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Editor (s):
Mustapha El Moussaoui
Kris Krois
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2023 By Design or Disaster Conference
EDITED BY: Mustapha El Moussaoui & Kris Krois
PUBLISHED BY: Faculty of Design and Art
Free University of Bolzano
ISBN: 9788894713954
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STRING FIGURES
Transforming together
DIGITAL CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
2023 By Design or Disaster Conference
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SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Prof. Aart van Bezooijen
Ingrid Kofler Ph.D
Prof. Kris Krois
Mustapha El Moussaoui Ph.D
Prof. Seçil Ugur Yavuz
Prof. Sónia Matos
Teresa Palmieri Ph.D
ORGANISATION COMMITTEE
Anna Maria Schuierer
Arthur Holt
İnci Aslan
Iraitz Gerriko Mujika
Jacopo Margaglia
Sofia Scroppo
with the guidance and support of:
Prof. Kris Krois and Massimo Eccli
GRAPHICS & WEBSITE
Anna Maria Schuierer (graphic identity)
Emma Fourie (book graphics)
Marielle Christin Scharfenberg (website)
PROOFREADING
Arthur Holt
Emma Fourie
Foreword - Mustapha El Moussaoui
Introduction: Transforming Together ∞ What for
and where to? And why with String Figures? - Kris
Krois
Taste Climate Change: Facilitating a multi-sensory
experience of the Anthropocene. - Vivien Büchele
The Art of ‘Unknowing’ the Future - Claire Wael
Things Do Making - Marius Land
Dare Inclusion: An inclusive restaurant in Munich -
Giueseppe Triano
One planet — Two Worlds: Exploring Eco-Social
Innovation within an Indo-European Design Research
Environment - Chris Doering, Rebecca Reubens
Participatory Futures Community Design for the
Nonsberg School District - Ingrid Kofler, Giulia Fasoli,
Johanna Eger, Laisa Cordes
Future as a Common: Revising the paradigm of trans-
formation - Andrea Dieck, Benjamin Lehn, Malte Terzer
A quest in colour: Botanica Colours and Their Crea-
tive Qualities - Giorgia Bandiera
Tactical Utopianism: An Alternative Way Towards
Concrete Utopias - Mustapha El Moussaoui
A Design Process to Transform Design Thinking to
Build Designers' Empathy with 'More-Than Human'
Actors: A Case Study From Floating University Berlin
- Jixiang Jiang
Social Participation and Transdisciplinary Research
in Real-World Laboratories - Ingrid Kofler
Experimenting the City of Tomorrow - Miriam Hamel
Limbic Landscapes — Edges, Boundaries and Thresh-
olds of Meaning - Aoife Mooney
Reflections and learnings on organising a convivial
academic conference - Sofia Scroppo, Arthur Holt,
Jacopo Margaglia
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58
66
74
84
92
106
116
126
134
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Abstract
Through exploring the Indian principle of Jugaad, the
text reflects upon everyday practices of tinkering and
re-purposing, executed to sustain oneself in scarce
living conditions and how they relate to navigating
within capitalistic societies. The basis for this inquiry
is everyday stories on what Jugaad as a practice
encompasses, such as navigation in scarcity, taking
responsibility, a way of coping with desires, a social
practice, a way of perceiving objects in time and space,
a tool of navigation or a form of resistance.
The main questions are the following: Are improvisation
and informal practices incorporating a dierent concept
of engagement with the future?
What can we learn from informal practices, such as
improvising and re-purposing, by reflecting on how
they sense and act dierently within their material and
social environments?
Juxtaposing concepts from artistic research, future
studies and design theory, the text examines dierent
aspects of how informal practices oer other ways to
navigate within static power structures by blurring
the distinctions of what is considered functional
and valuable. The text argues that we could learn a
new sense of navigation from these practices when
strengthening our skills in improvisation and rethinking
scarcity as the fundament of our everyday actions.
THINGS DO MAKING
Marius Land
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1. Introduction
A clock that is broken in half, is fixed by drawing
its missing numbers on the wall. You can find these
workarounds everywhere, made from leftover or
re-purposed materials. Jugaad is the Indian term that
describes this pragmatic practice of finding alternative
ways of making do, even if one lacks the proper
materials and resources. By sharing stories of the
everyday practice of Jugaad, this text reflects upon
everyday improvisational practices of tinkering and
re-purposing, executed to sustain oneself in scarce
living conditions and how they relate to navigating
within capitalistic societies.
The following questions guide this text: How do im-
provisation and informal practices embrace a dierent
concept to engage with the future? What can we learn
from improvising and re-purposing, by reflecting on
how these practices sense and act dierently within
their material and social environments?
Fig. 1 – Wall Clock
The first part introduces Jugaad as an ambiguous
and dialectical practice. Further improvisation is
introduced as a skilful practice (Gransche, 2019).
The main part consists of little stories about the
everyday use of Jugaad, reflecting on dierent
understandings and aspects of it. Based on these
stories, the discussion reflects upon Jugaad as
subverting existing logic of value and function
through a dierent operation in space and time.
In conclusion, I argue that doing a Jugaad is a minimal
act of everyday resistance that can inform others not
to buy, consume and discard, but to engage with
objects. When our understanding of value, function,
possibility and futures are limited by current strategic
ideas and design (Fry, 2020), it might be time to learn
from these tactics to make do dierently to open up
the space for other futures.
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The paper uses artistic research and improvisation as
a methodological approach. Initially, the project was
planned to be an artistic photographic project during
a 3-month artist residency program of the Goethe
Institute Max-Müller Bhavan in Bangalore in 2018/19.
Observing with the camera led me to realize that
Jugaad is not just about the produced artefacts, but a
social practice encompassing many aspects of daily
life. From observing with the camera, I moved to have
spontaneous and unstructured conversations with
people about their understanding of Jugaad. Since most
of the people chose to stay anonymous, I created the
collective persona “A” to become the character in all
these dierent stories.
Recollecting the insights of these conversations,
Jugaad is juxtaposed with concepts from sociology,
future and design research, to position it as part of
alternative ways of navigating in modern capitalistic
societies. Originally presented as a lecture performance,
the project became a narrative essay and is now an
academic paper. I see it therefore as a string figure that
is distributed in time, influenced by many collaborators
and changing form depending on the constellation it
appears in.
I acknowledge that my position as a European white
person within this context always bears the problem of
speaking about or on behalf of others. Still, I delved into
conversations with people who are practising Jugaad.
To learn from them, since many of these practices seem
to or have already vanished, is vital for suicient forms
of living and designing our environments.
3. Jugaad - Doing more with less
Jugaad is the Hindi word that describes a pragmatic
practice of finding alternative ways of making do. It is
applied where resources, tools, and services are scarce,
forcing people to find creative ways around material
and legal restrictions.
The phenomena of Jugaad (India), Gambiarra (Brazil),
Jua kali (Kenya), Urawaza (Japan), Kludge (America),
System D (France), Trick 17 (Germany), etc. form
a decentralized worldwide network of loose local
protocols that appear whenever actions are needed to
sustain oneself in scarce living conditions.
Colloquially, it means a quick fix, repair, improvised or
homemade solution, a frugal innovation, a temporary
hack, botch job, bypass, by any means necessary,
corruption, or bribe. Rai defines the eect of Jugaad as
“the capacity to move from a state of relative inaction or
blockage to an improvisational situation” (Rai, 2019, p.
47). It is never a singular action, since “the minimal unit
of any jugaad practice is the assemblage” (Rai, 2019, p.
47), thus always a culmination of dierent mediums,
social formations, and human or non-human actors.
To solve a problem, the question becomes “What do I
have?” instead of “What do I want?” This fundamentally
alters how one perceives their environment and what
actions ensue. Rooted in the subaltern life in India,
Jugaad became very popular. As a moment of national
pride, when the president declared India’s first Mars
mission was only made possible through Jugaad
thinking (Amos, 2014). Or as systematic incapability,
when the law cannot be enforced due to swelling
corruption within the police apparatus (Jauregui, 2014).
Recently, it has been picked up by business innovation
as the Indian way of frugal innovation strategies in
corporate R&D and marketing discourse (Radjou et al.,
2012).
It is a dialectical practice that incorporates ingenuity
as well as destruction, flexibility as well as corruption,
and empowerment as well as selfishness. “[It] helps
repair the system on the one hand, and on the other […]
operating to subvert it” (Badami, 2018).
4. Improvisation - Practicing Futures
”The future is an absolute monstrosity, and intuiting
its patterned but unpredictable forces requires an
ecological and collective practice of politicizing our
meshed and intuited ontologies” (Rai, 2019).
This quote by Rai speaks about futures as a practical
doing, rather than something that is not up to us. I
want to take this quote as a starting point to reflect
upon practices that create an active engagement with
the future. But “How are we to design the future?," asks
Bruno Gransche (2019, p. 103), when our futures are
something that does not exist.
Gransche’s concept of medial modal design opens the
dichotomy of the intended and realized purpose of
whatever we do. Every action we take alters the future
space of what becomes possible, plausible, or unlikely.
The argument is that we can somehow influence our
futures by altering the options of what is possibly
possible in the present.
Our action towards our futures remains usually
provisional when we try to provide for our anticipated
needs and desires. When this provision fails, we need
to find solutions for situations we couldn’t provide
for. This requires improvisation as a “relaxed tension
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for possible events” (Gransche, 2019, p. 103). Further,
when “it is not possible to foresee what is coming, skill
is more important in dealing with the unforeseen and
unpredictable than preparation (for possibly the wrong
thing)” (Gransche, 2019, p. 103).
The skill to improvise deals with the impossibility
of providing for futures but still remaining able to
act on them when they arise. A skill can be trained
and is embedded in our everyday actions when
unpredictability and contingency become the very
ground from which we shape our futures.
5. Jugaad and the everyday: Stories
from A
Since Jugaad is a practice rather than a theory, the
following are six Stories of the collective persona
“A” about their practical everyday experience and
understanding of Jugaad. These stories were chosen
to explore Jugaad as a manifold of individual practices,
each contributing aspects.
JUGAAD AND THE EVERYDAY: STORIES FROM 'A'
The electrician A explains that Jugaad is the
management of scarcity and systematic half-life. No
system is built to last; there will always be dirt wearing
it out. Jugaad derives from the necessity for finding
solutions to cope with constant failure without having
access to the needed resources to set it up properly.
Fixing something is investing yourself as a person,
by becoming part of the thing – as an assemblage of
humans and objects.
Fixing something means becoming responsible for
something when there is no standard to blame instead.
Electricity is the same everywhere. The obstacle is
who has access to it. A sees Jugaad as a practice of
establishing informal access to formal networks, by
working with given budgets and resources. A becomes
the gatekeeper, connecting formal and informal
networks by tying themself into the network.
You use what you have and try to tinker the best out
of it, aware that you will need to come back. You
cannot use the given systematic properties, names,
and categories since they don’t make sense for your
solution. So, you bend and exceed those borders
to deal with them. You twist existing patterns of
function, in favour of a provisorium. Something that is
(permanently) not meant to last. A is in the scaolding
business, and with every new job they acquire, there
are new problems. To solve them, they need to wrap
their head around these problems. Wrapping your head
around something means you become able to see the
thing from more than one side, allowing you to see
space and time simultaneously. Not only what things
seem to be at the moment, but what else they can be.
A is a group of road workers who have been given a
plot of land and an assignment to build a new road.
Except for this plot and a truck in which to bring their
belongings, the system provides them with nothing.
Just before they arrive at B, the political force in charge
bans all the flex-banner billboards around the city,
to prevent unsustainable waste and unsustainable
advertisements of political competitors for next year’s
elections. The banned banners become the new homes
for A when they pick them up to build tents from them.
B needs this type of workforce and only provides just
enough for A to work and dwell, but not to stockpile
and establish. A mutualistic connection is established
between the formal, which needs the informal to fill
out its shortcomings and the informal who needs to
dwell on what the system is willing to provide. Since A
doesn’t know where they will go after, they cannot plan
but only react. There is no map, combining point after
point to get a straight line, you could follow to create a
history and thus plan the future.
A needs to have a cell phone now since everybody has
one. They manage to buy one but have no money to
top up the balance. To save money, they tell the other
A’s only to give missed calls for dierent occasions.
One ring: call me back. Two rings: I’m on my way. A
becomes a part of the network without accepting its
standards of use by corrupting its function and not
creating value for it. At the same time, they provide for
the system as new customers, another currency that
companies need urgently to grow.
A is a company delivering broadband internet
connections—a new player in B. There is no time
to wait for infrastructure and applied standards, as
time is money. B is the historic garden city that has
trees everywhere to maintain a symbolic relationship
between humans and nature. The trees form a network
throughout the whole city and since there are no fixed
laws yet, every time somebody requests access to the
new broadband network, the internet cables are simply
threaded through the trees. The existing network of
trees is hijacked by this new one, which has no time to
gather its infrastructure and therefore uses the trees
as a parasite to establish itself in space. Trees are, of
course, not meant to be cable poles, but they can be if
the limit of their function within B is bent.
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A is an award-winning design studio that develops and
implements commercial products and services. For
them, Jugaad is like a screwdriver – a very versatile
but simple tool. Being decentralized and individual by
its very nature, it delivers a custom solution for each
problem. As practical as it comes to finding an initial
idea, setting standards on this basis makes it diicult
to achieve eectiveness at the level of production,
infrastructure, and policy-making.
To scale up, you need centralized control to maintain a
certain quality. Jugaad is not in it for the long run. It is
something that you rarely desire and therefore cannot
commercialize. It is not a design but a
pragmatic individual fix.
6. Discussion: Space and Time
We have seen dierent ways in which Jugaad’s
practice sustains oneself in economic and materialistic
scarcity, which is constantly produced within the
global capitalistic system. But “far from being natural
or inevitable, scarcity is designed” (Goodbun et al., 2014,
p. 17). You could say that since every natural resource is
finite, scarcity is the very premise of our existence. But
Goodbun et al. (2014) point out that while historically
the management and distribution of this scarcity are
what we call economy, our modern understanding of
scarcity is defined not as a given but as a lack, that
needs to be overcome through the ideas of growth
and development.
This modern idea of scarcity is relational since the
feeling of lack is produced through desires for valuable
commodities that hold the promise to overcome scarcity.
But value is relational as well. Georg Simmel describes
that value arises only in the exchange of things and
as the resistance towards wanting something. The
more we want something, the more we are willing
to give in exchange (Simmel, 2017, p. 35). This led
to a commodification of most of the objects that we
daily encounter, assigning value to them through
means of design (Pater, 2021). We perceive objects as
commodities – having a function and value, as this
seems to be the most eective way to control them.
A circuit of desire, analysis, and need that constantly
readjusts to create clearly marked borders between
value and scarcity, rich and poor, functional and trash.
These regimes of value (Appadurai, 2013) obscure
what Kopyto called the biography of things (Kopyto,
1986), the idea that objects have a social life and can
appear in many dierent forms. A key locks a door,
a brand logo manifests a social status and bricks
build walls. But an object can be a resource, a tool, a
commodity, a brand, an artwork, a lover, waste, or
evidence at dierent times. Matter does not inherit a
natural value or function, but only a socially allocated
and thus relational.
In seeing not only the socially assigned function of an
object but what else it was or can be, Jugaad bypasses
this logic of market and commodification and corrupts
its notions of value and functionality. When emulating
existing commodities or hacking their use, power
dierentials are created that allow one to fulfil one’s
desires, even when lacking the necessary funds needed
in exchange for commodities.
Fig. 2 – Management of desire
To look beyond the commodity status of an object, you
need an understanding of the past, present, and future
of the things you encounter. Adam and Groves call this
the artisan way of engaging. Defining “the artisan as
one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow
of matter” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 689). Rather
than planning, the artisan “inhabits the material”
(Adam & Groves, 2007, p. 134) and works with what
they encounter.
As much as the ideas of value and scarcity are relational
and designed, so is the idea of space itself (Harvey,
2006). When managed by concepts of ownership and
property, it becomes a static and strategic tool of power,
including a few by excluding most others. In following
the flow of matter, Jugaad produces a relational time-
space that only exists in a specific formation of actors
as long as a given opportunity enables it (Certeau,
1984). Lacking space and power, Jugaad relies on time
and opportunities. A leap of faith to make things do for
the moment but unknown in its consequences and thus
hard to scale and control.
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Returning to Rai’s definition of Jugaad as an
assemblage, we could add the aspect of opportunity
as “the potential of each for producing forms is only
revealed when they come together: in other words,
when they combine by interacting in some way,
the potential and therefore the futures of each are
augmented in perhaps surprising ways” (Adam &
Groves, 2007, p. 134).
Forming improvised temporal bonds with objects
and other humans is what Adam & Groves call
living futures that are “neither pre-formed and pre-
determined nor fully indeterminate, empty, and open
to endless transformation. Rather, it is an embedded
future that possesses the still-to-be-determined
character of collective futures in the making” (Adam
& Groves, 2007, p. 198). Actions of re-purposing and
tinkering can then produce collective agency and thus
futures when the strict regimes of value and function
are abandoned towards improvisational encounters with
other human and non-human actors.
7. Conclusion: Navigating with the
currents
Being in the currents of our capitalistic reality,
A developed a sense of navigation that is not a
planned route on a strategic map. They use skills of
improvisation to re-evaluate and remain able to change
directions abruptly, even if this means taking a detour
or slowing down. Slowly, people are recognizing that
the established modern strategies of situating us within
our environments are not providing navigation for the
messy and entangled crisis we are facing.
What if we could learn from A to accept scarcity as
constitutional rather than trying to overcome it? A
new way of coordinating that is not based on strategic
planning and delimitation but entangling, iterating,
and improvising.
Nick Houde (2016) proposes that we should not yield
towards landing on utopian islands but navigate in the
very currents between them. For this, we would need to
abolish our ways of mapping, planning, and designing
and find new patterns to
guide us.
I contrasted two concepts here: one is the formal,
architectural, strategic, planning, and controlling. The
others the informal, artisanal, tactical, engaging, and
autonomous. As much as Jugaad is a tool for daily
survival, repair, and resistance, it bypasses limitations
and policies that are necessary to create a greater
good for a community. Jugaad is ambiguous and
impermanent. It is a dirty solution, but to quote Mary
Douglas: “Where there is system, there is dirt” (Douglas,
2005, p. 44). One should rethink practices like Jugaad
as essential in that they produce a constant error code
in our everyday environments, that leads us “from
recognizing that certain socio-technical arrangements
produce markets, to considering how socio-technical
rearrangements have the capacity to undercut them”
(Badami, 2018, p. 50).
Fig. 2 – Locked Flip-Flops
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Fig. 4 – Map for living future
At the end of their book “The Design of Scarcity”
(Goodbun et al., 2014), the authors ask themselves what
graphs and maps could look like, that are not based on
infinite development and growth but enable new ways
of navigation. This paper does not provide an answer
to this but tries to outline how practices of tinkering,
re-purposing, and dwelling incorporate another concept
of design, that builds on improvising with the things
around us. Creating entangled and unknown living
futures and recognizing that we make things but also
that things do make us. So the map I am proposing
would look like the photo below taken by me while
researching about Jugaad.
6. Acknowledgments
I want to thank all of the people who gave me their trust
to talk with them. Gayatri Ganju for translating and
roaming the streets of Bangalore with me. The Goethe
Institute Max Mueller-Bhavan and its Team. Kiran
Keswani and Stefanie Ollenburg for vital exchange
and helpful criticism. Everyone else along
the past and future ways of this project.
43
7. References
Adam, B., & Groves, C. (2007). Future matters: Action,
knowledge, ethics. Brill.
Amos, Jonathan (2014) Why India’s Mars Mission is
so Cheap – and Thrilling, BBC News. URL: https://
www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29341850,
accessed: 29.07.2023
Appadurai, A. (Hrsg.). (2013). The social life of
things: Commodities in cultural perspective (11. print).
Cambridge Univ. Press.
Badami, N. (2018). Informality as Fix: Repurposing
Jugaad in the Post-Crisis Economy. Third Text, 32(1),
46–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2018.14421
90
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of
things. Duke University Press.
Certeau, M. de. (1984). The practice of everyday life.
University of California Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus:
Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota
Press.
Douglas, M. (2005). Purity and danger: An analysis of
concept of pollution and taboo. Routledge.
Frichot, H. (2019). Dirty theory: Troubling architecture
(1. Auflage). Spurbuchverlag.
Fry, T. (2020). Defuturing: A new design philosophy.
Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Goodbun, J., Klein, M., Rumpfhuber, A., & Till, J. (2014).
The design of scarcity (First edition). Strelka Press.
Gransche, B. (2019a). Improvisierte Provisorien.
Zukunft als Möglichkeitsraum modaler Gestaltung.
In Arbeitskreis Philosophierender Ingenieure und
Naturwissenschaftler & K. Berr (Hrsg.), Zukunft
gestalten—Digitalisierung, Künstliche Intelligenz (KI)
und Philosophie (S. 103–116). Frank & Timme, Verlag
für wissenschaftliche Literatur.
Harvey, D. (2006). Space as a Keyword. In N. Castree &
D. Gregory (Hrsg.), David Harvey (1. Aufl., S. 70–93).
Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470773581.ch14
Houde, N. (2016). The Utopia between the islands, or
an Archipelago. Utopian Union Summit, Berlin. https://
www.academia.edu/26067344/The_Utopia_Between_
the_Islands
Jauregui, B. (2014). Provisional agency in India: Jugaad
and legitimation of corruption: Provisional agency in
India. American Ethnologist, 41(1), 76–91. https://doi.
org/10.1111/amet.12061
Kopyto, I. (1986). The cultural biography of things:
Commoditization as process. In A. Appadurai
(Hrsg.), The Social Life of Things (1. Aufl., S. 64–92).
Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/
CBO9780511819582.004
Pater, R. (2021). Caps Lock: How capitalism took hold of
graphic design and how to escape from it. Valiz.
Radjou, N., Prabhu, J. C., & Ahuja, S. (2012). Jugaad
innovation: Think frugal, be flexible, generate
breakthrough growth (1st ed) [Electronic resource].
Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Imprint.
Rai, A. (2019). Jugaad time: Ecologies of everyday
hacking in India. Duke University Press.
Simmel, G. (2017). Philosophie des Geldes (D. Frisby &
K. C. Köhnke, Hrsg.). Suhrkamp.
10. Images
Figure 1: Wall Clock, digital photograph, accessed
30.05.2023, https://9gag.com/gag/aNn38j6
Figure 2: Management of desire, digital photograph,
accessed 30.05.2023, https://9gag.com/gag/aRmOr62
Figure 3: Locked Flip-Flops, digital photograph,
accessed 30.05.2023, https://photogallery.indiatimes.
com/news/india/common-uncommon-crazes-of-india/
articleshow/46986507.cms
Figure 4: Marius Land, Map for living futures, 2018,
digital photograph
