Gizem Öz

Gizem Öz’s interests revolve around local practices and communities as alternative knowledge spaces for design and design anthropology. She is currently working in the context of the increased connectedness of rural craft communities to global networks through digital platforms.

Please, can you introduce yourself and your background?
I am a design researcher from Turkey. I originally trained as an industrial designer and worked as an educator in industrial design departments where mass production and global market dynamics are the dominant determinants of the relationship between the designer and their object. However, maybe as a response to that, my research practices now focus on local, situated making and designing practices and around craft production, which I think Turkey is still very rich in.I was lucky to participate in projects exploring the cultural and social dimensions of local crafts. One, inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s ‘learning from inside’ approach, sought to foster collaboration between designers and craftspeople through digital fabrication and basket weaving. The idea was that design and craft, though related, have different knowledge spaces and materials and that collaborative making can work as a dialogue builder between the two. Another project documented the repair and adaptation of objects by street sellers of Istanbul, shedding light on the creative ways inhabitants addressed urban challenges. To incorporate these products into the discourse of design, an inventory was created using design tools such as technical drawings to examine and represent the objects.

How would you describe your design practice?
I see these in-situ making and designing practices as sources of alternative knowledge spaces to diversify design fields. My experiences formed my approach to learning from local communities. I found myself motivated by the latest efforts in design to question the notion of a single, unified form of knowledge and by the increasing recognition of the importance of context-specific, varied forms of knowledge. This approach became more apparent to me with my PhD fieldwork.My doctoral research was focused on women weavers in a Turkish village, unravelling the embodied knowledge of these women and the collaborative dynamics that facilitate participatory capacities within the group. This was also a process for me as I pondered my position in the field, as well as the role of a design researcher, in local/rural contexts. The weaving practice was a relevant, cooperative designing and making process. I take it as important as any participatory workshop done in a university or a corporation. I try to learn from the material and social entanglements of participation, facilitation and cooperation in their weaving and bring this local understanding into design fields.

What is your project about at HKB? And what makes it unique?
While formulating my proposal for the ESKAS, I aimed to continue to develop the concept of learning from local practices and diversifying the knowledge space in design with equal participation from different knowledge ecologies. In addition, I think there is a very practical side to these kinds of scholarships. In my understanding, there were two driving questions about the Scholarship’s objectives. One: What will you learn that is new? Two: How will this contribute to your home country? For the first, I want to expand my field of operation and my methodological toolbox. Until now, give or take, I have always done in-person, ethnographic fieldwork. I saw this year as an opportunity to explore more about digital fields and digital methods. I chose to work with rural conditions of digital platform use and digital platforms in terms of their operations and environments with digital ethnography. That was one of the reasons for choosing the HKB. I was kindly supported by Prof. Minou Afzali in the Scholarship application and now I am lucky to share my work with Prof. Paola Pierri as well. In my interpretation, the work of both infuses anthropological perspectives into the critical examination of design practices.

“There is a gap in technology studies regarding the relationships between rural crafts, local communities and digitalization.”

The second question drove my methodology and my splitting of the research between Switzerland and Turkey. The methodology for my research involves connective ethnography, a mixed methods approach combining digital methods and fieldwork strategies. This will encompass two interconnected fields: the physical spaces of rural craft initiatives and the digital landscape of adopted technologies. Hopefully, after my year here, fieldwork will be conducted in rural sites in Turkey that I have examined here digitally.Overall, there is a gap in technology studies regarding the relationships between rural crafts, local communities and digitalization. Examining situated craft production within rural communities can, I believe, reveal the inherent capacity of rural practices and in situ dialogues with technologies. These rural differences can assist us in understanding the rural–digital relationship from an embedded perspective that goes beyond technosolutionism and opens up the distinct imaginaries of rurality and rural crafts in a digitally connected world.

What can we learn at the HKB from your work and methods?
My overarching aim is to move towards more locally situated and contextually responsive methods and forge more accountable and epistemically imaginative links with local contexts. I try to write as much as I can about my field experiences candidly and reflexively, describing potential points of conflict, and sources of implicit and explicit power imbalances. I hope these accounts form relations of conviviality with researchers with similar experiences.