Week 4 - The Box! The Box?
As we explored additional items to include in the box, I recalled the reference of “Making Trouble” (Busch, 2022) from week 1. I realised that additional items need to be tested in relation to one another. For instance, the meaning of a map shifts once a mirror is added. We initially wanted to avoid instructions, but soon realised that the items alone could cause confusion without context.
On that note, I felt that top-down instructions would undermine our definition of anarchy. We tested various minimal prompts, like “explore your community”, but these also felt too commanding. We also experimented with providing small comic strips instead of written words, but interpretations varied so widely that it became unreliable.
This led me to reassess the idea of the box entirely. After some brainstorming (with the help of ChatGPT), we thought of a ledger that passes around between students, inspired by the decentralised and spontaneous communication in bathroom graffiti. It is a globally occurring phenomenon (Leong, 2015; Wang 2018; Piironen, 2024), and allows for a private, freeform channel of communication, similar to consciousness-raising groups (Cole, 1991).
Chazzo suggested we include broad questions rather than instructions, which we narrowed down to “what would I like to learn?” and “what can I contribute?”.
We tested a digital version first. Though participants engaged, they needed significant guidance from us. We used our Work In Progress exhibition to test the idea further. Whilst participants interacted, they disregarded the leading questions for the most part. We also still needed to support participants with additional guidance.
↑ Inspired by Junk Journaling, cohorts build and add to a physical knowledge pool together.
↑ Digital ledger iteration. Issues arose from the fact this wasn’t circulating back to participants as it would be in the system we intended.
↑ During our Work In Progress show, we invited people to add to the ledger. Participants often ignored the leading questions and just contributed freely. Whilst participation was encouraging, the scenario was too different to the one we plan for.
This led us to realise that the ledger idea might work better within the box system, with complimentary items. Whilst it can remain the main object, we debated on the other objects the box should include.
Inspired by university welcome packages, we settled on the following items:
A brochure: offering orientation to the structure and values of the course rather than a list of instructions.
A Student ID: allowing students to physicalise their entrance to the “zone of development”.
Sticker tags: would be used to document and reflect on the learning and encourage real world exploration.
In the brochure, the guiding prompt would be “find your teachers” - ambiguous enough to invite exploration yet simple enough that it can be interpreted in many waysChazzo conducted a workshop over the weekend to test participants’ reaction to this prompt.
Through testing, we noticed participants were inspired to learn not just from each other and other people, but also from non-human actors. This fits well with our interest in Posthumanism (Forlano, 2017) and Tentacular Thinking (Haraway, 2016), which explore knowledge-making inspired by non-human forms.
References:
Busch, O.V. (2022) Making Trouble: Design and Material Activism. London; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Cole, C.M. (1991) ‘Oh wise women of the stalls…’, Discourse & Society, 2(4), pp. 425–437. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926591002004002
Forlano, L. (2017) ‘Posthumanism and Design’, She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 3(1), pp. 16–29. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Leong, P. (2015) American graffiti: Deconstructing gendered communication patterns in bathroom stalls. Gender, Place & Culture, 22(8), pp.1088–1102. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2014.991705.
Piironen, S. (2024) ‘Motivation Bathroom the Best Bathroom: Doing Community Through Graffiti-Writing in a Liminal Space’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086241232609 (Accessed 15 Apr. 2025).
Wang, D. (2018) ‘What does bathroom graffiti reveal about young adults in China?’, Young, 26(4), pp. 342–358. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/1103308817725023 (Accessed 15 Apr. 2025).