Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary ...

Science as Culture

ISSN: 0950-5431 (Print) 1470-1189 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csac20

Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication Susana Nascimento, Alexandre Pólvora, Alexandra Paio, Sancho Oliveira, Vasco Rato, Maria João Oliveira, Bárbara Varela & João Pedro Sousa To cite this article: Susana Nascimento, Alexandre Pólvora, Alexandra Paio, Sancho Oliveira, Vasco Rato, Maria João Oliveira, Bárbara Varela & João Pedro Sousa (2016): Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication, Science as Culture, DOI: 10.1080/09505431.2016.1193131 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2016.1193131

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Date: 14 July 2016, At: 10:49

Science as Culture, 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2016.1193131

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Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication ´ LVORA∗∗ , SUSANA NASCIMENTO∗ , ALEXANDRE PO † ‡ ALEXANDRA PAIO , SANCHO OLIVEIRA , VASCO RATO† , ´ RBARA VARELA§ & ˜ O OLIVEIRA§, BA MARIA JOA § ˜ O PEDRO SOUSA JOA ∗ CIES-IUL/Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, ISCTE-IUL/University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, ∗ ∗ CETCOPRA/Centre d’Etude des Techniques des Connaissances et des Pratiques, Universite´ Paris 1/Pantheón-Sorbonne, Paris, France, †Department of Architecture and Urbanism, ISCTE-IUL/University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, ‡Department of Information Sciences and Technologies, ISCTE-IUL/University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal, §Vitruvius FabLab-IUL, ISCTE-IUL/University Institute of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

A BSTRACT This paper argues for hands-on, contextual and problem-solving collaborations, that is, for a transdisciplinary approach that establishes direct connections between social and technical disciplines. It is based on our experience as a team of researchers at the Vitruvius Fab Lab (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal). The paper presents a particular research and learning initiative – STTF2013 Summer School ‘Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication’, which served as a testbed for our transdisciplinary, critical and open approach. We address its rationale and main challenges, while also discussing recommendations for other transdisciplinary projects striving to integrate social and technical disciplines in research and innovation. K EYWORDS : fabrication

Transdisciplinarity, sustainability, technology, collaborative design, digital

Correspondence Address: Susana Nascimento, CIES-IUL/Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, ISCTEIUL/University Institute of Lisbon, Avenida das Forças Armadas, 1649-026 Lisbon, Portugal. Email: susana. [email protected]; [email protected] # 2016 Process Press

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Introduction: A Framework for Bridging Social and Technical This paper is based on a research and educational experiment conducted by the authors, as an interdisciplinary team at the Vitruvius Fab Lab (Digital Fabrication Laboratory) of ISCTE-IUL (University Institute of Lisbon). Our focus was the creation and testing of new models for conceptual and practical collaborations between social and technical disciplines. This was materialized in the Summer School STTF2013 ‘Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures: From Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication’ (8 –13 July 2013). But the process also comprised what led up to the main event, from preliminary discussions on sustainability to collaborative curriculum design or final interdisciplinary selection of materials. The practical challenge for the Summer School participants was to discuss, design, and assemble material prototypes with support of digital fabrication, physical computation, and social methods, for two Lisbon waterfront territories, Cais do Sodre´, Tejo north bank, and Cacilhas, south bank. Eight teams of participants produced these prototypes considering specific citizen groups (commuters, cyclists, fishermen, homeless, sailors, street vendors, teenagers, and tourists) that pass by, use, or live near the shoreline of these two often overlooked waterfront territories. Through this experiment, we wanted to stimulate people with diverse backgrounds to generate new sociotechnical debates, aiming not only at open and critical blending processes between different fields of knowledge and skill sets, but also processes that met citizen needs to enhance sustainable appropriations of a city. Our ambition was to establish a successful test bed on how to envision and construct technologies from a transdisciplinary standpoint where socially oriented disciplines, as sociology, anthropology, or philosophy of technology, met technically driven ones, from architecture and design to material or computer sciences. But our ambition was also to do it towards the social and technical integration of environmental, economic, social, and cultural topics needed for establishing a broad range sustainability framework. Multiple questions arose from the beginning to the end of this experiment, ranging from the possibilities of achieving a transdisciplinary model that could be reproduced or adapted by us or others, to the concrete ideas and materials that we needed to achieve our wider sustainability framework. How could distinct disciplinary actors combine their concepts and skills without ceding to any epistemological sovereignty, through which projects sometimes remain framed by the most visible disciplines for instance? And how we could create a cooperative program that dialogically intertwined and balanced these concepts and ideas into a single week of introductory sessions, masterclasses, hands-on workshops, and empirical excursions to Lisbon territories? Or yet, what tools and materials would be more appropriate to translate environmental, economic, social, and cultural pillars of sustainability into concrete functioning prototypes? And how to make it so that the idea of what is sustainable and how it impacts a territory


Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures

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could be both subjectively worked and objectively understood not only by Summer School participants but also by real potential users of the prototypes? Following our vision these questions were addressed through a shared sense of further integrating the knowledge and methods from all our disciplinary fields. This is, collaborations that privileged hands-on, contextual, and problemsolving approaches, where technical choices were constantly permeated with wider social, ethical, and cultural parameters, and vice versa. And from first sketches to the final day we pushed for, and consequently achieved, a transdisciplinary approach that established direct, practical, and cooperative work between the social and technical actors involved in this experiment, whether considering the coordinating and teaching team, whether the participants themselves. A common critical understanding between all involved in the stages of design and construction can effectively point towards transforming the meaning of technologies themselves, that is, their descriptions, ends, and conditions. Such type of integration is now being increasingly explored by many, as patent in the recent Science as Culture Forum on ‘Embedding Social Sciences?’ (Levidow, 2014), and is also becoming articulated at the policy level, as in Horizon 2020 through the definition of a cross-cutting role for social sciences and humanities (SSH) in all Societal Challenges (Felt, 2014). Moreover, we follow science and technology studies (STS) perspectives that argue for opening up processes that take place in design tables or production floors, advancing from mere observation to early engagements characterized by interactions between researchers from SSH with those in science and engineering (Schuurbiers et al., 2013). It was by this token that the intervention level we strived for was closer to STS frameworks engaged in building technologies through more open and normative paths (Woodhouse et al., 2002, p. 298), to value sensitive design where technical and non-technical actors work together in the same processes (Doorn et al., 2013, p. 237; Nascimento and Polvora, 2013, 2016), or yet outlooks as universal design, participatory design, ecological design, feminist design, socially responsible design, appropriate design, design by society, and design for social innovation (Nieusma, 2004; Je´gou and Manzini, 2008). This kind of over-arching and critical collaboration was understood from our standpoint under a transdisciplinary pattern that generates comprehensive knowledge for solving concrete issues or real world problems through collaborative platforms with both academic and non-academic stakeholders, while also combining frameworks across disciplines (Nowotny, 2006). Our endeavor to discuss, design, and produce sustainable technologies was particularly permeable to go beyond constraints of disciplinary boundaries into more transdisciplinary research (Felt et al., 2012), where the proper meaning of what is sustainability in technology creation depends on more than simple material or technical choices that fulfill circular ecological requirements. Our transdisciplinary framework for sustainability is structured both horizontally, to involve and mix different concerns and areas of


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expertise, and vertically, to include all possible stakeholders that can help to address such concerns while adding their distinct know-how (Klein, 2007). We worked with a concept of sustainable development from start to end that now rests on integrating environmental, economic, and social pillars (United Nations, 2005), and a fourth pillar, regarding culture (COST Action Cultural Sustainability, 2010). Horizontally, redefining the nature –society relation towards the recognition of its multi-dimensionality was a key factor for the integration of social and human factors in sustainability models (Biermann et al., 2010). Vertically, the high public and political visibility of environmental projects prompted the logic of accountability significantly within transdisciplinary debates (Gibbons and Nowotny, 2001; Nowotny et al., 2001). The common framework we assumed was always under the assumption that sustainability issues and its wicked problems are now being increasingly formulated and addressed by integrating not only all possible disciplinary contributes, but also all meaningful lay or non-expert knowledge in face of a post-normal science (Irwin, 2001; Funtwicz and Ravetz, 2008).

Setting up STTF2013 Summer School as a Transdisciplinary Experiment Program and Methodological Compositions We hosted a group of 38 participants composed of Master and Ph.D. students, researchers, and professionals from STS, service and product design, SSH, architecture and engineering, communication and media, computer sciences, environmental studies, economics, and management. This diversity was our goal from the start aiming for a group that could work together in the same project and learn from each other regardless of individual experiment, technical skills, or knowledge of social methodologies. We asked for CV’s and individual letters from all applicants (124) in a first phase, and after final selection we made additional inquiries to determine current skills and aspirations. We carefully composed the teams, balancing geographical and age groups, professional and academic backgrounds, social and technical skill sets, etc. In the end we assembled eight interdisciplinary teams of four to five members, assigning each with a citizen group for whom the prototypes were designed for commuters, cyclists, fishermen, homeless, sailors, street vendors, teenagers, and tourists. Assuming the first part of our title, ‘Sustainable Technologies and Transdisciplinary Futures’, we offered participants the opportunity to work together in sociotechnical processes of discussion and fabrication of sustainable technologies. In terms of sustainability, participants were challenged to explicitly design their prototypes as best as possible integrating all four pillars—environmental (e.g. select materials as cork or recycled components available in our Lab), economic (respect or enhance local economies of the territories), social (address needs and expectations of the citizen groups), and cultural (make reference to local identities and images). Furthermore, we asked the teams to reflect upon and address in



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their final booklet how their prototypes specifically addressed the environmental, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of sustainability, and how they selfevaluated their transdisciplinary process as a team. All this was mainly translated into the Summer School first day as introduction to our framework and the concrete processes under which participants would combine conceptual and practical knowledge from different disciplines for creating sustainable technologies. The day began with an Opening Seminar by Ravetz et al. (1998) on ‘Nascent Science 3.0: Transdisciplinarity for Sustainability’, offering a foundational perspective on the intersection of democratic accountability, uncertainty, robust knowledge, and mutual learning within transdisciplinary and sustainability frameworks for participants but also a general audience, as this Seminar was fully open to the public. To further inspire participants in their first prototype ideas this day ended with the ‘What if the Future . . . ?’ Session, where four guest speakers presented cutting-edge Portuguese projects with futures in mind, going from distributed environmental monitoring, to open source aquatic drones, or new digital applications for cork. Between these two sessions, we also chose the first day to fixate the bulk of our design and methodological presentations with other sessions meant to display our transdisciplinary proposal, implicit in the sub-title of the Summer School, ‘From

Figure 1. Elements of the contextual and material kit. Source: Contributing author.


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Collaborative Design to Digital Fabrication’. First, in session 101 (Processes + Contexts) each team received a contextual and a material kit for making their prototypes (Figure 1), as a practical translation of our joint social and technical framework. The contextual kit was composed through ethnographic research interdisciplinarily conducted in previous months by our team members. We prepared a video presentation of Lisbon’s waterfront territories, two semi-structured interviews to members of each citizen group, contextual presentation sheets of Cais do Sodre´ and Cacilhas, and photo sets focused on Cais do Sodre´ (Ribeira das Naus, public transports and center, bicycle paths, and warehouses), Cacilhas (public transports and center, Ginjal and Olho de Boi), and Tejo (river and Cacilheiros). The material kit included an Amorim medium density cork agglomerate block, and physical computing and electronic elements such as Arduino and Raspberry Pi boards, LEDs, metal – oxide –semiconductor field-effect transistors, rotary potentiometers, and light-dependent resistor photocells. As focal point of the challenge, a column made of recycled wooden pallets, previously collected in the waterfront, was collaboratively designed and fabricated previously by our team as a central support with hanging spots for each team of participants to insert and connect their prototype. All prototypes had to be physically linked to the column, so that their functions could not be performed in isolation or transported to other places, thus suppressing their potential for onsite interactions between the citizen groups. Session 102 (Materials + Tools) was structured to allow participants their first contact with the material elements planned for use, and offered an introductory exposition on our physical computing (Banzi, 2009; Platt, 2009) and rapid prototyping tools (Gramazio and Kohler, 2008; Paio et al., 2012). We previously created a digital clock embedded in a cork block that was employed throughout this Session as mock-up example prototype to facilitate our explanation of the intended processes, from idea, sketch, and 3D modeling with generative and parametric definitions, to fabrication, instrumentation, and prototype assembly. Moreover, this mock-up also allowed us to showcase CAD/CAM software as Rhino3D, additive and subtractive digital fabrication tools as a 3D printer and a 3 axis 3000 × 4000 computerized numerical control (CNC) milling machine, or physical computing platforms as Arduino and Raspberry Pi already presented in the Material Kit. Primary Contexts and Outlining Engagements This Summer School was a joint initiative of Vitruvius Fab Lab (Digital Fabrication Laboratory and CIES-IUL (Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology), both research and innovation centers of ISCTE-IUL. There was a cross-fertilization of the areas of knowledge of both centers, as researchers and professors found common ground in the topics of open science and technology, transdisciplinarity, participatory and community-based research, value-conscious design, and



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environmental and social sustainability. The Fab Lab (Gershenfeld, 2007) emerged as both a creative space particularly suited to the research and prototyping of various ideas from the beginning to the end of our experiment, and a physical space that enabled a new way of thinking and acting through continuous engagements between different actors and perspectives that otherwise would not cross paths with such regularity and intensity. We worked closely together in every stage of organization and preparation of the Summer School, from defining theoretical backgrounds and selecting social contexts, to choosing the building materials and design guidelines for the prototypes, or producing the ethnographic contextual mapping that paved the base for each group. We progressively found ways not only to convey our disciplinary perspectives to each other, but also teach each other new technical and social tools while creating our epistemological blend, by following a problem-solving approach (Wickson et al., 2006) to produce practical outcomes deriving from and applied to particular social contexts in Lisbon’s waterfront territories. As an example, team members connected to the social disciplines learned about and worked with digital fabrication and physical computation, while technical oriented ones engaged in debates and decisions on appropriate qualitative methodologies to research the citizen groups and contexts. Horizontal collaboration between our fields was however a question that was continuously debated at several levels, and involved negotiations on priority areas in the curriculum, time management or division of tasks. But looking at the context aspects in our transdisciplinary process (Carew and Wickson, 2010), we had the advantage of past experience in working together, and the Summer School was envisioned as a fitting development for our on-going collaborations.1 We also benefited from physical proximity considering all team members conducted their research and teaching activities within the same buildings when not working at the Fab Lab. Regarding vertical aspects of transdisciplinarity, we also engaged in collaboration with institutional stakeholders given Lisbon’s specific contexts, and constantly pushed for incorporation of their inputs into our design and production processes, whether conceptual inputs from local associations or authorities as Lisbon’s Municipality, Bike.POP, Clube Naútico de Lisbon, altLab Lisbon’s Hackerspace, or Ze´ Dos Bois Gallery, whether material inputs from entities as local suppliers like Corticeira Amorim, Valchromat, Serra da Estrela, and others. Regarding distribution of information as an essential part of the Summer School, we had a strong commitment to principles of Open Access in Education, Science, and Technology. From the beginning all outcomes were available at the website and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Imgur) as we were producing them2 (program, speakers bios and their initial inputs, participant bios, bibliography, conceptual and physical materials, suggested software, hardware choices and guidelines, etc.), to which we later added all outputs (textual, audiovisual, sketches, code, 3D models, etc.) of the work developed by guest

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speakers, organizers, and participants. All of these contents became accessible (website and repositories as Thingiverse and GitHub) on Fair Use grounds, with outputs available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike Licence, with the agreement of all those involved.


2.3. Prototyping Outputs Between Social and Technical Dimensions From the second to the sixth and last day, the Summer School program was envisioned as a close and necessary interconnection of conceptual (masterclasses) and practical moments (hands-on sociotechnical workshops, divided in follow-up and intensive workshops), with continuous inputs from the different fields of knowledge and skill sets of our team members and guests. Prototype development took place throughout all these stages as a sequential, cumulative, and dynamic process of learning and experimentation. These days were carefully designed for a constant interchange between both conceptual and practical, and social and technical configurations. Moreover, they always allowed time for internal team debates and contacts between teams that often resulted in prototype adaptations and iterations. Throughout four distinct masterclasses participants were introduced to, and experimented with theoretical frameworks and methodological tools from both social and technical disciplines. We envisioned this part of the program as an opportunity to provide valuable know-how from guest speakers with extensive scientific and professional recognized experience in cross-cutting topics and projects: co-design and collective thinking by Liz Sanders (Sanders and Stappers, 2012), distributed production and physical computing by Tomas Diez (2014), integration of ethical and societal aspects in technology assembly by BensaudeVincent (2001, 2009), and rapid prototyping and open design by Schaub et al. (2011) and Deanna Herst (2011). Masterclasses were always accompanied by follow-up workshops, which served as crucial test beds for participants to apply what they learned in the preceding masterclasses, and start developing the group projects, with the assistance and supervision of the guest speakers and the organizing team. Looking at the development processes mostly done by the participants in the follow-up workshops, the initial stage of brainstorming and idea sketching for prototypes was an important step to provoke a fruitful debate between team members, but also to encourage them to follow an open approach, in the sense that new ideas and/ or deviations from initial plans should be considered or at least acknowledged in the following stages. For instance, the follow-up workshop after Sanders’ masterclass was dedicated to visualization exercises in which each team used co-creation techniques as 2D collages in posterboards with visual and verbal triggers, idea cards, photos, and timelines (Figure 2). This process helped participants to keep the current and future experiences of the social groups in mind by recurring to the contextual kit, and to produce at the end a pitch of concrete ideas for their prototypes. In



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Figure 2. Team posterboard at follow-up workshop. Source: Contributing author.

the follow-up workshop after Schaub and Herst’s masterclass, methods of open design were applied. Participants were reshuffled into new teams as an exercise, and then asked to rethink their original ideas for prototypes and to present them the other participants, an iteration process that led in some cases to concrete modifications in the final prototypes. At this initial stage of discussion and design, these workshops were also places where our team initiated debates with participants about their ideas for a prototype while assessing their technical feasibility. From the start, a support team (with technical and social expertise in topics as 3D modeling, digital fabrication, physical computing, public engagement, ethnographic context mapping, etc.) was assigned to each prototype to help with available tools, to aid translating their ideas into concrete procedures, advise in connecting their prototypes with the local contexts, or yet to assist with any question, task or topic that could arise. While avoiding any substantial interference, the support team had the crucial but challenging role of adjusting the original ideas of each team to tangible sketches, often instructing the participants on adequate management of time and resources, or even helping to mitigate internal conflicts. After the teams decided on their prototypes and were more intensely focused on its production, they usually assigned specific tasks while working individually or in sub-teams of 2/3. More technically proficient members would take on digital


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fabrication and physical computing tasks on the prototypes, and members from social sciences or humanities would work more for instance on some details of the interviews that could be integrated in the narrative surrounding the prototype. Most teams showed nevertheless a good understanding of necessary collaborations between their fields of expertise in their projects, by learning with each other specific skills, managing to regroup from time to time to check on each other’s progress or helping in various tasks that required more resources, no matter the expertise. Moreover, drawing from our informal contacts with participants during the workshop and also their formal assessment gathered through final feedback forms, some of them conveyed their wish for more time to think about their ideas and enacting the problems they were addressing with each possible prototype. There were, for instance, some members in one team who wanted more time to work on iteration, alternative scenarios or artistic aspects of the prototype, and had to negotiate with other members the constraints of time and available technical means. Regarding the horizontal level of transdisciplinarity, one team was very aware of the challenges of joining social and technical concerns, and stated on their booklet: ( . . . ) technical issues with the electronics (important for the social configuration of the design) emerged and appeared to take central stage, pushing conceptual ideas into the background. Team members reminded each other of our conceptual ideas that considered key aspects of our communities’ experience in order to keep a balance between our concepts and what is technically possible’.3 Curiously, another team reflected on the transdisciplinary process as going beyond their own disciplines. That is, each team member contributed in diverse ways that were not bounded by their expertise by learning new skills and abilities and concentrating in a specific project: ‘In essence, our experience of being transdisciplinary is all about process and practice’.4 As for the vertical level of transdisciplinarity, at first participants were concerned about their knowledge and their own prejudices regarding the citizen group we assigned. The contextual kit was considered a key element for them to get acquainted with the waterfront territories and their populations. Almost every team took quotes from interviews and was inspired by photos and videos to brainstorm their ideas, and also to contextualize its work by using them in the social or cultural clues of the prototype. But at the fourth day of the Summer School they had the opportunity to engage more directly with both waterfront territories and the citizen groups as we had previously included in the program a visit to Cacilhas and Cais do Sodre´ and a roundtrip in one of the Cacilheiro boats that connects both river shores. This visit was only scheduled for the middle of the process to avoid adding excessive inputs to our contextual and



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Figure 3. Intensive workshop. Source: Contributing author.

material kits given the limited time of the Summer School, but it allowed some teams to get a different grasp of the territories as planned, and also to interact with and talk with some of the citizen groups to get more information and test a few of their ideas for the prototype. Intensive workshops (Figure 3) occupied the rest of the program, based on final debates, design, and fabrication of all team prototypes. Participant worked with both social and technical tools to achieve expected results, and they collaboratively sketched and tested frameworks, models and constructions, recurring to social conceptualizations and qualitative data analysis, computer aided design, physical computing coding and instrumentation, and digital manufacturing through subtractive processes (Figure 4), until completion of prototypes. In the last day, teams assembled their prototypes in the central structure, delivered their booklets and additional documentation, and made their final presentations. We provided a guideline for the booklet, in order for the teams to direct their sociotechnical reflections into the transdisciplinarity and sustainability topics of the Summer School, to fully document their team experiences, and to have a common written/visual language for every prototype. Each team was also asked to prepare a final presentation to be recorded and made publicly available. All outputs are accessible online as mentioned before, including the


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Figure 4. Digital manufacturing at CNC machine. Source: Contributing author.

Figure 5. Final presentation of team ‘commuters’. Source: Contributing author.


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prototype booklets (website), presentations (Youtube), 3D models (Thingiverse, .dwg + .3dm), and code (Github, .ino). As examples we can briefly present the work from team ‘Commuters’ and team ‘Cyclists’ among all eight well-accomplished prototypes. The one dedicated to commuters was called ‘Public Transits: Grow your community; share your point of view; get to know the other’ (Figure 5). When someone approached the device, the LCD screen revealed a topical question to which the commuter answered with a yes or no by pushing a button. Then the screen displayed the percentage of other commuters who shared their views, and at the same time a paper manjerico (replica of a traditional plant usually offered in Santo Antonio celebrations in Lisbon) expanded to the relative position to reflect that percentage. Its key two goals were to encourage the commuter to reflect upon social, environmental,

Figure 6. Prototype of team ‘cyclists’. Source: Contributing author.


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cultural, and economic issues, while creating a sense of community between commuters. In fact, the four pillars of sustainability were expressed in the questions posed in the device: (1) environmental: Do you know that you help the environment by taking the public transport?; (2) economic: Do you support the public strikes?; (3) social: Have you ever spoken to another commuter while waiting?; and (4) cultural: Do you think that taking the boat is part of Lisbon’s culture? The prototype dedicated to cyclists was called ‘Cool Hotspot’ (Figure 6). The device contained several components fulfilling distinct functions: for relief, for help, for information, and for communication. It included a fan system to cool off cyclists, a CO2 meter to display air quality, a cooler for the water bottles, a bicycle pump, maps where cyclists could add their stories and leave them in the designated slot, and comment cards to share positive and negative opinions with other cyclists, and a newsletter ‘News from the other river bank’ offering information gathered on the southern waterfront. The team imaginatively combined low- and high-tech components in the same prototype, and thus demonstrated the potential to use different techniques and avoid a frequent overwhelming attitude towards newer fabrication tools. It is noteworthy that the team conceptualized a full cycling experience along the waterfront, for instance by offering assistance in certain moments (hotness or flat tires), information on CO2 levels and best routes, and communication through a newsletter, also included in the booklet, with historical information on the territory, a sample of a talk with a squatter-cyclist, the announcement of a FabCycle workshop where you could make your own safety laser lane, and a call to sign a petition for a better cycling experience in Lisbon’s riversides. In the end, all prototypes produced are to be seen as the material outputs of STTF2013 Summer School, and thus as the pivotal points towards which the teams converged to and also managed to combine their knowledge and resources. All the organizational and work processes previously analyzed are as much, or even more, valuable than the prototypes themselves, which deserve all the same to be fully showcased as embodiments of each team’s transdisciplinary work. Concluding Remarks The experiment materialized in STTF2013 Summer School enabled us to grasp more of what is necessary for successful transdisciplinary work when designing and creating technologies that ought to be grounded in environmental, economic, social, and cultural pillars of sustainability. But having built this initiative not only by following previous collaborations of this team, but also on top of multiple theoretical and empirical endeavors conducted by others, we focus our final remarks on how its assessment may help to enhance new initiatives. Transmitting the processes and outputs of this Summer School for replication and improvement was always one of our goals by pursuing an Open Access framework with constant



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dissemination channels from the very beginning. And as this occurred whenever team members learned from each other and passed it on to their own colleagues and students, or continued when some participants took their experiences to develop new projects based on what they learned and created, it needs to keep on happening. Spaces as Fab Labs, Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, and others are promising physical and creative venues for people with different experiences to experiment various engagement options and scenarios in the multiple stages of a technological innovation process. But any focal space that lends itself to collaborative work emerges in our experience as a crucial igniting point for this kind of projects to develop with a positive outcome. It allows different disciplines not only to discuss their ideas with constant engagement from all parts and greater impact in their respective perspectives, but also to contact directly with other ways of thinking and acting given a same challenge. Moreover, it helps other social actors to be part of whatever may be taking place in this bridging, as the mingling process already in motion seems to become more tendentiously open to the inputs of stakeholders such as pro amateurs or lay citizens. When considering as we did a wider definition of sustainability rooted on environmental, economic, social, and cultural dimensions, some sort of balance should be found between all involved disciplines, nonetheless, as they must assume a relevant role and a concrete presence at all stages of the process. We saw it happening in a successful way throughout both the work conducted by the organizing team and the participants, since it allowed contributions from all sides to make sense in both the program design and the final outputs. But even in more general enterprises, the outline of a concrete goal— building a functional prototype with a social purpose—may serve as focus for all involved parties, while other pathways may also be considered, such as allocating enough time for all developing phases (sketching, debating, iterations, testing, and physical production); promoting constant feedback between conceptual thinking and practical work (as in masterclasses followed by followup workshops); setting up methodologies dependent on interdisciplinary sets of tools (software for digital fabrication mixed with cultural probes for ethnographic context mapping); or allowing insights from all possible sources to take the center (whether from people with different backgrounds in the organizing team or among guests speakers, whether from direct and indirect contact with external social actors). Acknowledgements We would like to acknowledge the support of altLab Lisbon’s Hackerspace and ZDB Gallery. We are very grateful to the support team (Antońio Lopes, Miguel Duarte, Nuno Marques, Emmanuel Novo, Joaõ Ventura Lopes, Pedro Varela, Vasco Craveiro Costa, Raquel Martins, and Pedro Videira) for their commitment

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during the Summer School. We also greatly appreciate the institutional support provided by ISCTE-IUL colleagues, particularly Nuno Guimara˜es, Antońio Firmino da Costa, and Fernando Luı´s Machado. Finally, we would like to thank all participants of STTF2013 for their involvement and hard work in one tremendous week. Funding STTF2013 was partially funded by the Joint Research Centre - European Commission, Luso-American Development Foundation, and Institut Français du Portugal.

Disclosure statement Downloaded by [Alexandra Paio] at 10:49 14 July 2016

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes 1

As an example, the team conducted a series of workshops for high school students between May 2013 and March 2014, in the project ‘Experimenting Interdisciplinary Fabrication of Everyday Objects’ (http://efioq.wordpress.com/, in Portuguese). The project was a joint initiative of CIES-IUL, Vitruvius Fab Lab, ADETTI-IUL/Research Centre in Advanced Information Systems and Technologies, and IT-IUL/Institute of Telecommunications, in partnership with Santa Doroteia secondary school, and the support of ‘Choose Science – From School to University’ Program of Cieˆncia Viva – National Agency for Scientific and Technological Culture. 2 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt. 3 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt/wp-content/uploads/STTF2013_PrototypeBooklet_Commuters.pdf. 4 http://sttf2013.iscte-iul.pt/wp-content/uploads/STTF2013_PrototypeBooklet_Sailors.pdf.

ORCiD Susana Nascimento http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1813-1880 Alexandra Paio http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4144-8499 Sancho Oliveira http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1391-3194 Vasco Rato http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5097-8248 References Banzi, M. (2009) Getting Started with Arduino (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media). Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2001) A genealogy of the increasing gap between science and the public, Public Understanding of Science, 10(1), pp. 99– 113. Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2009) A historical perspective on science and its ‘others’, Isis, 100(2), pp. 359– 368. Biermann, F., Betsil, M., Gupta, J., Kanie, N., Lebel, L., Liverman, D., Schroeder, H., Siebenhuner, B. and Zondervan, R. (2010) Earth system governance: A research framework, International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, 10(4), pp. 277– 298. Carew, A. L. and Wickson, F. (2010) The TD wheel: A heuristic to shape, support and evaluate transdisciplinary research, Futures, 42(10), pp. 1146–1155.



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