Pooling people

Elise van Beurden Product Design/Open Design Project: Pooling People, 2015

Open Design is often defined as a comprehensive design approach that includes sharing of blueprints, openness in the design product and process and transparency in the production chain. By increasing transparency in society, citizens may become aware of their ability to contribute to environmental welfare. Social empowerment is an aspect of open design that I aim to achieve. Therefore, I intended to invent creative research tools that encourage e innovative collaboration accross disciplines, cultures, and social levels. My research question:

How can Open Design play a role for social contact?

Since a decade, Polish labor migrants have been settling down in my hometown Steenbergen (Noord-Brabant). They came here to work in jobs like the horticulture sector. Many migrants visit Steenbergen for a few months before returning to Poland. However, there is a growing number of migrants who decide to stay in Steenbergen to build up a future. The inhabitants of Steenbergen only seem to know about the Polish people from their route home-work and home-supermarket,. Steenbergers seem to have little knowledge about Polish culture. In a small rural city without a culturally diverse mentality , more background information is needed to able to live in conviviality . With my project ‘Pooling People’ I want to contribute to a local problem and involve stakeholders like the municipality, library and employment agency. I try to empathize with the communities: I design for them and with them instead of assuming just my personal expression.

By doing a great amount of field research among both the Polish and Dutch inhabitants and various stakeholders, I got inspired by the needs, future visions, differences and similarities within the communities. For example, the Polish migrants were surprised by the unstrained lifestyle of the inhabitants from Steenbergen, as the Polish traditional lifestyle requires discipline in work and religion. Furthermore, strangely enough (and hard for me though) social contact between cultures did not appear to be obvious for both rural backgrounds. During the dozens of interviews, surveys and workshops, I developed and tested open design tools that provoke acquaintance and for the longer term, social contact. For example, I designed an an apron to explain recipes and a toolbox to write a Polish-Dutch story together.

Through my research, I've found out that not only the language is a barrier to meet each other. The inhabitants prefer to get to know each other from safe distance, step by step. Therefore, my ‘tool-table’ can be used for both as individual acquaintance as for group workshops. It is a mobile table that collects stories and ideas of citizens and provides assignments and questions for both cultural groups. Questions include: 'what do you think about the local government’s interference regarding social contact between the two groups?' Or:'what are places for social contact in the city?' The use of 100 year old mahogany wood out of the Gummarus church of Steenbergen, gives the table its traditional and catholic expression. The table is currently being tested in different public spaces in Steenbergen, like the library, town hall and the Polish hotel. Until now, the design of the table elicited curiosity and the table’s content turned out to be informative and explorative.