparency and security?

Input Variety:

• Can the platform support different types of input, such as voice, text, and other formats?

Input Delivery Options:

• Can the tool enable input delivery through various means, like phone calls for voice-based inputs?

Efficiency vs. Accessibility:

• If there are multiple tools available, one being faster but more opaque, and another being slower but more accessible, which trade-off is more important based on the specific needs and limitations of the collective?

Long Term Stability

• Is there some sort of way that the project itself fails in the long-term either by acquisition, abandonment or commercialisation

Coherence for Collaborators

• [] Does it make sense with the larger context of our work to our team internally and to our collaborators

The article draws on our experience building and maintaining mesh networks in rural Karnataka to propose principles for how community practices and local engagement can inform the design of climate-responsive digital infrastructure. It asks what “open” means when the communities in question have never been centred in conversations about openness.

Read the full piece on Branch Magazine

🔮 “How do platforms compel/enable the manufacturing of “truth” and “ignorance”? And what does that mean in the context of live-streaming politicians”

These are notes from a presentation (Design Baithak) hosted by Micah and Paul

There are two parts we are juxtaposing. Firstly the idea of politicians on Twitch (a live-streaming platform) put into the context of Twitch’s various affordances and subcultures. The second part takes the idea of manufactured “authenticity” and manufactured “ignorance” that are enabled/compelled by platform cultures and interfaces.

Understanding virtual worlds is important because “we increasingly live in a world in which opting out of technological systems is more and more difficult and yet participation within those systems pushes us to accept structures we might oppose” (Taylor 2006a:135). - Tom Boellstorff (Coming of Age in Second life: An Anthropologist explores the Virtually Human)

Question: What does the idea of live-streaming platforms mean for politics, information and networks as we know it?

What is the Twitch Culture Like

On 21st October, AOC and Ilhan Omar, two congresswomen from the USA went on Twitch, a live-streaming platform, and played a bunch of games with Twitch streamers. It was one of the most watched streams with over 4 Lac concurrent viewers and totally near 1 crore views over the course of the stream. This is an extensive account of the events that transpired. It includes accounts of how it was set-up, who was involved, how moderation for the usually rowdy Twitch chat was plannedwhile keeping the constitutional regulations set on the Congresswomen.

AOC streams on Twitch

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Streams On Twitch With Hasan Piker And Pokimane, Draws Over 430,000 Viewers

Aside 1

This is quite significant as an event because of the platform it was streamed on. Twitch is quite unlike other live-streaming platforms in the way that is its own microcosm.

The story of Prometheus describes one mythic moment when humans, receiving the gift of techne, became fully human for the first time. Since humans are always crafting themselves through culture, they have always been virtual (Clark 2003). The virtual is the anthropological. This makes it possible to study virtual worlds with the same flexible, underdetermined ethnographic tools used to study human cultures in the actual world. - Tom Boellstorff (Coming of Age in Second life: An Anthropologist explores the Virtually Human)

How Viewers affect the Streamer

Twitch sub-cultures have their own unique languages, behaviours, histories, skeletons and demographics. Twitch’s affordances enable a certain level of accessibility to the streamers which often manifests in different ways. this also plays out interestingly in the power dynamics between the platform, the streamers and the viewers.

How the Streamer affects the Viewer

This then raises the question of “authenticity” and what it means to have parasocial relationships between streamers and viewers. This is considering the fact that many streams often go on for more than a few hours daily. Also this illusion of accessibility also goes up with amount of money that viewers spend. Different tiers of subs (subscriptions) have different privileges and levels of access.

What is Authenticity when you can see “unfiltered” Streams

Timestamps

• 17:00 -19:00 - example of authenticity is manufactured in some youtube shows
• 23:00-30:00 Emotional Labour and its relationship with Money. And what that means for creators on Youtube.
• 33:00-34:51 - Lindsey’s Conclusion

What is a performance

Timestamps*

• 8:44 - 12:50 - Manufactured Authenticity and Emotional Labour driven by Capital
• 16:00 - 16:45 - Parasocial Relationships????
• 22:45 - 29:36 - Is being a creator of content a performance(vs real)?

Streaming is a performance of authenticity

Can you manufacture ignorance the same way that streamers, content creators manufacture authenticity. What does that mean for platform interfaces?

What happens to truth on the Stage

Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation a talk that invites us to re-examine, what it means to curate life as we live within and through the interface that has algorithmic mediation, being subverted towards strange tangents.

Quotes from the Article

• Whether we’re talking about the erasure of history or the undoing of scientific knowledge, agnotology is a tool of oppression by the powerful.
• Epistemology is the term that describes how we know what we know. Most people who think about knowledge think about the processes of obtaining it. Ignorance is often assumed to be not-yet-knowledgeable. But what if ignorance is strategically manufactured? What if the tools of knowledge production are perverted to enable ignorance? In 1995, Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance.
• One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material.
• One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these.
• YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.
• The creation of sides is a political project.
• You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

How is Truth told in differernt subcultures like Twitch

What we can learn from the 24x7 News Cycle - A case study

The strange, sometimes sinister conspiracy theories on Sushant Singh Rajput’s death that flourished on social media How that affected India recently in the SSR case

Quotes from the Article

• The other prominent conspiracy theory features how FAU-G, the game developed by GOQII founder Vishal Gondal and promoted by Akshay Kumar were originally Rajput’s ideas. This theory is based on an Instagram post by the late actor where he was supposedly learning the basics of gaming from Khan Academy, during the lockdown. The claim was fact-checked by BOOMLive, and discredited, with clarifications from Gondal and his company nCORE Games.
• Additionally, these groups present the trappings of the proverbial “rabbit hole”. Join one group, and Facebook’s algorithm offers you a carousel in the ‘Discover tab’ or “Suggested Groups” of at least eight to nine such groups or pages, which harbour similar interests. And typically, users get sucked in, keen to consume more content on similar matters.
• The story about conspiracy theories on Sushant Singh Rajput’s death – bear a striking resemblance to QAnon conspiracy movement- which began in the United States and is now going global- to a large extent, underscores the global concerns about the information ecosystem, as it stands today. The several grievance-filled hashtags, deliberate misinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories arising out of large social media platforms are being mainstreamed by popular news channels, only for further content on those channels going back to the system, amplified by the same actors and drawing higher engagement.
• “There’s the obvious link to the Bihar elections, and it gives them a good opportunity to create a parallel narrative, besides targeting the Mumbai Police and the Maharashtra government, something that has been a constant since Thackeray became CM,” says the digital political strategist quoted earlier in the story. A recent report by social media researcher Joyojeet Pal and his team highlighted that the data showed “the important role played by politicians, especially the BJP, in proposing a ‘murder’ alternative to the ‘suicide’ narrative.”

Through further research, including interviews and interactions with IT professionals participating in carpooling, the team discovered that cohort-based carpooling was successful in India, particularly in the IT sector. Factors such as traveling with like-minded individuals, corporate culture support, platform tie-ups with IT firms, shared destinations, shared context beyond carpooling, and regular commute patterns played a crucial role in boosting carpooling adoption within this specific group.

We carried out some secondary research to find possible answers to this question. We looked at various aspects:

• What do potential carpoolers want?
• Who are the kinds of passengers that would potentially pool a ride?
• What are the incentives for someone to pool a ride?
• What are some reasons not to?
• What were the challenges to Carpooling in the pre-technology era?
• How many of these were solved by Technology?
• What remains to be solved?
• Since most of these papers were from elsewhere, what were the defining factors in India?

The Principles for Our System Design

With these insights, the team developed the concept of “Karwaan,” a community-based carpooling platform focused on event-based travel in Bangalore. The platform aimed to facilitate ride-sharing to events, cost splitting, and community-building among participants. The team designed user journeys for booking events, pooling rides, and fostering friendships during the journey. They incorporated monetary and non-monetary nudges within the app to incentivize participation and engagement.

1. It had to be fun
2. It had to be community-based

Key Findings:

Based on their findings, the team identified trust and cooperation as significant barriers to carpooling in India. They also discovered successful models in India that fostered trust and cooperation among carpooling participants. With these insights, the team created clusters of factors that influenced carpooling adoption, including the aspirational value of a car, safety concerns, inconvenience, legal ambiguity, lack of awareness, and social barriers.

To narrow down their focus, the team eliminated factors that were not major bottlenecks to carpooling adoption, such as the aspirational value of a car and safety concerns. They also considered the legal ambiguity surrounding carpooling, which required policy changes beyond the scope of their project. This led them to shift their perspective and explore the concept of cohort/community traveling as a dominant factor in carpooling adoption.

Successful Carpooling Environments in India

Apps like Quick Ride, Ho Ho rides and Wunder are promoting carpooling among IT professionals in Bangalore. Our interviews showed us factors boosting this trend:

• Cohort Travel
• Part of corporate culture
• Platform tie-ups
• Common destination
• Shared context
• Regular Commute and Routine times

This led us to understand the importance of ‘cohort/community travelling’ as a key component in carpooling. Trust, shared community and culture became a significant part of our system design.

“We are in for a longer game, we are here to build a culture and community of carpoolers than looking at profitability at the moment”.

We came up with a piece that details the research more as a team.

Contributors

People Involved: @BaishnabiMonger, @SamarthGupta, @SarojTailor, @AnantKaur, @MicahAlex

My contribution: System Design, Qualitative Research, Market Research

Originally published by Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, 2020. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Acknowledgements

This project would not really have been possible without the whole village of support that I received. At every point in my project there were people that picked me up, gave new directions, compensated for my weaker phases and supported me. My parents and Merlyn have always been supportive despite Srishti being a huge risk to take and that is something I’ll always be grateful for. My support systems were many and amazing and I hope they will forgive me if I forget to mention someone. Paul, Naveen and Shreyas have always been the wind at my back, comforting me when things got overwhelming. They opened up so many different ways for me to articulate my thoughts. The breadth and depth of their knowledge is only matched by the volume of their compassion. In Bidar, Supriya, Dilip and Vinay took really good care of me and showed me my thesis in practice and showed me how persistence transforms a place. They will be my lifelong inspirations for this. Ruksana Ma’am was an encouragement to me in this sense as well. Her knowledge, compassion for the world and her view on things have changed many things in me. A large group of my peers and friends have been the safety net on which I have so often relied on. The writing group created and moderated by Thomson was immensely helpful in helping me vent when necessary. Veda, Nishita, Siddhant, Malini, Koumudi, Baishnabi,Thomson,Chandra, Shreya, Sweta, Mahima, Sanket have constantly helped me clarify my thoughts, given me support and helped me look at things from a different perspective and teaching me about why collectives have strength. Ayan, Preshit, Maria, Oindrilla, Subhashmita have helped me keep sane during the lockdown. David, Naveen, Mufteeb and Vishnu were constant companions in the last month of the race - keeping things from getting overwhelming and always being people I could rely on to shift my viewpoints. Even though we didn’t talk much about the project, Padmini was always a north star for the things I was describing. Ishita helped me out a lot by sharing her experiences of collectives and what she has lived and loved in them and discussing my ideas through her experiences. I owe a lot of these possibilities also to Rohini, who has looked after and nourished my mental health through these two years-she is a gem of a person. Also repeat shoutout to Paul and Shreyas.

Lots of strength and hope to you all.

Preface

The systemic nature of the issues we face has been revealed through the various breaks, in reality, we are seeing all around us. I experienced this from working in Wayanad with the budding network of research and design. During the studio, I studied how the socio-economic situation of the Paniya tribe was being reinforced through histories of oppression and ahistoric policies (Suchman 2018).

More and more we are realising that the non-linear nature of these issues and each factor feeds into other factors and create loops of reinforcement or depreciation. This also means that band-aid solutions often end up worsening the problem because of the interactions between the different factors and stakeholders in play. It also makes systemic issues much harder to see and much easier to dismiss the number of factors involved in each systemic issue and how densely interlinked they are.

Through a studio about future studies, I explored how the systems that surround us so ubiquitously are wrongly attributed to a positivist view of human civilisation. Our progress was never linear but plural. The systems that come into power and the mainstream are often chosen based on existing hegemonies and sometimes sheer luck and are seldom an indicator of quality. Rather they are an indicator of what metrics took importance to whom at what point of time. This leaves ghosts of systems that could’ve been and never realised. The presences and absences of alternative ways to make sense of the world affect the way bodies are structured or collectivised. Through a conscious effort to speculate about these ghosts, we try to surface alternate ways of do-ing and be-ing while also suggesting that ‘this’ isn’t the ‘natural’ way of things. The saying that a fish doesn’t know about the water till its outside is an apt metaphor for how much this ubiquitousness blinkers us. It is a clouding of vision in a temporal sense and restricts the way we see the past, present and the future.

Cally Gatehouse summarises this using the way that Jacques Derrida and Mark Fischer talk about the concept of Hauntology.

“Hauntology is a term coined by Jacques Derrida that ‘supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.’. Cultural critic Mark Fisher has identified two hauntological patterns through which virtual entities come to act upon the present: the first is something that is no longer present, but still has an effect even after it is gone. This can manifest itself in a compulsion to repeat what has gone before. The second is something that is anticipated, but never manifested. This anticipation can also shape our behaviour, even if the thing anticipated is never realised. Speculation, as a practice that aims to generate previously unanticipated futures, could be understood as an attempt to reconfigure these patterns so that both futures and past might manifest themselves differently” (Gatehouse 2020)

Through the future studies studio, I explored the various socio-political alternatives that could have arisen in pre-independence India. Furthermore, how these alternatives would affect the technological realms that are in place in our country today. Our worlds are made of many human and technology linkages in every aspect of our life. I use technology as more than a modern digital electronic tool and more as a term encompassing made objects and the socio-material systems that guide them. However, like Lucy Suchman shows in her talk “Relocating Innovation: Places and Practices of Future Making”, the visions of these made objects are blinkered temporally by limiting the historicity of technology (Suchman 2018). These same ‘blinkerings’ apply to humans, their bodies, societies and the relations between these. The neoliberal capitalist view of the world as a linear progression or even a geometric progression like that Moore’s law(The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020) is something that I hope to challenge at least in the slightest way.

In this paper, I aim to offer a glimpse of different epistemology for collaborative networks from the position of centring the various collectives that we belong to. Much has been said about care, but I hope to contextualise my experiences in the theories of care from medical anthropology, political actor-network theories, feminist geography and science and technology studies. Through this research, I hope to present a reimagination of hierarchical practices in networks, of typologies of collectives and institutional practices that are ‘new’. I present the different manifestations of care that I observed, embodied, built for and encountered in networks. I have, through my time at Srishti approached collaborations and networks and studied how they addressed whatever issues they were formed around.

Through a studio in Wayanad, I explored ways of helping tribal children speculate about futures with children from other castes as a way to destigmatize caste. The project was important for me to understand systemic perspectives and how issues play into each other. Another project in Bihar with early childhood care involved understanding the links between caste and spacio-linguistic access to education. In partnership with Project Potential, we were on field with youth from the district and were lucky enough to talk to them and have them talk to us about the research. Working with groundwater fluoridation in Chikkaballapur helped me understand the value of middlemen in the support and maintenance of the network. INREM and a network of people, practices and organisations were working to solve this. It was amazing to witness how much longevity matters to field engagement. As a part of my Transdisciplinary studio, I was exploring conflict and care across systems to answer existential questions that were close to me like “Can we actually hope that we can deal with Climate Change and all the conflicts that it will bring?”. Through the fieldwork for the capstone, I explored how collaborations and networks can work from practices of care and use conflict and care to deal with important issues. Through all of these experiences, I grew closer to the idea of redefining how we work within our collectives. How do we practice caring for the world through these collectives while also making sure that the collectives themselves were cared for? This involves a lot more work than caring for the individuals within the collective and often about understanding that care for the individual rarely has benefits for the collective. Annemarie Mol puts this succinctly, “care for collectives tinkers with the conditions in which they live” (Mol 2008, p. 68). Through the paper, I explore what this means for the everyday lives, the places of these collectives and their practices.

It was a struggle for me to describe and reflect on these practices as I was still learning through most of my capstone how I recognized and responded to these care practices. I intended to flesh out these slices through my capstone. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the various privileges that made it possible for me to do the research this way. I come from the privilege of living in a Tier 1 city; higher caste and middle class; neurotypical; able-bodied; cis-het male studying in a expensive design research institution. Also, the reason I was able to do this capstone is the access I had to travel and stay in a place with funds from home and focus on my work most of the time. There was also the privilege of being the practitioner and the respect and access I received through the role.

Fig 1: A causal loop diagram of my Wayanad Research - The Disenfranchisement of Paniyas in Kerala

Fig 2: From the Mapping Futures StudioEcological System: Drawing Inspiration from Ants

Methodology and Representation of Research

It is precisely the fact that our vision of the world is a vision from somewhere – that it is inextricably based in an embodied, and therefore partial, perspective – which makes us personally responsible for it. The only possible route to objectivity on this view is through collective knowledge of the specific locations of our respective visions.(Suchman 2002)

I wanted to do the capstone not as a single thesis or problem-solution but rather as an object produced from participation and collaboration which in turn produces multiple smaller outcomes, outputs, practices and reflections. The aim was for me to be able to first understand how care manifests in networks, frame my learnings on care through the outcomes, outputs, practices and reflection. As I reflected on how I wanted to represent my learnings, I came to using multiple descriptive tools such as archetypal roles of care practitioners in networks and other practices of these care practitioners that weren’t big/small enough for those archetypes. Through this capstone, I hoped to rehearse a practice I wanted to develop for myself, one that moved in between academia, activism, technology and design that is heavily centred in responsive human-nonhuman networks.

I imagine, retrospectively that there are two ways that I envision my participation in these networks-through being and through doing. By be-ing in a network, I wanted to see the network as not separate from me. This would have been a defeat if my engagement remained within the scope of my capstone or my “research question”. Care as a general inquiry helped me build an inductive experience of the network not by forcing my agenda but by involving myself with the activities of the networks themselves. The post-COVID part of my capstone served as an illustration of that to me. I was, first, part of those networks and be-ing in them and only then did it occur to me to include the work in my capstone.

“Rather than occupying the two positions simultaneously all of the time, what happens is more akin to an oscillation between observation and participation.” (Bondi 2003)

The second aspect of the participation involved do-ing things in the network. These could include making with, for and of these networks. These constantly helped me frame the differences in the contexts and practices of these networks and also helped me draw shapes around the things that united them in my inquiry, care. By making artefacts that served the role of shaping, supporting and aiding the work of the network, I was able to understand my thoughts about care and articulate them through the work. Often, this process of do-ing was interrupted by the capabilities of the tool and the tooler. Finding different ways of doing those things also gave me insights on how tooling and meta-tooling- their appropriation and sculpting-is a legitimate care practice that doesn’t receive its due. This is, in Lucy Suchman’s view an effect of the binaries of designer and user and the resulting centring of power and visibility on the designer’s side. This is despite the amount of work it takes to articulate and appropriate the tools for whatever specific work it is needed for. (Suchman 2002)

I draw from the theories of feminist geography to inform my research methodology. This methodology’s self-criticality and reflexivity refine both the way I conducted my research and what emerged from it. Another principle is to make visible the presence and absence of bodies, histories, knowledges and practices in a geographical setting (Thien 2009). Through this process, I engaged with ideas of care - in the forms they exist in-unique to the communities, networks, technologies and individuals that I work with. The question I got to ask in the end was “How do you re/imagine different modes of collaborative networks that take care of their communities and their value systems?”. This ‘how’ was important to me. I wanted to make sure that this knowledge production emerged through intersubjective and very relational dynamics which involved more than mere objectivity but rather an overt acknowledgement of the emotional content of the research(ibid). It was also my intention, in the spirit of participation to research through learning as a method.

As much as the scope of the research goes, I want to emphasize on the specificity of the research, and how if the same participation was undertaken with another set of networks then my descriptions of care would change. However, I would like to outline the processes of research like this, which could be adapted and used according to context.

Juxtaposition is a method I am borrowing from Jenna Grant to translate between concepts of care and practice of care in networks of collaboration. I want to juxtapose my anecdotes, experiences and made objects on the field with how care has been theorised in politics, medical anthropology, STS and feminist geographies. Juxtaposition offers the opportunity of talking and thinking about “difference without the subordination of one in terms of the other” (Grant 2020, p. 22) Also for my purposes, it brings forward the specificity of this research and negates any claim to objectivity and talks about the intersubjectivity of this research.

I also struggled with getting together a coherent representation of the anecdotes, metaphors, embodied intuitions, epiphanies that I gathered as well as the understandings I gained through the making of artefacts and micro-practices. I was somewhat inspired by the roles that Deepa Iyer envisioned in a social change ecosystem for the Solidarity Is and Building Movement project (Iyer 2019). I bring together a synthesis of these experiences in the form of archetypal roles that care practitioners play in a network. Other than that, I describe other axioms of care that I saw in these networks. Hopefully, the archetypes and axioms serve to partially illustrate my learnings through the capstone.

The decision to structure my paper in this way was a conscious one taking into consideration the non-linear nature of the work. By not isolating aspects of the work in distinct chapters, I use the current structure to move between binaries like theory and practice, designed artefacts and reflections, methodologies and personal connections to the research. Another decision was to use micro-outputs by defining outputs as any “do-ings, be-ings or make-ings” that helped me understand care in networks. Keeping this collection of outputs as the cornerstone of the description of axioms and archetypes, I present a glimpse of how I was witness to care practices.

The preface of this paper introduces systems-networks as I have come to understand through my practice in Srishti and speculates how futures thinking can help us imagine new paradigms of collaboration. The first chapter is an articulation of my intent and how that reflected in the work that I did in terms of research, making and theorising. The second chapter describes briefly my experiences and my work with the various networks. Thirdly, I describe how I reflected on theories of Actor-Network and political care through the structures and shared value systems of the networks. In the next chapter, I present some of the doings and beings I used to reflect on and understand the nature of care in collaboratives. I do this in three ways:

• Micro-understandings contain experiences which served as epiphanies
• Micro-practices contain understandings that I was able to gain through putting some things into practice or while rehearsing a practice
• Micro-makings consist of artefacts made or retooled for a purpose and what they taught me through the process

The fifth chapter uses descriptive tools like archetypes and axioms to articulate how I see care work in networks and talk about shared value systems. I do this in two parts. Archetypes which describe how there are roles of care practitioners that members may slip into when performing care work. These roles aren’t used as normative notions but rather a tool to describe care work in networks. The second descriptive tool that I use are axioms of care work in these networks. It is a convergence of the shared values that networks like these espouse. I go about the description by interspersing anecdotes and reflections with different theories.

Fig 3: From the Gondhal we attended. credits: Anu AP, Anushtha Sharma

Fig 4: With Ruksana Ma’am and her husband. Credits: Dilip Patil

Fig 5: From Naveen’s workshop

Fig 6: From Naveen’s workshop Credit: Vinay Malge

Fig 7: From the exhibition Credits: Vinay Malge

Fig 8: An old visualisation of my research

Fig 9: The first messages in the ICAN

Fig 10: The welcome message in DB

Fig 11: An update from Padmini on the Beku Group

Fig 12: The apps made in other cities

Fig 13: I helped the Sukhibhava team make this poster which was then translated

Fig 14: Translated versions of the same IEC material all done by different volunteers

Fig 15: Translated to Marathi by me and Saili

Understanding how networks come together

“We can refuse to miss what we are deemed to be missing. We can share a refusal.” (Ahmed 2017, p. 185)

Care as a concept was only familiar to me as being vaguely socio-spiritual. Shreyas suggested that I look at theories of ethics in practice in feminist geographies and through Naveen, I found Annemarie Mol and Lucy Suchman who talk about care in the contexts of medical anthropology and science and technology studies. It started to become clear to me the kind of literature I would read from that point on as I started to look at care in different contexts to recognize it in networks and maybe elaborate about a theory of care in collaborative places. Annemarie Mol’s Logic of care underlined a few very important things for the course of this research. Annemarie Mol asks the question of whether we are individuals or collectives first. She talks about how we are not singular entities and argues the case for adding temporal relations in the associative identity of a human. By putting out missives to individuals to encourage them to keep up healthy practices, it is assumed that the health of the collective will also increase. Collectives are not made by adding together its individuals and much like emergence in systems practice. The actions, responses and reactions of collectives are non-linear to those of the individuals that it consists of. The two ways that she uses to elaborate on this idea is through categorisation and specification. How certain categorisations stick but are not the options that take the best care of the collectives and how a generalisation of care practices only alienate people, as they are now demonstrably deviant to the norm. Thus, care must be specific. (Mol 2008)

Through this project, I hope to present categorisations of people in networks not as individuals with a function but through their practice of care. This may be a smaller part of a larger reimagination of how networks situate themselves. It also may offer insight into how these different networks were organized around something. It would either be a shared value system, a response to an emerging event or matter of concern or both.

An worldly thing may fill in as a mutual object of concern for a specific collective. It is consistently a contested item, that also creates a bond among them. Something that cleaves as well as unites. This is not to say that it is not something that takes away commonality but rather defines something as a different type of common like a match on a football field. A political matter that is common through the process of people connecting because of it but also articulating distinctions within and without themselves through the “thing”. Ella Myers talks about how a ’thing’ or a ‘matter of concern’ happens before the emergence of ‘publics’ and ‘solidarities’ between them. Through these contest and alliances, she dismisses the idea of an all-inclusive ‘we’ in this emergence of a collective. (Myers 2013)

Latour also talks about how anthro-techno and natural assemblages start to coagulate around a “matter of concern” and not a “matter of fact”. This ’thing’ is about the shared care of the world that is much larger than care for the self and care for loved ones and others (Latour & Weibel 2005). It is a care that transcends the personal and the intimate and moves beyond that as a shared articulation of concern for something present in the world. The public coagulates around this thing in various forms of solidarity. These solidarities take the form of “alliances and contests”. (Suchman 2002)

Vinay when talking about the beginning of Team YUVAA told me that the network was activated when they decided to clean up the monuments in Bidar. The monuments thus became a part of the assemblage that is Team YUVAA. This was evidenced by their continued engagement with the geographies of Bidar, its various ecologies, dying practices and other micro-contexts. It was in the vein of this same compassion for the place that Shreyas and Vinay started working together. Their style of working heavily centred these shared values as drivers of action. There are so many times that I was a little confused by the melding and ‘unmelding’ of the identities of DLL, Team YUVAA, their partner organisations and their academic engagements. This was amply demonstrated during the Bidar civil society response to Coronavirus. The groups were heterogeneous in their constitution and didn’t have any name other than “CoronaSainikaru” which was given to them by the people. This soon changed to “Koi Bhooka Na Rahe”. Vinay always jokes to Shreyas about how the names don’t matter but the work does. ICAN was a chance for me to see how a network coagulated around individual intentions to respond to the crisis. However, in retrospect, the scale at which Ruchi chose to work, inside a city and with quick making tools, had an effect of articulating the values that would be shared later-Small, local, contextual, low barrier to replication and quick making. It was unfortunate that I couldn’t work anymore after a point and the group also disengaged from each other. The Telegram group, the Google Sheets, the Glideapps-by their very collaborative nature hosted a bunch of different people and conversations. Many of them flitting in and out of conversations, some hidden, some over a long period.

Another way that I saw the coagulation of these networks were through the latent and invisible processes that came before them. Design Beku is the brainchild of Padmini, Shreyas, Naveen and Paul who wanted to recontextualise design to more than the IT sector. I had attended a workshop in 2019 that Beku had conducted with trans-persons from across Karnataka post the 377 judgement. It was an effort with Sangama, an organisation that works for trans livelihoods and dignity. It was a time where Beku was still finding its place and pace. When coronavirus hit, they saw a reason to activate the network and invite more people to join them. Even with Team YUVAA, Vinay told me about how he had scoped Bidar for over two years looking for individuals who wanted to do something(“kuch karna he”) for Bidar. “One day we just decided to start cleaning the areas around monuments because they were really dirty. And from then on, the group kept working in more and more places with real issues that needed to be worked on. That whole process built up a lot of goodwill.” This also laid the groundwork for DLL to emerge even though Team YUVAA had very few members left in Bidar. Shreyas and Vinay started working together by chance and decided to team up and give a new direction to their efforts.

Each of the networks has had so many human and nonhuman members, participants and actants. In Bidar, through Naveen’s workshop, the networks we interacted with were mostly activated by the recording done on the Pi Zero. The nature of the RPi allowed us to do certain things while forbidding others. It allowed us to bring the sense of novelty to the activities while still having to be able to persuade the other network actants to use the device. Design Beku was a true assemblage of human, nonhuman, digital and non-digital, visible and invisible. The tools that made it possible to continuously collaborate allowed us more time to keep posting and putting out stuff even though the time that each volunteer could spare was quite less. The tools also needed to be interoperable. The ICAN became possible to put in app form only because something like Glideapps existed. The modular, sheet-based structure allowed for non-technical persons like me to start compilation on my own.

By “anthro-techno and natural”, I am also trying to describe assemblages and networks the way that Myers and Latour talk about their makeup. Anthro stands for humans and their pace in these systems and Techno as a broader term going back to the concept of ‘Techne’ ¹. Natural systems, organic and inorganic also feature as part of these assemblages. Latour speaks about these constituents of these assemblages having a distributed agency in the whole process. He posited that it might be beneficial for humans to see that they aren’t the only ones with agency in these assemblages. They posited that effects were generated by an assemblage of organic and inorganic factors and humans cannot claim a monopoly on world-building. This diffusion of agency could lead to more conscientious care for the world(Myers 2013; Latour & Weibel 2005).

Techne as the belief systems that guide systems of making, made objects and the belief systems behind them. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/

However, Myers argues that this denies the amplified world-building capabilities that humans have in their respective sites. She stands against the flat-out distribution of agency that Latour and Bennett talk about in their network theories and instead argues that each actant in a network or assemblage is not the same in terms of the capacity for world-building. There are many things that she borrows from Latour and Bennet’s description of assemblages in terms of the fallibility, non-sovereignty and the blindness of human actors in these sites. However, she rejects the notion of levelling the agency among each of the actants in an assemblage. Human agency has the most effect on the assemblages of organic and inorganic. She talks about assemblages as not just actants that may be organic and inorganic, she talks about “worldly things” surfacing assemblages that are defined in scope and scale by its human actants. This means that the process of care for the world must also take into consideration the lack of agency we have in defining newer paradigms of assemblages (Myers 2013).

However, she doesn’t factor in the changes in human communities, histories, wealths and personal agencies. In effect, when we add the dimension of time to the concepts of these assemblages there are implications as to the fixed identities of these actants that both Latour and Myers suggest. I believe networks are made not of unitary actants and that each actant is also an assemblage of their collectives, histories and wealth. Assemblages are themselves constellations of bodies, generations, relations and wealths through time.

We cannot just cleave systems and its actors into human and nonhuman components. Neither has a world-building capacity as an individual unit, devoid of the relations between each other that enable such world-building.. Especially in political organizing, this starts to become more clear once you start to include temporality as a factor of actant agency. Each of the human actants is a combination of their memories, resources, relations and perspectives on the world. The nonhuman world is now a combination of its history, memory, trauma and resilience which is indistinguishably intertwined with human history. Annemarie Mol talks about a patient who has been brought up with her single mom and was reported to have diabetes from her father’s side. Her father had gone from being absent to being an inconvenient presence in her life. Thus, the actant that is the patient constitutes also of the material and immaterial histories of her father and the genes that were passed to her before she came to the scene. She talks about a patient who has been brought up with her single mom and was reported to have diabetes from her father’s side. Her father had gone from being absent to being an inconvenient presence in her life. It might be helpful to use this as a framework to set in place the battles of privilege and dominance in human histories to match up with nonhuman histories. A diffused sense of agency among the actant constellations and their parts could also have implications in terms of the access and ability to perform care.

Fig 16: An old representation of me trying to make sense of what I am doing

Fig 17: An old diagram of me still trying to make sense of this

Do-ings and Be-ings: A collection of micro-outputs

Repair as care means that ongoing work of tailoring, appropriation, and resistance is an attachment, for it is “to bear and affirm a moral relation” to the object. (Jackson 2013).

to think of care beyond a moral disposition, or a good intention, extending its senses to a material doing, the way we experience, perceive, represent, and live with things.

“Care stands for a signifier of necessary yet mostly dismissed labourers of everyday maintenance of life, an ethico-political commitment to neglected things, and the affective remaking of relationships with our objects” (Bellacasa 2011)

I present here a collection of experiences of do-ing and be-ing that helped me articulate ideas of care in networks.

Micro-Understandings

These are experiences that don’t have any making or practising form explicitly but it was instrumental in contextualising some of the other experiences.

Mudras for clay

Jahnavi and I went to the workshop of the Kumbhara potters. The workshop was principally a male domain. It was quite different from the home where we met Vidyawati ma’am where they were drying smaller vessels and clay instruments. The workshop space is where five brothers work from. It is a structure with a courtyard and a little more land in front of that. There are 5 rooms where each brother stores their products. The open space in front has a variety of utensils kept to dry, the women work within the courtyard, adding ash to the pots and other tasks which weren’t considered part of the main pottery work, according to the mother of the 5 brothers. As we sat there with them for a while, one of the brothers offered to teach us how to make a small diya. The process starts with adding wet mud to the platform on the wheel. There’s a long stick that fits into the notch of the wheel where you fit and rotate it forcefully and with a rhythm. He then showed us the exact hand positions that we need to mould the diya. I was immediately struck by how gentle and mudra-like it seemed. I had a lot of issues managing my hand pressure and keeping my body upright in a squatting position. Reflecting on it, the experience demonstrated to me how important bodies are, as a vessel of knowledge and practice. The rhythm, pressure and posture mattered in how the diya turned out.

After a few failed attempts, when I finally managed to make a decent one, he showed me how to cut it off the mud base with a thin wire. The cutting itself was a task of motion and rhythm. He said he would be delighted to teach us about the work if I came every day before 8. “There’s enough research and books about us, we like to teach. The last time a student came to learn from us, he was quite consistent and came every day for a month. We liked him a lot.” I started to play with the idea of researching through doing, but doing through learning. It sparked the idea of being an active and partial participant rather than an impartial and distant observer.

Grassy Computers

A team from Servelots-Janasthu ran a session in Naveen’s workshop about their work in the Tech4Good sector. One of the projects that were relevant to the context of the workshop was part of their effort to establish an internet radio that is mobile in Devarayanadurga. They were also using a Raspberry Pi to record and create an ad-hoc network. However, the part that I found most interesting is how they shaped the hardware according to the place and the practices of the place. Devarayanadurga is mostly rural and has a few forests around. Bullgrass is amply available there. They made a container for the device made of bull grass in the shape of a pouch. It started to strike me how the minimalism aesthetic of mainstream design and “clean curves” serves the purpose of delocating the technology. Situating the technology would also involve the effort of using context to shape how the technology is perceived and felt - tangibly as well as intangibly.

“City as an archive”

There was a point in the workshop where the groups were preparing to do activities with the communities that they had chosen. But as the day went on, many didn’t show up. While I was puzzled, Naveen got it immediately that it was probably due to fatigue of having 3 sessions in 4 days with us. He decided then that the workshop phases which were planned for more sessions of community participation wouldn’t happen. It was interesting to see how the facilitator in him was constantly on the lookout for the interests of the groups and not the interest of the activities and was willing to take a day off in the middle of a packed schedule.

In the exhibition space where Naveen’s workshop’s outcomes would culminate. I saw the way that cross-talk happened between communities of Bidar and the various groups that we had. The collaborating groups had a chance to see the outcomes that came about for other groups and comment on them as well. There was a table with the team from Servelots-Janasthu who were displaying and demo-ing their various projects and tools. Within the context of the workshop, the collaborating communities already had quite a bit of familiarity with some of the hardware. This made it easier for them to participate in the demo as well.

Micro-practices

This section outlines the times that I found another articulation of care through putting certain things in practice.

Rehearsing Alternate Futures

Shreyas and I were discussing the role of an archive in a community and how it has to move beyond a dead store. The activation of an archive happens when the community has agency over it and derives a utility from it. We were discussing how the practices are so enmeshed in their bodies and not a purely mental exercise. We discussed a few embodied ways of interacting with the archive. Around this time, Naveen and a studio of MA Ex. students came down to Bidar for a studio called ‘Archiving the City’. Naveen spoke about the way that archives are designed in a way that musemises people and practices. He wanted to co-experiment in the living labs for alternative imaginations of archives and how they can be used by the people to whom it must belong. I also tried a few ways to use archives in a way that channels more than just seeing them from behind a literal or metaphorical glass case. In what ways can archives invite responses and collective building of the archives if the input methods were designed by allowing for more bodily agency.

We were also using audio as the medium of archiving. However, there are many problems with audio, one that it doesn’t offer the modularity that text gives. This modularity would allow for more ways to annotate a voice clip or song. Another option that was closed off was the more cumbersome ways to search and index the song and the content within it.

Meta-Facilitating for and with care

Naveen showed me how a meta-facilitation practice works through the studio. Where I joined along with a group with Jackson, Giri and Ishan who were working with the Shayara ma’am. Besides that, I was involved with the other groups when they worked on their brainstorming for activities. Some of them had difficulties understanding the workshop’s intention because of the popular use of Hindi and the academic use of English. After a session of reflection, I would sit with some of them and try to work out with them the way that they interpreted Naveen’s sessions about the workshop.

There was a point in the workshop where I was the facilitator for a few days, which gave me a little anxiety on whether I would send someone down the wrong direction and I spoke to Naveen about it. Naveen told me how now I am part of the workshop for all its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ implications. As long as I understood some of my biases and the apparent “don’ts”, I would be part of shaping the workshop and that is okay. This helped me understand and augment my understanding of opposing design authorship practically. I also faced some situations where I couldn’t articulate the right thing to do for some students who were surfacing their own biases while working in the field. From the knowledge that I have struggled with the same thing in the past, I decided to take a safer route for the conversation and leave the critical parts of it to Vinay and Naveen, which they handled well.

After we went through the first two stages of the workshop, which involved acclimating themselves with the place and understanding the people we were working with. We started to discuss the tendencies of practitioners to separate a practice from its people, their environments, livelihoods and their everyday lives. As we moved into the third phase, we wanted to bring this research to the living labs and co-experiment with the brainstorming part of it. I led a workshop with children from the school at which Supriya is the headmistress. The children were mostly from the 8th and 9th standards. We had a strict deadline which wasn’t possible with our earlier plan so Supriya and I decided to change the structure to make some things faster. An initial briefing was done from me and I intended to get the children comfortable with speaking to us and also slowly understanding the idea of what things we wanted to brainstorm and experiment with them.

After they broke out into smaller groups, I moved around making sure to see if the facilitators themselves were participating and not just observing. The night before the workshop, Naveen was explaining the concept of an embodied knowledge through the way that he and his child count ‘red badam trees’ on the road and how they no longer needed to consciously see and count the trees. It was an aspect, I wanted to be able to encourage them to follow through on. It worked well when they brought the way to make it an embodied rehearsal of the future and demonstrated to me that the scaffolding was fitting in place.

Tooba - A Translation From Urdu

I also worked more closely with Ruksana ma’am-the Shayara. In conversation, she started to mention how the limited readership of Urdu literature was not ideal for writers in the language. We started to talk about how we could start the process of translation or continue with making her stories as audio episodes narrated by her. I offered to help her translate her work and she said she would like to translate “Tooba”, one of her books. The book was a collection of medium length short stories. Hindi was the in-between language and a second language to both of us. It was interesting, however, because I am a writer too and I was constantly watching for my style overpowering her prose. Sometimes, I would understand a phrase or word through intuition, however, the process of confirming the meaning from her in Hindi took a lot more time. The nuances of the word, juxtaposed meanings and just the way the word is structured would cause a lot of dissonances when I tried the more obvious choices of translations. The experience also took to task a lot of my assumptions regarding language and how natural language speakers find its rules. Often when ma’am would translate a word, I would find myself asking her if the word was a composite of two other words and she would not consider that as a good question because it is intuitive. I also would come to points where the English words would dangle at the tip of my pen but the experience of translating from Urdu to Hindi to English would cause many slippages.

Another concept that I started questioning was the idea of genres because of how she imagined her works as categorised on the most general level. Once after reading to us the story of a grandfather and grandson contesting and comparing their ideas and experiences of love, she said that she doesn’t like to write on such topics which were ‘khayali’ and it was more important to write real(sachhi) stories. At first, I thought they aligned with the English fiction/non-fiction binary but as she spoke more I started to realise how much it was tinted towards the way of suffering. Having a hard childhood, she remarked to me once, was the reason she wrote stories the way she did so that people who were suffering would get hope from her stories. Another time, she told me about how she knew her limitations, how she doesn’t include real-life details in the stories. Her physical affliction was such that she wasn’t able to see as much of the world as other writers. This, in addition to the fact that she was only educated till the fourth standard, made it all the more impressive that she was able to produce so much work and be known for being a writer all over India. She attributes her success to Allah and how she was always surrounded by supportive family members. The reason that she could write as she did despite only having studied until the fourth standard was that her father would get her books to help her overcome the loneliness that her affliction forced on her. She talks about how her husband has always been supportive of the things she does and helps her with her work. Uncle is a jolly person who’s always joking around and making her laugh.

Collaborative Translations

When I started making the COVID19 resource spreadsheet, we hadn’t yet started to translate the materials. I found an add-on to translate a sheet. It was surprising that Google Sheets didn’t have an in-built feature to do it. Prayag suggested that we rephrase it because the language was a direct translation and didn’t quite work. I also struggled to find a way to deal with a large number of English and Marathi sheets, and finally used the links within the sheets to create separate indexes for the Marathi sheets and English sheets. After this, Sowmya helped me rejig the translations with the help of her parents. It was heartwarming to see that they were so excited to help even though they didn’t live in Pune. I soon started to work with Viral Kindness group in Pune, they also helped finish up the translation and change things within the sheets.

Translations between community practices

I had come to Bidar and was living at the nodal centre of DLL. At the time songs, folklore and stories of women members of various communities were being recorded on Raspberry Pis. There was also an effort to familiarise the communities with the use of these devices. These devices were to become smaller nodes in a mesh network across Bidar and serve as an intra-archive to be used by the residents of Bidar. A roadblock that DLL and Janasthu-Servelots were facing was in the procurement of the Libre router devices to set up a Bidar-wide mesh network. They were costly and needed to be shipped from overseas and this process was creating a delay in operationalising the technical part of the project. People-as-Nodes was designed as an alternative approach to bypass this handicap where people would act as nodes and facilitate the use of the archive manually. The whole team thus designed a series of workshops to prototype and experiment with the way that the network would hopefully encourage annotation and cross-talk of these practices. The first workshop was held with three communities - the Kumbhara, the Bhooteru and the Shayaras. I wasn’t present for the first workshop with was to be the first of three. The first workshop was an effort to facilitate a process of self-annotation. The communities listened to their songs in sections after which they were given the time to draw or write anything they could associate with it. The Shayaras however, were given photos from different places, peoples and practices in Bidar and asked to annotate it through freewriting, prose or poem. I was only present when the second workshop was being planned. I introduced the idea of adding some more mediums such as clay and paper cuttings to the activity.

The Bhooteru group weren’t able to attend the workshop and hence we did the workshop with three women from the Kumbhara and Ruksana ma’am from the Shayara. The plan initially was to show each community the practice of another community and facilitate annotation of that. Since the Bhooteru weren’t present, we decided that Vidyawati ma’am, her mother and one of their community members would sit together with Ruksana ma’am. In this setting, they would listen to a song that the Bhooteru sang. Ruksana Ma’am didn’t understand Kannada and the Kumbhara women had a little difficulty understanding that particular dialect, so Dilip had to translate for them after every section. We offered clay, paper cuttings and writing material and told them to use whatever they wanted and make something in response to the sections of the song being played.

The clay helped the Kumbhara women to quickly start making things which they were most comfortable with. However, their annotations started to come out more in the things they said and the songs they sang in response. At this point, I was only getting used to understanding the idea of an embodied cognition and knowledge practice. I observed through the whole process how the material and their bodies working with the material opened up more associations for them. I have always wondered about the process of participatory activities and how each participant requires a scaffolding that helps create a translation. This translation is so much more important when it is a matter of language, privilege and concept dictionaries. In the process of linguistic translation, there is a lot of slippage because of how nebulous language itself is and how this slippage is aggravated through a second language. I posit that the clay was instrumental in becoming the medium of that translation.

It was a bigger barrier for Shayara ma’am because she was dealing with paper cuttings, which were not a medium she was comfortable with. However, in the whole process, her husband started helping her and a conversation started to form around the group. It was a bit of a learning experience for me and something I reflected on later as to the nature of participatory workshops. We, the facilitators weren’t actively a part of the workshop which took away the meaning of a co-creationary workshop.

Micro-makings

Through the process of making I was able to think through the process to see things a little differently.

The Flow of working

While we were making IEC material with DB, we started work on tasks in two ways. We would initiate a rephrasing of more global missives to contextualise them. The second way would be by entering the process after the initial rephrasing was done. These tasks would be accounted to different volunteers, who would then inform us of the stage at which the artefact was and someone else would pick it up.

The initial work started with a few people on a WhatsApp group. The interface didn’t facilitate modular conversations about the tasks for different stages of different tasks. Soon, important messages started to get lost in the long singular thread. We then moved the conversation to Slack, which again required a lot of articulation work to set it up kind of like we want it. Padmini and Naveen decided to invite more people to join the collective through a form. As new people joined, the nature of how we worked changed with the scale. Here it became all the more important to be able to have these conversations. Each of the tasks was made of smaller subtasks which would be done by one or two members each. This further complicated things so I made a rough spreadsheet which I shared with Padmini to discuss workflow. The spreadsheet allowed for a more minute scale of accountability and tracking. It also allowed members to work as much as they could and document precisely where they stopped to allow someone else to pick it up from there.

Gifs through Real-time Collaboration

When fake news about COVID19 was spreading and changing the behaviour of people towards medical personnel and other communities we decided to respond to it. In this larger goal, we started to have smaller projects like the one that Thomson started - the myth-buster gifs. He made them with a combination of XD and Keynote. However, since the coronavirus information was still changing at the time, he had to do these changes constantly. This took a lot of his bandwidth with the constant revisions. We needed to find a collaborative tool that was browser-based and quick enough to pick up. Especially in a time-sensitive context, we needed something so that many people could work on something so that we could put things out faster and constantly revise. I started to play with the UX prototyping features of Figma with a hunch that we could use it for the task. I did this by using the ‘smart-animate’ feature that they had made for movement between frames and triggering it through delay.

Payments for collaborating volunteers

Design Beku was a collective that had activated after the coronavirus started to look scary. It was also founded with the vision that it would be a collective with a flat structural operation during the effort to put out IEC material. At one point, Design Beku had a possibility of being funded and we needed to figure out how to disburse the funds among the volunteers. It also involved deciding collectively on the way that projects and tasks would be costed. After a conversation about it on the Slack group, we decided it could be one of two ways. The first option involved getting a lump sum and dividing it among projects and how many ever volunteers were involved. The other option seemed more appealing since task complexity affected the amount of time that was needed to complete it. For different types of content creation, the rejigging of information, translation, giving it a form as pictures, video, audio or gifs would all require different intensities of effort. We then decided to move forward with costing by the hour for each task. This involved making a repository of this data by listing the average time that would be needed to complete different tasks. This would be compiled with a list of volunteers and projects.

I decided to try making an app that could be used for this purpose. It involved having the volunteers input the work they did through the honour system. I worked on Glideapps that whole night and had a prototype ready by the next day afternoon. The process of making the app was a difficult one because of how Glideapps organises data on a spreadsheet with limited capabilities for interweaving data of different types. I couldn’t find a good way to this the way that I had articulated the problem. I wanted to have three main tabs on the app other than the data entry tab for projects, tasks and volunteers’ names. I hoped that the data entered could be represented seamlessly in the headings and sub-headings of each tab. But the modular structure of Glideapps made it unpredictable how it would be displaying the data and that became more complicated once I started to add the option to edit records on the app. The prototype itself was full of bugs and I needed people to test it and talk to them about it while also trying to contend with Glideapps.

COVID Resources for Pune

After seminar 2 when it became clear to me that I couldn’t go back to Bidar because of COVID, I stopped working on the project completely. I saw Ruchi’s tweet about how she made a Google sheet and Glideapp for Bangalore with resources and information that people would need in the coming days. I messaged her immediately and started a conversation about how I could do the same. I started to collect and collate information related to Pune but immediately ran into issues. I had to find the location and information regarding hospitals that were deemed first responders and testing centres. At the time, there were few testing centres in Maharashtra and 7 of the 10 were newly assigned. I couldn’t, therefore, find much of that information long after I put out the app and sheets. Other than those, I spent a lot of time gathering from my social media volunteer organisations and their contact details. Other than that I decided to create a separate tab for people to find organisations easily to donate to. Both of these organisations’ information had to be personally checked by the nature of the spreadsheets I created. This involved long nights trawling the internet for information and constantly second-guessing if the amount of information was verified enough.

The reason the same information was made available in two forms was so that we could provide alternative access means to the same information assuming differences in devices and reading capability. Ruchi and I also worked to put out a meta-guide for getting these resources together and putting them in the form that we had.

Fundraising Activities with Figma

For #KoiBhookaNaRahe, Team YUVAA and other organisations were working on-field to distribute food among the people of Bidar. These were included in relief packets that had other essentials like soap and sanitiser. Each of the packets was costly and the government was responding very slowly. We needed to raise funds if the groundwork had to continue. We decided then to create a crowdfunding campaign and we needed to add updates and stories from the field to the creative material that we put out for the campaign. We decided to collect the information whenever Geeta, Supriya, Dilip or Vinay had time. Vinay was sending updates from the field almost daily as well. On this side, Eeshita, Shreyas and I needed to put these stories together, edit them and work on making it reflective of the on-ground conditions. This was a little more complex to do because those on-field were already swamped. Using a zoom call, interviews were recorded which were also used. For the images and text that had to be created, it had to be done fast and collaboratively. I decided to move the process to Figma, which would allow us to do that. I made a few templates using the text from material that had already been made. These were reconfigured for different screen sizes. I wasn’t able to work on the campaign materials but Eeshita and Shreyas tweaked the templates to narrate stories of different forms.

A Website to Go

In the initial stages, Koi Bhooka Na Rahe wasn’t even named. Vinay and others had started the process of delivering rations and essentials to houses and localities. They used to post updates about the work on Facebook. This information would go out to the groups that Vinay was part of and would come daily. There was a need to put them together with the calls for funds. In the beginning, we used two images, which had information on what each relief packet had and the bank details to donate to. However, this text had to be copied by anyone who had the intent of donating. Since there was no website yet, I created an Evernote with a shareable link. Using it I created a template with the main calls to action in the beginning and the updates below. These included the bank details and kept updating the daily updates that Vinay put up with pictures. After using a link shortener I changed the URL to something easier to remember - https://tinyurl.com/BidarRelief2020. We used the same URL to put the campaign on Ketto, which had a website field to fill. With this, we were able to update the note on the go, while also providing easy access to the bank details.

The Struggle of the Choropleth Map

The cases in Pune started to rise and entire localities started to get sealed off. I was prompted by someone that a choropleth map of the increasing cases would be ideal. This was because both the PMC and PCMC were not putting out timely information. PCMC was posting maps of the wards and their active and new cases with random colours and unreadable text. I also felt that the citizen-led information portals on Instagram and elsewhere were only showing information from PMC.

I had to find a shapefile that included both the municipalities of Pune city. This was easier said than done. I found a shapefile of every ward in Maharashtra that was done through an open-source meeting of tech people and the government. I extracted the ward information of Pune and Pimpri through that file. However, since the information was old(2017) I had to rejig it and deal with the wards and zones as they are demarcated and administered today. I found a relatively recent shapefile for PMC which I decided to graft to my original file. However, the wards in PCMC had now been administratively grouped into zones and it was quite difficult to find a shapefile of that. However, using the maps that PCMC put out on Instagram as a reference I reshaped them and dealt with all the errors of my inexperience with QGIS.

I decided early on that if I had to make this, the numbers data would need to be something that people can change daily and it wouldn’t just be my responsibility. However, most of the tools I explored like Tableau, DataWrapper, ArcGis and QGIS considered the ESRI shapefiles of the maps and the data in the same.geojson,.json, or.kml file. There was no way to separate the data of the numbers from the shape data. The reason that this was important was that I was hoping to create a collaborative sheet with the Viral Kindness group and we could collectively update it. This was a struggle that went on for a while and the emotional toll of the lockdown had caught up to me. It was after that point that I discontinued all the self-initiated projects including the work of managing the Slack channel of DB. After that, I only helped out here and there.

Fig 19: Kumbhara Potter spinning the wheel

Fig 18: Learning to make Diya. Credits: Jahnavi Koganti

Fig 20: Translation of one of Ruksana Ma’am’s stories

Fig 21: The sheet for Pune was translated by many different people into Marathi

Fig 22: The workshop with two communities on annotating other community practices

Fig 23: Dilip, Supriya, Vinay and I experiment with materials the day before the workshop

Fig 24: The workflow sheet had these headings

Fig 25: This is from the figma file used to create the gifmaking meta-tool

Fig 26: This is from the Glideapps for doing the costing for DB

Fig 27: This is from the Glideapps for the Covid Resources Pune

Fig 28: This is from the sheets for the Covid Resources Pune, translated

Fig 29: What is this Covid Resource App

Fig 31: Fundraising Material that Eeshita and Shreyas made for Koi Bhooka na Rahe

Fig 32: The Figma template used to make the fundraising material

Fig 33: Makeshift Website for the fundraising campaign with donation details and daily updates

Fig 34: All the failed attempts at making the choropleth map

Describing Care in these Collectives

Drawing from these doings and beings, I describe care in these collectives using two tools. Archetypes and Axioms. Archetypes are roles that care-practitioners in these collectives undertake for specific types of efforts and work. Axioms serve to illustrate the shared common space that these networks launch from. Both of these serve to illustrate a neglected politics of care in those spaces.

Archetypes

Maintainers-Repairers

Maintenance in these collectives is essential to the longevity of the entire project(Hyysalo 2018). Myers’ concept of the worldly things has tried to explain how different solidarities and publics come together in cooperation or contest to respond to a “worldly thing”. The “thing” is cared for and emerges from the idea that world is a shared home for many different entities - human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic and that the world is an in-between/medium of conversation (Myers 2013). This coagulation of different contests and alliances around a worldly thing may happen slowly over time or be a rapid response. These modes of working each have their pros and cons and generally define maintainers as those involved in keeping up the momentum of the work. This may in terms of creating new excitements, flashpoints within the network’s work or nurturing the slow-moving parts of the collectives’ work. The former involves understanding fragility as not a weakness but rather a source of divergent pathways. The latter is usually a much harder process of working on something and keeping it alive, revisiting things. This is a much more invisible work often referred to as the ‘mundane’.

Hysallo and Hysallo, in their account of a participatory revival of a library talk about the invisible work that goes into making something participatory. Through their exercise of conducting a series of workshops across various experts and publics, they start to articulate the things that happen behind the scenes. from conducting many workshops, one after another, the aspect of feedforward and feedback started to emerge. Their workshops were used as a platform to generate imaginaries for the library which could help it in some way. The ideas, futures and imaginations that were generated in workshop 1 would feed into an aspect of workshop 2. This required a lot of articulation work-refining, elaborating and simplifying-to get it ready to use for the next stage. Other than this, there were constant back-and-forths to plan for different workshops, getting people on board, making marketing material, publishing results, obtaining consent etc. This kind of mundane and strategic work remains invisible in a lot of settings where it isn’t valued. The newspaper article about how people started to see sanitation workers and transport workers as an essential worker only after coronavirus pulled back the veil, drove home the point for me. (Sunday Times 2020)

Maintenance is an idea associated with the concept of the “broken world thinking” that assumes the fragility of the world as the norm but underscores and appreciates actions that undertake stabilization (Jackson 2013). The concept of repair takes the form of care in that world. Grant makes the argument that repair is a moral good only if it is one choice of many, however, broken world thinking helps us to be okay with breakdowns of people, technology, practice and excites us for the process of repair. This is largely also tied to the work needed to help create safe spaces for all types of actants. Morale work is part of the many mundane and strategic courses of action undertaken by care practitioners who wear the maintainer archetype in a network.

In collaborative networks, however, as I have observed and participated in them, the role of a maintainer-repairer has a lot of value. These collectives are already so fragile through the nature of the collaborations and the mismatch with what the market hegemony rewards. The lack of maintenance/repair work has much more immediate and dire consequences here. Shreyas often spoke about this to me in terms of persistence and morale. In Bidar, Khansaab has an amazing collection of historical artefacts and knows their stories. I haven’t met him. But I would be regaled by stories of Khansaab’s small house, filled from wall to wall cups and stamps and photos and of all the stories he had found and now tell about them. In Shreyas’ words, he was no longer a hobby collector but a “keeper of public memory”. However, Khansaab had other problems on the homefront, his children were growing up fast and didn’t have his passion for the treasure trove of things that he had. He was growing old as and slowly feeling the brunt of it. Khansaab felt and expressed often that he is frustrated by the seeming invalidation of his life’s work. He feels that he might have to sell his collection.

The story above is unpacking maintenance at multiple levels, for many types of actants. The organic and inorganic assemblages that surround a “worldly thing” or “matter of concern” need multiplicities of maintenance. Khaansaab’s understanding of history as witnessed and manifested by made objects helped him to care for them. He undertook a lifelong effort to ensure that these objects moved on with their stories to the next generation. However, his struggle to keep up his optimism at this point is indicative of the lack of a support system. Maintenance work is some of the hardest work and I witnessed the emotional toll of it. Keeping work up during the lockdown when I was trying to articulate a purpose for the Pune volunteer group - Viral Kindness - was becoming impossible. I started working with them on a few things. However, within some time, I was met with my own body feeling battered and worn down. I discontinued a large chunk of my volunteering work after that.

There’s also the constant theme of digital groups having a heavy passerby effect. To counter this is also a difficult task. In some of the collectives, I had my share of experiences with this. Messages that are read but not responded to, urgent situations that need people to stand up but no one does. This is not to moralise but rather a frustration of ignorance. Through some of my past experiences, I have always found it difficult to manage a group that comes together for something. Through this capstone, I had hoped to find a way to do it well. However, the work of the capstone has taught me how to manage these frustrations better and find alternative ways to do some things.

In Bidar, there is a community called the Valmiki Samaj who had a collection of songs that seemed Haryanvi in origin that they sang for the ‘rasams’- wedding, sangeet, Mehendi etc. They had songs for every part of the rasam and often sang in a group. Dilip and I went to the house of a grandmother that we knew sung these songs as we were archiving song and dance practices throughout Bidar, in the hope of establishing an intra-network on which such media would be stored, annotated and elaborated. The day we went, the grandfather was sitting outside the house on his cot that had large cotton ropes as the netting. A hookah the size of a 7-year-old kid was next to the bed. The grandmother was on a cot next to him and little more on the concrete road. She had her own smaller hookah. She was ill today and was lying in the sun because of that. Somehow, she mustered some strength to talk to us and she did, some of her energy came back and she offered to sing for us even though we said that we only came to talk to her today. After singing for a while, we saw that her health wasn’t good so we offered to come another day, with better equipment. Grandfather assured us that the next time, they’d call the women in the neighbouring houses who also were originally from Haryana and they would sing together. Then he said something that often comes back to me, “when there’s a lot of people singing when one person’s voice falls, another can take its place.”

Especially in collaborative networks based in the global south, there are a lot of things that have to be figured out for the first time. These might be ambiguities of people, practices, places, finances, legalities and other constraints that may be unique. The navigation of these politics and obstacles and nurturing of a collectives’ work are what make a maintainer invaluable as a care practitioner. The maintainer oils the process of revisiting old engagements, making new ones, and nurturing the current versions.

Translator-Weavers-Facilitators

The translator-weavers-facilitators connect ideas, concepts, struggles, people, practices while experimenting with the overlaps and distinctions with care according to context.

Through my experience working with Ruksaaan Ma’am and translating her work, I started to realise how her writing in Urdu comes with its own sets of support systems, conventions and issues. She often spoke to me about how Urdu wasn’t well-read in the current times and how the political turmoil only adds to it. Through Nakhads(critics) who write about her work and talk to her about her craft and give her honest feedback, she improves it. There is also a local event called a Mushayara where poets come on stage and recite their poetry.

This led me to think of the connotations that translation has as a word. Translation is also the process of facilitating a dialogue where the universal claim to knowledge is substituted by partial viewpoints. In this, translation is similar to facilitation in the way that I see it because it involves bringing in stakeholders who have their stakes deprioritised or invisibilised. In Naveen’s workshop, the group I was with - Ishan, Giri and Jackson had problems with languages in two ways. I sat with them repeatedly over and over, because of the slippage of language both in linguistic and academic terms, trying to relate stuff to how I worked out those same issues through my studios. Giri and Jackson spoke less, if at all any, Hindi. This was worsened by the fact that Bidar was a place where mostly Hindi was spoken and their classmates also spoke mostly Hindi. By bringing them into the conversation, albeit with a little extra effort, we added two more partial viewpoints to the conversation which would themselves shape the conversation. Additionally, the experience of facilitating these students and Naveen’s advice about placing myself in the workshop and not worrying about doing or saying the wrong thing struck a chord with me about facilitation in general. It was also pointed out to me by Shreyas when I asked him about how he acts when an obstacle or mistake becomes apparent in the course of the project. He said that it helps us move on when we see the challenges, mistakes and obstacles not as stopping points but rather as points of divergence. These are one of the points where new perspectives get added, evaluated or appropriated to the movement of the project. Internal and external conflicts, conflicts between facilitators and others, conflicts of time, money, mental health, physical health and space work as breakpoints to reevaluate our decisions. I started to see where this would fit in my role as translator-weaver-facilitator. The looseness and fragility of action allow enough wiggle space for the world to talk back to us. This connects also to Ella Myers’ notion of the world as an intermediating presence. This intermediating presence allows for looser spaces to evolve which facilitates a more concerted effort of translation and weaving together of ideas, places, people and contexts (Myers 2013)

The first workshop with Kumbhara and Shayara also illustrated how made objects also take on this role of a Weaver-Translator-Facilitator. The clay became a medium of translation between the songs of the Kumbhara and the Bhooteru. Through the making of the objects that she was most familiar with, she was able to respond to the songs of the Bhooteru with one of their own. The mouldability of the clay and her familiarity of the material helped her two translations, one from the Bhooteru song to the clay and from the clay to the songs of her community.

To claim that the world is a shared home is not to make the unsupportable assertion that the world is shared at all equitably. Rather, it is to say that the world, conceptualized as a tangible and intangible, organic and inorganic web,…The world’s commonality, both as a mediating presence and as a collective home, is something to be achieved or sought after; it is far from assured.(Myers 2013)

This “mediating presence” is also something that must be actively shaped in the light of the need for translation. This practice is something I rehearse through my understanding of meta-tooling. The Figma templates that I made for making gifs and the other for making campaign materials were something that urged me to think in this direction. The templates allowed for different people in a collective to collaboratively build, verify, edit and recheck the artefact in a time-sensitive manner.

I believe technology can play a big role in this practice, especially when designed with specific people in mind and responding to their imaginations of how the technology would fit into their everyday lives, their professions, places or their practice. An implication of this according to Lucy Suchman is the opposite of the ecosystem monopolies that exist today but rather “hybrid systems” that have interoperability between “multiple heterogeneous devices” (Suchman 2002). These hybrid systems are platforms for translations between what is introduced recently and that which is older as well.

However, this mediating presence also facilitates a space for a contest/conflict to arrive on the scene. In the ICAN group, we had our run-ins with engineers and developers who were trying to work on a much bigger scale than what we were attempting. Some, with a chip on their shoulder, entered the group announcing their intentions to help out groups “like ours” quite pompously. Ruchi handled it quite well as they interrogated her while also flashing their credentials constantly. I reflected on that conversation and why it unsettled me so much. There were so many varied responses to a global crisis, some like ours limited in scope and geography and others working at a national scale.

However, the belief that scaling up is always a good thing was being reflected in these responses and as those from the government with the advent of the Aarogya Setu. The important issues often give way to the interest of scaling. These issues include privacy, specificity, narrow-minded imaginations of algorithms, algorithmic black boxes, data protection and the metaphor of data being the new “oil” - to be extracted, refined, sold and marketed. The lack of transparency in these data markets is just another way to exclude voices. The weaving that happens there is an oppressive technocratic hegemony which excludes the real stakeholders and their bodies.

The weaver-translator-facilitator practices the rejection of these extractive practices and puts in the extra effort to be better. Through the exhibition of Naveen’s workshop I observed how important it was for collaborators to see how the time they invested in us, the academia was utilised for them. My initial dread of these exhibitions came from the question of “What can a student do?” Through the exhibition, I saw imaginations of a technological system and the one-day renderings of exhausted students still had an impact.

This exhibition was an amazing sight to see even though many people couldn’t make it. The guests who came were from our collaborator communities - a group of Bhooteru folk and Ruksana ma’am. A team from Janasthu was also showing their annotation software. The exhibition, though done hurriedly, was an important step in the whole workshop. It allowed us to demonstrate what work we were doing and hopefully become a little more worthy of their trust to keep working with them. In the same way that the clay opened up the conversation and allowed different people to respond to each other’s practices. As the made object, became a translator-weaver-facilitator so did the exhibition space. Space, filled with objects, imaginations and ideas of different contextual archival technology was demonstrative of their participatory nature of the workshop. It was activated by objects of shared imagination.

On the note of translation, I was lucky enough to attempt to craft a name with Vinay and Naveen’s help for the exhibition that would read similarly in Urdu and Kannada.^1,2

Kale, Kride, Kalpane - Art, Doing/Playing, Imagination

Tehzeeb, Tehfillat aur Techne - Culture, Imagination and “Techne”(root for Technology but implying the belief systems that guide making and doing)

Storyteller-Archiver-Guides

Another interesting idea that I got to explore through working in Bidar was the idea of how archiving and storytelling are activities that tethers a community together. The project “Co-Creating Local Knowledge Network’’ that DLL applied for a grant to implement with Servelots as its partner was one such exploration. Through the project, DLL and Team YUVAA worked to map the various practices of Bidar that involved singing and storytelling. I got involved in after more than half of the project timeframe and was able to accompany Dilip, Supriya and Vinay on many such activities. Servelots and DLL were trying to put in place a local mesh network that would act as a store for such practices of women and non-binary groups. The idea was that it would be locally stored and accessed. Through the activities, I got to meet people from various communities like the Kumbhara, Bhooteru, Valmiki Samaj, women Dholak players, Shayaras and Khitmatgar. Each of these practices had a rich history of women/non-binary groups singing and speaking about their culture and history.

The local mesh was built first in Devarayanadurga, where a local internet radio was managed by school children. The intent was to build this local mesh using open-source hardware that would have a long-range in transmission and be durable to the elements. At a point, the project was severely delayed due to the inaccessibility of the technology in India and the difficulty of procurement. During this time, Dheeraj, Shreyas and Vinay decided to move to the framework of People as Nodes. Instead of having routers which would work as nodes for the local mesh, people would collect the stories and songs on Raspberry Pi devices that enabled an ad-hoc network. It was during this time that Naveen and a group of M.A. Experience students came to Bidar to explore the idea of a contextualised archive that enabled these collections to be more than just dead stores. The idea was to involve these communities in the reimagination of these technologies to start to talk about the various ways in which the archive could come alive. It immediately felt like the stories of the Kabooliwaala. The wanderer in many stories who sold toys and knick-knacks and told stories of the past. Even the story of Khansaab was one such story that sparked this imagination in me. I could imagine a future in which an atomised community like an urban setting needs these shared experiences and people and sensemakers to make sense of the world. A recent example was the Italian lockdown videos of musicians playing from balconies and whole crowds of balcony audiences chiming in.

This connected with me on various levels because of Eragon - a book that I’d read before. Eragon lives near a town with an old storyteller named Brom. It is a time of hardship across the kingdom, the taxes are high and legal systems seem to be breaking down because of rumours of magical creatures that are to be feared. Brom, on a few occasions, tells stories at the place where the townspeople gather. He tells stories of old times when dragons existed and were at war with the different species of the world. He talks about a time that came later, where dragon riders were selected every generation among the species as part of a peace treaty and how the governance system was fair and just because of the dragon riders. It turns out later that he was a dragon rider himself and was part of the rebellion against the tyrant king who had now put the entire kingdom of humans under his subjugation. Forcing the other species to retreat where his immense power couldn’t subjugate them as well (Paolini 2003). He then becomes the first teacher to Eragon and opens us new possibilities for the world they lived in. The archiver-storyteller-guide has a similar practice in the way that I envision them. They archive the multiple and often erased histories of places and collectives and uses them to demonstrate that the current state is not one to resign ourselves to or even help the world in imagining different possibilities.

Even though the coronavirus was a universal fracture, many existing and emerging fractures disrupt the lives of distinct communities. The role of a storyteller-guide becomes more and more important in these times. The urgency of situations often allows no space for other perspectives to emerge and that is when the role of the archiver-storyteller guide becomes important. I also include this as a role that researchers can place themselves in; as I do through this document. By documenting practices and technologies and how they evolved meanings over time, researchers can open up conversations of alternate systems and futures.

Axioms of Practice

Fragility

Underlying these collectives is the core idea of fragility which manifests itself in many spaces that the collectives must operate in as well as the structure of the network itself. These networks demonstrate this fragility in both an overarching manner as well as in the everydayness of it. These are easy to come across in the very simple operational matters.

When we were talking about volunteer time commitments in DB, Thomson said something very important to the group,

“Voluntary thing. No hard deadlines. Contri whenever possible, keep things shared so others can pick up if you’re down. Keep things moving but sustainable.”

Operationally, it offers an alternative way of working which has its merit. However, this often brought me up to an “internal wall”. It would be often something on the lines of how “this is not how things work in the real world”. In the real world, there are deadlines and timeframes, strategies and liabilities. Work couldn’t possibly be done in this way, could it? There’s no way that a group like this could have an impact, can it? When some of my internal walls manifest and realise themselves, it’s a confirmation of these assumptions of these networks being breakable. This was a difficult thing for me to navigate.

These internal walls have come to me in many places, and I will be using my retrospection to describe the fragilities that I saw. I asked Shreyas about how he deals with obstacles and things that don’t work out in a project. His reply to me was something that changed the way that I thought about the fragility of these things. “It isn’t an obstacle that stops you rather, it is a point of divergence.” This point of divergence occurs in the times of coming up against walls, external or internal. However, this is something that requires a readiness to bear the burden of the divergence. When I was working on the choropleth map, I witnessed this. I had been working on the COVID 19 Pune app for a while, constantly updating it and verifying the information that went on it. This, however, soon brought me to a point of exhaustion and I decided to find some help. That is when I started working with the Viral Kindness group for Pune the map was to have a collaborative object for us to work on together. But when that didn’t work out, I could feel the exhaustion in my body. By some time, there was no energy for me to bounce back either.

“some bodies become depleted because of what is required to go somewhere, to be somewhere, to stay somewhere.” (Ahmed 2017, p.186)

Another implication of this fragility that I saw was the move from liability to accountability. In the app that I made to handle fund disbursals for volunteer teams, the honour system was the core operating principle that I used. Volunteers weren’t held liable for the work they did, the information they gave about their work. However, they assumed accountability for them. This comes from the shared understanding that they are part of something fragile. I have also previously seen the manipulation of these beliefs by networks to exploit their members. This also is an indicator of the connections that these actants and the networks have among each other and with other enabling institutions. These connections are of many types-some fragile, some symbiotic, some parasitic and most others a hybrid of these. These connections are also different manifestations, linkages, relationships between many different identities. The practice of care often involves discussions and decisions about the packing and unpacking, the integration and differentiation of these identities. These things often involve deciding what might be better at what point.

“But, while it is impossible to ascertain in general what it is good to do, this does not mean that everyone has to figure it out for herself. The task of establishing what ‘better’ might be involves collectives.” (Mol 2008)

I have seen this as practice in DLL as well as DB, where group conversations happen about new sources of funding, new projects and collectively understanding whether the engagement would be “good to do”. Another conversation that merits this kind of collective concern is the question of melding and unmelding identities between people, collectives and institutions. These reflect in the processes of adding people to the collective, discussing if overlapping collective identities are to be differentiated for projects or endeavours. It is also a question of asking which identity is more suitable for a project. This kind of nebulous identity is flexible and fragile at the same time.

Sara Ahmed describes fragility in three ways:

• The quality of being easily breakable
• When being breakable stops possibilities of doing something or reaching somewhere
• No longer able to grasp hold of what we need to persist in something (Ahmed 2017)

If this is what fragility means for individuals, how does this translate to the collective sees the world. Practices such as adding to the collective then go much further than mere skill or capital, whether it is for people, other collectives, institutions or corporations. Even for things such as keeping up morale after a setback, it is anticipated because of a more honest view of our collectives.

Counter-hegemonic practices

I wrote before about ICAN, and how there was a conscious unspoken decision to stay at a small scale and not “solve” anything. The saviour idea of technology is looked at quite humbly and seen as a tool that needs to be situated. For DB, there were some spaces where this “stand against” becomes clearer. While we translating the IEC material, I would sometimes take on Marathi and Malayalam. I have a conversational hold over both languages and often I would stumble where a little more complex concepts were included. Soon, I started to rely on Google translate to do my work. At first glance, the output seems okay but often quite formal. After reviewing my work, Naveen re-edited once and told me how he had to “de-sanskritise” it. That got me thinking about how the differences between formal and informal language is often a story of imperialism or colonialism. Instantly transported back to school, how even though I could read and write literary Marathi, I wouldn’t be able to speak colloquial Marathi. It was only later that I realised the differences lay in the Brahmanistic influence on Marathi and the relation to whoever couldn’t speak the “Puneri” Marathi was considered “gavthi”(a slur that means village-folk). These actions require us to constantly think about how we talk about our work, what is our work, how was it done, why it was done in a certain way and question everything. Care is a very political act in the sense of what it questions and that has reflected in these collectives.

Relationships

Another thing that I have seen the collectives question are the arbitrary yet normative way that relationships have been formed. I spoke to Shreyas about scoping Bidar for my capstone, and visited it once for a week and he added me to the main group of Living Labs. I was bewildered by this. As I worked with DLL longer, I saw this in the context of how relationships were formed, taking into consideration personal feelings, larger engagements. I started to understand how adding people was less about the opacity of the “top management” but rather the convenience and bandwidth of the collaborators. DB, DLL, LLN and Team YUVAA are quite closely interlinked in terms of the in-betweening of contexts and collaborators. However, discussions about matters of identity often emerge only in terms of the differences between the identities and what each can or cannot do, not in the prescriptive sense but rather as a matter of humble honesty.

Fig 35: An early attempt at visualising the archetypes

Fig 36: The poster I made for the exhibition

Fig 37: An overview of the capstone

Fig 38: This QR code redirects to all the web artifacts listed

Conclusion

I have discussed my experiences of different collectives and I witnessed care manifesting in them. The research opens up ways of looking at networks in a systemic and structural level through the lenses of care. Care systems are working in each of these collectives and quite probably in every network. The people who are part of these care systems often adorn themselves with different roles of care-practice that might allow them to nurture collectives. This is also a smaller exercise in reimagining networks structurally and revisioning how they coagulate, evolve and operate. The shared assumptions carried by these collectives often enable them to ground themselves and move beyond the few normative methods of being and doing in a network.

Fragility is an honest and important understanding in this sense because it changes the way we look at incentives and penalisations as a motivation. I imagine this in the sense of “broken world thinking” and how honesty helps us to better appreciate care practices.(Grant 2020; Jackson 2013) The relationships of these collectives are pluralistic and multi-faceted, each requiring a different aspect of care practice. I think that a large portion of these newer networked practices emerges as a result of their stand against a hegemony of materials, knowledge, scales, relationships and hierarchies. And some of these practices of care from the necessity of this “stand against” causes a fracture and sets up the network to fail when looked at in relation with the belief systems that surround it. But also, as Sara Ahmed says, a point of breakage isn’t just that it is a point of becoming - a divergence from the norm, new protocols, practices, ways of finding capital, engaging with people, engaging with other institutions and networks emerge.

“Shattering: scattering. What is shattered so often is scattered, strewn all over the place. A history that is down, heavy, is also messy, strewn. The fragments: an assembly. In pieces. Becoming army” (Ahmed 2017, p.186)

It is a “diseased” collective in a world that claims to be effective and optimised. If living with the disease isn’t seen as a temporary thing, but rather as the norm then maybe care is the best way to navigate that.

“The logic of care is definitely better geared to living with a diseased and unpredictable body… examine it, adapt it, fiddle with it, push and pull it, alter it, as and where this seems right. The logic of care as I articulate it here is not something to solidify or cast in stone. Not at all! It is fluid and adaptable. But it is a good place to start from since, instead of addressing only the part of us that is healthy, it takes us seriously as we are, diseases and all. It seeks to nourish our bodies; respects the collectivities to which we belong; reacts forgivingly to our failures; and stubbornly strives for improvement, even if things keep on going wrong; though not beyond an (un-)certain limit, for in the end it will let go. Although it is difficult to relate to one’s own suffering in a clinical way, learning to combine being active with being receptive does more than strengthening our capacity to care. For the ability to let go actively not only makes suffering easier to bear. It is also a precondition for experiencing pleasure.” (Mol 2008, p. 83)

Bibliography

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Ahmed, Sara. “Fragile Connections.” In Living a Feminist Life, 163–86. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

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The article draws on fieldwork in rural India, where “community network” means something different from its usual technical definition. Here, networks are not just about connectivity but about the social relationships, trust, and shared knowledge that make infrastructure meaningful. The piece reflects on what it takes to support communities in building these layers together. Alongside infrastructure, we also experimented with community-driven content creation tools to help participants claim ownership over these networks.

Read the full piece on APC

Project Context

We chose Bhutijhari with Project Potential, and included Bhelatupi nearby, because the contrast between the two shows how caste plays out in where people live and how children get to school.

Initial Mapping Activity

We used a map to start structured discussions with Project Potential’s local researchers, who shared their own observations and experiences of caste. Bhutijhari’s houses run along caste lines; Bhelatupi’s are mixed clusters. The map made that contrast easy to talk about.

Working with local researchers

The local researchers were mostly youth volunteers from Project Potential, and since they would still be there after we left, we worked with them as facilitators rather than subjects. We spent time on team-building first and shared some basic design-thinking tools.

One activity they ran, “Mummy kya Bolengi? kya Bolenge?”, looked at how beliefs pass from parents to children. Through storytelling and role-play, people voiced the myths and warnings that carry caste from one generation to the next.

Speculating an Ideal Village

We also asked adults and children to build an ideal village on a hand-drawn map, placing homes and infrastructure by occupation. Occupation stands in for caste here, so where people put things, and what they put first, showed how differently the two communities see the same village.

Reflections

The point was less to produce findings than to make caste discussable on the ground, in a form people could point at and argue with, rather than in academic language. It is a small piece of work, and it mostly taught us where the real questions are.

This theoretical lens allows us to interrogate the boundary between biological systems and technological infrastructures through the use of speculative fiction. My exploration started with a set of intriguing jump-off points:

1. An ecological system: Ants producing and distributing liquid food
2. An artifact (thingamajig): Liquid food packets and their decentralized production and delivery system
3. A place: Bengal
4. A name: Antarsam

Ecological System: Drawing Inspiration from Ants

Introduction: The Divergence Point

The year 1943 marked a devastating milestone in Bengal’s history - a famine that claimed nearly three million lives. While our timeline saw this tragedy followed by the Green Revolution of the 1960s, elsewhere in the multiverse, a different path unfolded. This document examines that alternate trajectory, where a single change in history reshaped not just a nation, but the very nature of technology, society, and sustenance itself.

The Alternative Timeline: Netaji’s Survival

In this alternate reality, Subhashchandra Bose - the revolutionary leader who challenged Gandhi’s non-violent approach to Indian independence - did not perish in a plane crash in 1945. Instead, Netaji (as he was respectfully known) continued his resistance against British colonial rule with tactical support from Japanese forces. Following World War II, he strategically positioned himself against both American and Japanese imperial ambitions, which had divided their control over the north-west and north-east regions of what would have been India and Pakistan.

Witnessing the Bengal famine and subsequent food crises through the 1960s, Netaji’s government prioritized food security above all else. “A nation that cannot feed itself cannot truly be independent,” became his defining philosophy, reshaping the entire trajectory of this alternate India’s development.

The Ant Paradigm

The breakthrough came from an unlikely source: myrmecology, the study of ants. Micah, a biologist specializing in social insects, observed how ant colonies solved complex resource allocation problems through decentralized systems. In her landmark 1952 paper, he wrote:

“Ants have no central authority dictating distribution. Each ant follows simple rules, yet collectively they create remarkably efficient supply chains. Their social digestive system - where food is passed from ant to ant, processed at each stage - provides a blueprint for reimagining how humans might approach resource distribution.”

This insight catalyzed two revolutionary innovations that would transform society.

The Twin Innovations

1. Mrutaru (The Nectar Plant)

Dr. Ayan (no relation to Netaji) explained the science: “The plant utilises modified photosynthetic pathways and nitrogen-fixing bacteria to create protein structures and complex carbohydrates with unprecedented efficiency. Unlike conventional agriculture, which wastes nearly 60% of potential energy in each trophic transfer, Mrutaru captures almost 80% of input energy, approaching theoretical limits of thermodynamic efficiency.”

2. Annacharkha (The Food Wheel)

Antarsam: The Food Internet

As these innovations scaled across the nation, a new challenge emerged: coordinating decentralized production to ensure equitable distribution. This need birthed Antarsam, a communication network unlike the internet that developed in our timeline.

The term “Antarsam” merges “antar” (meaning ‘in between’) and “sam” (abbreviated from ‘samachar,’ meaning ’news’) - literally “news between,” but conceptually representing the connections between nodes in the food distribution network. Unlike our internet, which evolved from military and academic roots with packet-switching technology, Antarsam developed as a specialized network for matching surplus and deficit regions in real-time.

The system operated through three tiers:

1. Household Nodes: Families registered daily production and consumption, automatically reporting surpluses or deficits
2. Neighborhood Hubs: Local coordination centers that balanced resources within communities
3. Regional Exchanges: Larger facilities that handled inter-district transfers when local balancing was insufficient

“a nervous system for collective nourishment.” Physical infrastructure - a combination of pneumatic tubes for urban areas and dedicated bicycle couriers for rural regions - enabled the rapid transfer of both information and resources.

The Langaar System

The comprehensive decentralized food system became known as “Langaar,” borrowing the Sikh concept of community kitchens where people of all backgrounds eat together. This naming reflected the system’s social dimension - it wasn’t merely about sustenance, but about redefining community relationships through food.

Traditional cooking didn’t disappear but transformed. Households still prepared conventional meals for special occasions, while daily nutrition came primarily through Mrutaru and Annacharkha. New cultural practices emerged around “flavor sharing” - the exchange of catalyst tablets that produced distinct regional tastes. Marriages often included the ceremonial exchange of family flavor formulas, creating literal “fusion cuisine” in newly formed households.

The system fundamentally altered gender dynamics as well. With basic nutrition secured through a less labour-intensive process, the traditional burden of food preparation - which fell disproportionately on women - was significantly reduced. This created space for greater participation in other economic and social spheres, accelerating women’s integration into previously male-dominated fields.

The Outside observer

Paul didn’t consider himself a time traveler - he preferred “possibility navigator.” A quantum physicist from our timeline, he had accidentally discovered a method to traverse not through time but across divergent realities. His specialized equipment allowed brief observational periods in alternate timelines, though interaction remained limited.

“The differences are both subtle and profound,” Paul explained during a sanctioned presentation to the Antarsam Community Meeting in 2023 (their timeline). “In my world, technology optimised for individual consumption rather than community distribution. Our ‘internet’ connects information, but rarely connects physical resources in meaningful ways.”

Reflection: The Power of Small Changes

The fiction was an exploration on how relatively small changes to historical trajectories can cascade into fundamentally different social structures. By reimagining resource allocation through the lens of collective nourishment rather than individual accumulation, this alternate India created technological and social systems with profoundly different values and outcomes.

This case study reminds us that even seemingly monolithic systems in our own world are ultimately human constructions - the result of countless decisions, values, and historical contingencies. The alternate timeline of Antarsam offers not just an intriguing “what if,” but a mirror that helps us examine the assumptions and priorities embedded in our own technological and social systems.

It is also interesting to compare the conditions that led to the development of liquid food in the current reality ala Soylent and the circumstances of this fiction.

Rhinehart used to view food as a time-consuming hassle and had resolved to treat it as an engineering problem. He blended the ingredients with water and consumed only this drink for the next thirty days. Over the course of the next two months, he adjusted the proportions of the ingredients to counter various health issues and further refined the formula.

We are also able to see other examples of digital infrastructures currently being speculated on for food networks ala Antarsam

Blockchain for Organic Food Traceability: Case Studies on Drivers and Challenges

As part of a project to study the effects of the 2018 floods in Kerala, a group of 25 students left from Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology to Wayanad to see how the socio-political and economic realms of the state had been altered by a ’natural’ disaster of this sort. On this five-day research journey, we spoke to many of the affected, and the stakeholders in an initiative to make Kerala more resilient in the future.

Millions of Dalits, Tribals and others still face discrimination, especially the women and girls. In too many communities, religious minorities also suffer. We must continue Gandhi’s battle for equality.

• Ban-ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General, 2015

We were on our way to Kottathara to see one of the places that had been submerged in the floods. I saw the scars of the flood, reaching up to 10 feet in some places, marking its horrors in muddy tree trunks, dead plantains and compacted soil.

As I brooded over this destruction, I saw Paniya workers in the fields that we were crossing. I knew that the Paniya are one of the most populous and deprived tribes of India. They also constitute nearly 15% of Wayanad’s population. Before we left, we had been told that the Paniya were a tribal group in Wayanad who were employed as agricultural labourers. They used to be slaves that were bought with the land and had always worked in someone else’s fields toiling away under the harsh sun, doing the same job for centuries. It was then that I decided (very naively) that I would design better systems for them to inhabit. So I set about learning as much as I can about them in the following weeks.

Traditional caste rules mandate forced labour from certain communities. This is perfectly reflected in India’s labour market, which is more governed by laws of social origin than by statutory legislation. Moreover, violation of caste rules by Dalits seeking to break caste-related employment barriers is prone to severe punishment from dominant castes, including economic boycotts and even physical violence.

• India Exclusion Report, 2014

These were some readings and anecdotes that set the foundation of my knowledge about that tribe. This literature review provides insights into various aspects of the Paniya tribe, covering topics such as population, caste names and structures in Wayanad, periods of Paniya history, inter-tribal disparity, work and employment for Adivasis, alienation through the education system, public perceptions, plantation economy, exclusion from the financial system, and health issues.

Population

1. According to the 2011 census, the scheduled tribes’ population in Kerala is 4.85 lakh, which accounts for 1.45% of the general population.

Caste Names, Structures in Wayanad

2. Livelihood changes and health status of paniyan of Wayanad by Vipindas, P explores the organization of the caste system in Wayanad. Pages 1–13 outline each of the tribes, their histories and how they got their names, which is interesting because of the implications it has for the phrase “What’s in a name”; pages 14–19 describe the history of Wayanad and its Adivasi populations and page 20 describes the tribe at the focus of this article- The Paniyans.

Periods of Paniya History

3. Paniya history can be divided into four periods, as summarized in THE_SHRINKING_LIVELIHOOD_STRATEGIES_OF_THE_PANIYAR by Baby Francis Kulirani. These periods include an early hunter-gatherer period leading to a long period of being agrarian slaves. Then as liberated wage earners, they entered an extremely competitive market, grew dependent on state welfare as a rising sense of desperation and hopelessness set in.

The Tribal People are Not a Monolith

4. TRIBAL POPULATIONS IN KERALA’S DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: AN IMPACT EVALUATION OF POLICIES AND SCHEMES highlights the inter-tribal disparities in welfare scheme benefits and socio-economic conditions. It emphasizes that different tribes have vastly different socio-economic and political lives, challenging the notion of tribes as a monolithic group.

5. Health divide” between indigenous and non-indigenous populations in Kerala, India: Population based study further emphasizes the inter-tribal disparities, showcasing the significant differences within tribal groups. It also sheds light on the stark contrast between ST communities and non-tribal groups.

Work and Employment for Adivasis

6. SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEPRIVATION AND MALNUTRITION AMONG THE TRIBAL WOMEN: A COMPARITIVE STUDY explores the kind of work Adivasi women engage in and their average monthly earnings as of 2016. It highlights their lack of political representation, economic growth, and physical well-being.

Alienation through the Education System

7. The challenges faced by Paniya children in accessing education are outlined in (Inclusive Properties of School Interactional Milieu: Implicationsfor Identity Construction and Social Exclusion). The paper raises questions about the inclusivity of existing educational models. Additionally, a video (source) provides insights into an education system designed with Adivasi culture in mind.

Public Perceptions

8. Our discussions with the locals brought up the themes of the Paniyans being lazy, unreliable, alcoholic and living off the government’s welfare schemes. This, I found later, goes to show how oppressive systems perpetuate destruction.
9. We also saw, firsthand, how the Paniyas had become a spectacle when our guide stopped the rickshaw because he saw some of them walking by and told us to take photos. We learnt later that this might be because of the amount of social research and government aid that is centered around them.

Plantation Economy

10. Paniya workers primarily engaged in paddy cultivation but faced a decline in employment due to the expansion of plantations. They were not easily absorbed into the plantation labour economy. (1, 2)

Exclusion from the Financial System

11. The majority of the Paniya population was excluded from formal financial activities and the financial sector. (Source)

Health and Caste

12. The Paniya Tribe faces numerous health problems. One study focuses on malnutrition among Paniya children, highlighting their underutilization of available governmental schemes and the resulting deprivation at the community level. Another study - Women’s health in a rural community in Kerala, India explores the impact of caste on the health of tribal women, with lower castes experiencing amplified vulnerabilities while upper castes enjoy protection due to an invisible caste buffer. Additionally, a study - Morbidity Pattern of Tribes in Kerala examines the occurrence of various diseases among Adivasis, including the prevalence of sickle cell anemia in Paniya communities.
13. Access to quality healthcare is limited for tribal populations due to their remote locations. Government hospitals, community health centers, and primary health centers, though available, are insufficient to meet their needs. Mobile medical units have been introduced to cater to remote tribal areas. ASHA workers play a crucial role in responding to healthcare issues and alerting the government healthcare infrastructure. However, historical aversion to healthcare institutions among Paniyas remains a challenge. Government hospitals in Wayanad, located in Kalpetta, are often the only facilities equipped for specialized operations like deliveries, further restricting access to quality healthcare for the tribals living in remote areas.
14. Sumant Badami writes about how the Paniyas use black magic practices as a sort of counseling session that acknowledges their existence and situates them in a temporal setting. He explores how oppressed communities often carry the burden of historical trauma which manifests itself in many forms, sometimes even as physical pain. He also shows how the power dynamics due to caste hierarchies often infiltrate the spaces of modern health-care.

“When people say it has been 60 years of India’s liberation, I find it difficult to believe, for we are still slaves, working for others, picking up human excreta with our bare hands.”

• Kala bai Lavre, a manual scavenger

By this point in my research, I was starting to see the kind of bubbles that I was living in. I also gained perspective on how the invisibility of caste is its biggest barrier to annihilation. I started to see how these oppressive systems worked and how they reinforced the same behaviour because of the systems they had put in place. I wanted to study how things got this bad for this community, so I tried to learn as much as I can about their histories and how the alienation unfolded. I was able to glean an elementary map of the systems that the Paniyas inhabit through this exercise.

System Map of Issues

I was able to somewhat see the main factors that contribute to the vicious cycles that the Paniya were forced into.

Decreasing Health, Alienation, Landlessness, Erosion of Cultural Pride, Anger, Lack of Wealth and a disconnected population

After seeing the connections between Erosion of Cultural Pride and Anger, Landlessness and Wealthlessness, and Alienation and Disconnection, I also understood why the stories of their oppression and alienation never reached me before this. The problem was too complex for a five-minute soundbite on TV, and caste hierarchies and caste privilege meant that it was an inconvenient truth meant to be hidden away.

“Every single child labourer that I have documented comes from a highly impoverished family unit and belongs to a low-caste or minority community.”

• Siddharth Kara

Understanding the History

I built this history out of the readings mentioned above, a few current media pieces, and the stories and songs that the Paniya peoples tell about themselves.

I then mapped this into the three stages of alienation (in the footsteps of Kulirani, whose work I mentioned above)

Stage 1: A Rich Culture Mixed with Centuries of Oppression

Cultural Artifacts and Practices

Stories and Songs

Through most of their rituals and practices, the scars of slavery can be seen clearly. They call themselves the ‘Ippi-mala makkal’ -meaning The children of the mountain called Ippi. However, the name they are called, ‘Paniyan’ means worker. This story of oppression is also clearly evident in the story they tell of their origins:

On a hill called Ippi-mala (Mt. Ippi), there was a temple with a Brahmin priest and Jain Gounder. The priest would often observe a boy and a girl playing near the temple well. So they captured the children with help of another tribal man who worked for them. The children then worked for them, after which the gounder got them married to each other and they had five daughters and five sons. The Paniya regard them to be their first ancestors.

There are other variations of this story that warn the Paniya against manipulation from the upper castes. In that version, the Paniyas are enslaved because one of them was lured using good food that he then told the others about.

Rachel Santosh writes about the ceremony where the Paniya were sold to different landlords at the Valliyoorkaavu temple every year. The ritual that confirmed the transaction consisted of songs that showed how much the Paniyans suffered under their slavers. In the songs that are sung, god (padachavan) approves of their bondage and wills it so. Ironically, this temple is the biggest place of Paniyan worship now — they get special privileges at the temple as well.

Other stories talk of the Paniyan afterlife, which does not constitute heaven or hell.

After death, the soul splits into two — the soul shadow (nizhelu) and the ancestral spirit (pene). God takes the nizhelu of a paniyan and puts it in the body of another paniyan that is born after him. The pene goes down to the keenadu(netherworld) where the pene will have the same occupation and work under the same master. The bondages in the present world continue in the netherworld also. This means that there is no freedom for the Paniyan even after death.

Dance and Music

They also have a dance called the “Vattakalli” which is inspired by the movement of elephants. It is accompanied by instruments like the thudi.

History of the Paniyans

A tribal girl once asked me modestly, ”When we go to school, we read about Mahatma Gandhi. Did we have no heroes like that? Did we always suffer like this?” Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps 1993

Origins

No one really knows about the origins of the Paniyas. Some theories state that they are the original inhabitants of India. They, themselves say that they were brought to the Wayanad region by a Malabar King but have no records of when or who that king was.

They initially lived as hunter-gatherers in the forests, sometimes straying into the farms of the landlords of the time to steal some food and then run away. Soon the landlords got tired of this behaviour and enslaved them and made them work in the fields as bonded labourers. This incident is preserved in the origin story that the Paniyans tell about themselves about their origins. However, the veracity might be dubious considering all the other stories which seem to be told by or board towards the upper castes.

As slaves that are sold with the land, they worked under the upper caste Namboothiris and Nairs or the ‘janmis’ (rightful inheritors of the land). This caste hierarchy has had great effects on the cultural stories of the Paniyans — they called themselves the ‘kachavanmar’ (lowest of the low). Other castes and subcastes were also cultivators but they were the tenants of the ‘janmis’. The Paniya and the Adiya were the bonded laborers who did the work on the land. The Paniyas were also known to be ‘fearless’ and were used as weapons in vendettas between the janmis, often robbing or killing the enemies of their masters.

Settler Oppression

There were many political upheavals during this time from Tipu Sultan to Pazhassi Raja to the invasion of the British, but the situation of the Paniyans remained them same. Working from dawn to dusk for meager amounts of money, they were treated as objects and property. This only changed in the early 20th century, after the British tried to put a stop to the slave trade. Soon after, a new wave of migrants came to Wayanad and the Paniyans moved on to daily wage work. There was a little more freedom now, but the means of exploitation only changed into other subtle but equally nefarious forms.

These new Christian and Muslim immigrant landlords forced Paniyans out of the little land they were given under the Janmis. Since the Paniyas rarely had any paperwork regarding their ownership, they had to move. Some of these landlords would put fire to their colonies so that they would clear another patch of forest for the landlord to convert into farmland — at no expense. They even paid the Paniyans partly in alcohol and encouraged an addiction to it so that they would continue to work under them. They also exploited their illiteracy and would often trick them into signing off huge parcels of their land without them knowing or understanding what they were signing off. Other landlords took sizeable populations of the Paniyas and Adiyas with them to their homelands in different districts and settled them there.

Stage 2: Wealthlessness due to Landlessness

The lack of access to their own land, combined with this expectation to perform free labour and the threat of violence and economic boycott against those who challenge their expected social roles, keeps many Dalit families in bondage and a perpetual state of poverty

India Exclusion Report, 2014

Despite the abundance of land reform attempts, Landlessness is a very serious issue as Paniya households own the least land on average among the other tribes in Wayanad. When coupled with their forced exile from forest lands this has led to the shrinkage of livelihood options for the Paniya. This has profound implications as they weren’t able to move into other professions, create wealth — or in extension political power — which became the biggest roadblock to land reforms in modern Kerala. The landowners have too much political clout that they frequently use to thwart movements by the landless marginalized.

Land Reforms in Kerala

After the state of Kerala was formed, an act that made it illegal to own land above 15 acres was passed. However, plantations were exempted from this act. In this process, many landowners got away by declaring their land as a plantation. There is evidence to show that because these huge plantations were exempted from this act, the Paniyas were forced into small overcrowded ghettos.

The Forest Rights Act that aimed to empower the tribes that live off the forest ended up excluding the Paniya community from the list of tribes that can use and sell forest produce. With this, they were cut off from their past as well because prior to their enslavement they were hunter-gatherers in the forests. Not only were they alienated from those forests but now they were also banned from using those skills in wealth creation.

Other than that, there have been several attempts to reform land practices. This was and is, however, repeatedly being sabotaged by unwilling governments, powerful landowners and cunning businessmen. Even after two successive acts in 1975 and 1999 and an HC order demanding the restoration of land to the tribals, the distribution of land has been meager and often inhabitable.

Aralam and other Land Crimes - Land Assertion

The story of how Aralam (a heartbreaking read of the violence that they had to face even when things looked calm on the outside), a centralized farm was distributed to tribals but without any kind of support in the way forward. They lived in semi-starvation conditions without power or knowledge of how to tend for the crops that were already there on the farms that they were given. It also talks about the malicious tactics that the government employed to evict those whose claims they saw as invalid is a case in point.

There have been land struggles for the Adivasis at almost every piece of land that was to be restored to them. This article lists out a small history of such struggles. This systemic apathy has given rise to many political tribal movements that have demanded the restoration of land in movements called “land assertion”. As a community, they would occupy the land and protest the inaction of the government. These movements, however, received a huge setback in Kerala during what the media called the “Muthanga Incident”. The official report of how the police fired on an angry Adivasi crowd is contrasted by the Rajmanikyam probe commissioned by People’s Judicial Enquiry Commission shows how the community was targeted by keeping their children and tribal women hostage and torturing them. Other activists, such as C.K. Janu — the leader of the AGMS, Adivasi Gothra Mahasabha — were imprisoned.

These movements were also harmed by powerful parties using divisive tactics to split the movement on the basis of leaders, districts and affiliations. A unified movement to demand land soon broke down.

The systematic land grab over the years has been affecting tribal populations significantly and adversely. This is why these movements have come to believe that ownership of land is the only way out for these communities to grow. Which seems to be verified by this paper, that highlights the differences in land claims for the Dalits and the Adivasis. It theorizes that the reason only 22% of Dalits vs 49% of the tribals are still engaged in agriculture is the difference in land allotment. Since, a lot of the Dalits received land as part of the land reforms, they were able to gain social mobility and move into other sectors of work that will remain closed for the landless tribes.

Consequences on Health and Financial Conditions

As of now, a majority of the Paniyas face malnutrition on a large scale. The uprooting of that community from forestlands where they were able to find nutritional food plays a huge role in this. Not having land, means that the Paniyas must work as agricultural laborers in other landowners’ fields. This, when coupled with their tendency to not save any money owing to the hopelessness for a good future that is often seen in many oppressed indigenous peoples. This is a great article shows how trauma in the Native American peoples has mirrored the trauma in the Paniyas as well. Alcoholism is rampant in such communities and further contributes to the loss of wealth.

In this vicious circle, they then approach the owners of the land they work in for money. Adding debt to this dangerous circle makes it almost impossible to escape. Even though ‘bonded labour’ is apparently outlawed, these forms of slavery and feudalism still remain.

“The sign of ultimate oppression working is when the oppressor can take away his hands, stand back and say ‘look at what they’re doing to themselves.’”

• Jessica Gourneau

Stage 3: Lack of Access and Lack of Trust

No Access

CK Janu on the political position of Adivasis

For this section, I’d like to quote C.K. Janu, leader of the AGMS (an Adivasi activist who has been at the forefront of many politically organised movements for Adivasi upliftment — a profile of C.K. Janu)

Traditionally, Adivasis maintained a harmonious relationship with their land, both cultivated and forest land, and it formed an integral part of their lives. Also, these resources are inseparable to the Adivasi way of living. By and large, Adivasis were uneducated people and they earned their living by making use of the resources available to them- their lands. So they have a symbiotic relationship with the soil and even now they haven’t turned away from this eco-centric culture.

Now, after the setting up of Adivasi colonies, they are in a crisis. Land is the primal symbol of power. So without tackling the issues regarding the ownership of land, Adivasis’ problems cannot be resolved. Only those who have land can play an active role in the socio-political and cultural spheres of the society. So those who are pushed to the margins are effectively alienated from the modern institutions of power with respect to politics, bureaucracy, and social order.

For Adivasis, the resources that they get from the land are their sole revenue and therefore they maintain a blood-relation with their land. So they cannot survive without their lands.

During the Land Reforms in the 1960s, the Kerala state government decided the upper limit of land that can be possessed by an individual as 15 acres. But this limit was not applicable to the estate plantations that cultivated cash crops. Through this law, the Government assumed the ownership of the excess land. This in effect, led to the ghettoization of the Adivasi communities as they were pushed to the reserves and colonies.

Ghettoization of these communities

The Tenancy Reforms Act of 1970 contributed to the process of creating Dalit and Adivasi colonies and recent studies show that there is a total of 12,500 Dalit and 4,082 Adivasi colonies in the state.[1]

This ghettoization meant that the Adivasis now live in small parcels of land that are often remote and inaccessible. They often face scarcities because of this. Water supply to these overcrowding of colonies is often intermittent and unclean. The overcrowding and the locations in remote places also make them really hard to reach. This has special significance in the matter of accessibility to services. In Wayanad, some colony members have to travel 30 kilometers to the nearest government hospital for a childbirth. Even though, medical services are free in the government PHCs, THCs and Government Hospitals the travel to and from there costs upto 500 Rs in some cases which is often a lot as they earn up to 400 Rs a day for working in the fields.

2018 Floods

This inaccessibility was clearly also revealed in the recent floods, where rescue workers couldn’t go to the colonies because of how remote and unknown they were. There were also clear cases of discrimination rising up out of the disaster.

No Trust

The dystopia of the Kerala Model

From all of these, we finally arrive at a conjunction of all these issues playing out and against each other. A lack of trust in everyone but themselves, and for good reason. The government, no matter which party, which has often touted its credentials under the hyped label of the ‘Kerala Model’ has repeatedly been unable to eke out the political will to actually do something radically bold and helpful for the landless marginalized. This kind of ostracization meant that violence against these communities is often hidden away or ignored. These kinds of oppressed communities have huge numbers of unwed mothers that were either manipulated or abused. It is no different for the Paniyas.

M.S. Sreerekha on Land Alienation and Restorative Justice

To end this I’d like to quote from M.S. Sreerekha’s report:

Both the state and civil society wish to interpret and believe that alienation as such has never happened. Many, who were for or against restoration of land, today prefer to believe it is actually impractical. Alienation is a thing of the past and it is too much of a responsibility on the Adivasi community today to prove it though in reality one wonders whether there is any land ever that has not been alienated from the Adivasis.

Alienation in itself is a sensitive matter and so is the need for restoration of land. Should land be “restored”? If yes, is that “impractical” due to the state’s inability to face the “organised resistance” against it?

In the decades of never-ending legal battles, the adivasi community has experienced and learned the complexities that law can create. They have seen that a change of words or definitions on one piece of legislation on land, restored, alienated, forest, non-forest, immovable property, agricultural, non-agricultural, revenue land, forest land…and the ways in these can be used/misused means a lot to them.

…. the only changing “ground reality” is that the long fight against the migrant, upper caste/class settlers within the state has today become a struggle against the state and many big plantation owners and private agriculturalists, working hand in hand.

No Clean Answers

After reading the histories of the Paniyas, I understood that my assumptions about designing solutions for them were presumptuous and naive. As an aspirant “social designer”, I understand now that the trap lies in the hero-worship that design engages. The future is multi-disciplinary and one person cannot take on problems like these, no matter how optimistic your view of this field is.

This was beginning to look like a wicked problem that had no solution. I was starting to see that H. L. Mencken was right when he said

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong”

Read the archived piece

Project Description: Habba Website Redesign

In my internship with Habba in 2018, I undertook the task of redesigning their website to improve user experience and highlight the unique aspects of their platform. The goal was to create an engaging interface that effectively communicated the values and offerings of Habba, a platform dedicated to supporting artisans and promoting handmade products.

The redesigned website incorporated visually appealing elements such as carousels and product grids to showcase the diverse range of products available. The main focus was to highlight Habba’s three key promises: supporting artisans, ensuring product authenticity, and transparent pricing.

To enhance the user’s browsing experience, I introduced a feature that allowed users to choose from different styles for outfits, specifically kurtas. This customization option provided visitors with a personalized shopping experience.

I also added sections for other Habba initiatives, like the Habba Bioscope (a rural-urban outreach run on corporate CSR funds), and for their social-responsibility and staff activities.

Throughout the website, I emphasized Habba’s dedication to supporting artisans and showcased their products, ensuring customers understood the authenticity and creativity behind each handmade item. Additionally, I incorporated a breakdown of the cost-price for each product, allowing customers to see how their money directly supported the artisans and the production process.

The aim was a plain interface that put the artisans and the cost-price breakdown first, for buyers who care where handmade goods come from.

Our primary goal was to challenge the prevailing notion that only individuals who have spent their entire lives drawing and sketching can become designers. We partnered with several designers to identify the most effective traits in their profession, subsequently devising tasks to enhance these characteristics.

Here’s a glimpse of the tasks:

These tasks were formulated by grouping the traits a designer should ideally possess, as per the consensus of a community of designers.

In addition, we arranged the tasks based on their inherent nature and introduced a gameplay element via the application of archetypes.

People Involved: @DarpanaNaik, @KiranSabnis, @Anagha Rewalkar, @VivekShinde, @MicahAlex My contribution: Qualitative Research, Prototyping, Play system, Nomenclature and Typology