Situated knowledges in action. The Nolo Situated Vocabulary

Abstract

Sometimes the context in which we design urges us to question and rethink the work we do from a slightly different perspective. When working in Participatory Design (PD) processes, we do not necessarily question the hermeneutic paradigm we use nor focus on the idea of knowledge we engage with. This is certainly the case of this project, a neighbourhood Situated Vocabulary where the context literally urged us to rethink our approach to PD with the aim of mitigating social polarisations by embracing the perspective of marginalized (human and more-than-human) actors. To do so, we are compelled to address the epistemological issue with an idea of “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988) able to embrace relationality and go beyond the dichotomies subject-object, man-nature. The following experimental paper is a reflection on this ongoing process: exploring how to engage with a situated idea of knowledge in a PD design project on a neighbourhood scale.