Introduction

Latin America is one of the most urbanised regions in the world with 80% of its population currently living within urban centres. Approximately 1,500,000 people move to Latin American cities every week. According to UN Habitat (2013) the chief factors of attraction for this urban growth in the region are employment, education, health services, housing, infrastructure access, and social inclusion, among others. However, in countries like Colombia, the internal armed conflict also led to permanent displacement of populations to urban areas (e.g., Grupo de Memoria Histórica, 2011), which further contributes to the chronic inequalities, mass poverty, inadequate and insufficient infrastructure, among others (UN Habitat, 2013). Many grassroots organisations across Latin American cities are driven by the need to respond to such challenges in urban environments (e.g., Gasparre, 2011; Hirschman, 1984).
Grounded in the structural affinities between some of the countries from Latin America (Fernández & Bonsiepe, 2008), this paper discusses our first attempt at making use of design for working with grassroots organisations based in the region. It presents the results of running a workshop as a pilot study during a conference organised in Argentina by the South American chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). The grassroots organisation Centro de Jóvenes Viejos Amigos (CJVA) from Buenos Aires in conjunction with a group of professional interaction designers participated in the workshop.

Motivation

This project is anchored in the vision that small-scale participatory design activities can lead to large-scale sustainable social changes (Manzini & Rizzo, 2011). While we do not intend to portray design as a panacea for all social challenges, we believe that co-creating situated design responses to struggles that are specific to particular contexts in question (e.g., de los Reyes, 2012; Navarro-Sanint, 2013) will have positive impact in bringing about positive changes for people living in Latin American cities. We are particularly interested in understanding the role that design and its associated processes can play as grassroots enablers for social change.

Methodology

We implemented a combination of a focus group and a design workshop during the conference IxDA 2014 that was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In addition, we also did observations prior and during the workshop and collected sketches, notes, mind maps and paper prototypes produced by the participants.The workshop was split in two sessions and lasted seven hours in total with an hour-long lunch break in between. The overarching structure of the workshop was based on suggested approximations by Moulder, Boschman, Wakkary, Odom, and Kuznetsov (2014), Kuznetsov et al. (2011) and DiSalvo et al. (2010) that stress the importance of understanding the constraints grassroots organisations are subjected to. The design process in which we base our work comes from Laseu’s design process (Laseau, 2001) as expanded by Kotzé and Purgathofer (2007). We focus on the initial and creative stages of the process by emphasising the What, and the How (ibid). The What emphasis is on the raw material that the group works on, and the How concentrates on opening up the design possibilities through sketching and prototyping. The first session aimed at understanding the civic concerns in which CJVA grounds its work, and in providing insights about how the group operates. This phase also included identifying stakeholders concerned with the organisations’ issues, and role playing techniques (Boess, 2008). The session concluded with the proposal of a collectively defined design challenge. The second session produced responses to the design challenge together, and included a modified version of Brainsketching (Linsey et al., 2011; Van Der Lugt, 2002) and paper prototyping (Snyder, 2003) for the exploration of ideas and rapidly testing them the same day. The first session was a group discussion, as shown in Figure 1, and the second session was divided in three teams: one with six participants, and two with five each. Figure 1. Group discussion. CJVA explains the qualities of their neighborhood.The attendees included twelve CJVA members, which is based in the González Catán neighborhood in Buenos Aires. Two adult leaders, and ten young members in their teens composed the group. In addition, six professional interaction designers from Argentina participated in the sessions. The professional participants were recruited via the conference’s website, and IxDA’s own local social media channels. CJVA participants were recruited via CJVA’s facebook page. The focus group and design workshop were video recorded and uploaded by the organisation to their public YouTube channel.

Challenges and Opportunities

The following subsections describe the challenges that we encountered, and the opportunities we identified in the process of running our design workshop with a grassroots organisation and a group of interaction designers in Buenos Aires.We have also identified synergic relationships established during the workshop between the participants that show how in collaborative processes designers can operate from various positions (Manzini & Rizzo, 2011). These shifting positions can be, in turn, embraced by the participating grassroots organisations, further making each role less predefined by eliciting and focusing on the creative capacity (DiSalvo, Clement, Pipek, Simonsen, & Robertson, 2012) of all the involved parties, rather than just the designers’.Outlining the Design ContextWe designed the workshop by including a scaffolding structure aiming at gaining a rich understanding about CJVA during the first session, both for the designers participating in the workshop and for us. We identified that to run an in-depth design workshop we need a deeper understanding, as suggested by Kuznetsov et al. (2011), of the tools, constraints, risks, organisational structure, and approaches for collaboration that are required to work with grassroots groups. Therefore, the purpose of the first session was manifold, and the aspects explored included discussing the civic issues and struggles CJVA addresses and how they actually address them. This was then discussed in reference to how the group operates the organisation, which in turn included the social and physical characteristics of the location in which CJVA is based. Further, we were interested in understanding how CJVA situates itself in relation to the local government, other similar groups, private or public institutions and neighbors. In addition, we discussed how the group would like to see itself in the future.Outlining the context in which the group was going to envisage design alternatives to address the organisations’ concerns presented challenges that were related to not having access to the organisation before the workshop. Chief among them was how far removed we were from the actual social and physical setting in which the organisation works.Opening Up Spaces for DiscussionWe were interested in ensuring that all participants had an opportunity to contribute with their views to the design process. In order to do this, we aimed at providing spaces of discussion throughout the session, and the deployed design tools covered both individual and collaborative scenarios in which to participate. Individual ideas were discussed, and collaboration was encouraged throughout. Both the designers and CJVA engaged from their perspectives.One of the major challenges that we encounter was the designers’ knowledge about the design process. This combined with the display of their non-verbal and sketching communication skills appeared to overwhelm the participants from CJVA. However, the organisation’s members were vocal in many opportunities, and through verbal communication they delivered their ideas, which were then collaboratively translated by the designers into sketches or paper prototypes. Further, we observed that paper prototyping was a much comfortable form of thinking about the project for the non-designers than sketching. We also observed that some of the participants from CJVA engaged actively when they were working with their teams, but did not participate as much during the collective discussions. CVJA manifested an interest in continuing working with designers, and implementing design processes into their everyday work. However, they also made explicit their own lack of design knowledge and technical skills. Further, collaborating with organisations such as CVJA opens up opportunities for exploiting the potential of the design as an articulation device between designers and the organisation, and integrating the participants’ voices throughout 
the process.

Discussion

In this paper, we have discussed how design can be used for social change in the Latin American context. The data analysis provided insights that could inform future collaboration projects with grassroots organisations. The workshop and the observations show that members of the grassroots group and the designers can shift positions that strengthen the creative capacity of the group as a whole, leveraging the skill struggle between the organisation and the designers. We argue that this provides an opportunity for design processes to operate as articulation devices that bring grassroots organisations and designers together.We present the challenges and opportunities that encapsulate core matters relative to designing for change. As the challenges and opportunities are based on insights gathered from the workshop at IxDA in Argentina with CJVA, the generalisability of the findings will be limited. Further research with other organisations is needed to amend or extend the discussed workshop structure. A deeper understanding of the organisations and their surrounding physical and social context might be good starting points to gain more insights into how they function, and that could be conducive to develop processes that suit their specific needs, and that allow for the integration of their voice in the process. Moreover, it would be valuable to perform similar studies in other cities of Argentina or Latin America where the social and physical conditions of the urban landscape might provide similar situations despite the local nuances, to trial our approach.