OpenDoTT (Open Design of Trusted Things) was "a PhD programme to explore how to build a more open, secure, and trustworthy Internet of Things". I have moved in 2019 to Dundee to work at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, and relocated later to Berlin to work at the Mozilla Foundation. The academic side of the project has migrated from the University of Dundee to Northumbria University in June 2020.
The title of my thesis is Generous cities – weaving commons-oriented systems for the reuse of excess materials in urban contexts.
I am gradually moving relevant documentation to a public wiki. I maintain a list of links with the tag opendott in my infinite bookmark collection.
I have used this blog to document what I read, learnt and discovered as I went deeper into my research. Earlier outputs can be seen in this set of concept ideas(2020) and this repository with second year deliverables (2021).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813508.
Posted on 30th Oct 2019
A sad implication of the way cities are structured and managed. While reading Shareable's book Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons I found some very interesting examples of initiatives from different parts of the world, and wanted to learn more about them. Whilst the ones managed by NGOs...
Posted on 16th Feb 2021
As briefly mentioned in another post, last month I went through a process of research evaluation at the University. Northumbria calls it an "annual progression", which should take place, obviously, every year during the research period. In my case, it was delayed by about six months, due to the wh...
Posted on 18th Nov 2024
An update, sketched for formal reasons: I started my research in Dundee last year writing a Career Development Plan in which I stated what were the opportunities I would be looking for in terms of learning, experimenting and seeking collaboration and exchange. Since then I have progressed in mul...
Posted on 16th Feb 2021
As I worked further on concept ideas, I had the chance to get back to the people I have engaged with in my research studies and share with them the concepts. Participants were broadly supportive of the path my research was taking. Furthermore, through ongoing conversations with practitioners both...
Posted on 18th Nov 2024
! This post is a work in progress. This warning will be removed once I'm done editing it. Adam Greenfield wrote a series of interesting texts criticizing the usual take on smart cities. I'll be pasting below some excerpts of his work as I (re)read it. Rise of the machines: who is the ‘internet o...
Posted on 18th Nov 2024
! This post is a work in progress. This warning will be removed once I'm done editing it. Tooling Up: Civic visions, FabLabs, and grassroots activism Many in the wider ‘maker’ movement can be reluctant to engage in politics overtly, as to do so would appear to constrain the notion of giving to...
Posted on 25th Oct 2024
Viva Voce / PhD Examination / Thesis defense. It's been over a year since I defended my thesis, or as it's called there, had my 'viva voce'. Some months later I would submit a final version, with great improvements suggested by the examiners. And on May 1st this year - a holiday in Berlin, by the...
Posted on 12th Aug 2024
Felipe Schmidt Fonseca Berlin, July 2024 Keywords: #generosity #urban #conviviality #reuse #repair #circularity Initial comment After the Viva Voce, the examination board required me to apply modifications to the thesis as a condition to awarding the doctoral degree. I agreed with all th...
Posted on 24th Jul 2024
I presented the reuse.city co-design lab at ESOCITE LA (Latin-American Conference on Social Studies of Science and Technology) in Campinas, Brazil. It was gratifying to return to the University where I got my Master's degree, ten years ago, and reconnect with some people who were important in my c...
Posted on 27th Sep 2023
After more than four years of work amid challenging conditions, I have recently achieved the most important milestone of my PhD research. I have successfully defended my thesis before an examination board composed of an internal examiner (Professor Joyce Yee, Northumbria School of Design) and an e...
Posted on 18th Apr 2023
Inaugurando (18.04.2023) esse blog dentro do meu site para fazer anotações mais sobre projetos e afins. Minha pesquisa foi desde o começo uma metainvestigação. Acho que isso é sempre assim, né? Precisamos também pesquisar formas de pesquisar. Mas no meu caso tinha alguns elementos a mais (o qu...
Posted on 27th Dec 2022
Open Access Conference Paper published in the Proceedings of the Fab 17 Research Papers Stream, Hogeschool Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 123-133. A video of the presentation is available here. Abstract Over the last decades, there have been significant improvements in waste...
Posted on 22nd Jun 2022
Over the course of the last two decades, I had the occasional opportunity to engage with policy-making on different capacities: as a social activist, a formulator, a campaigner and an advisor. The stories below summarise those that I see most relevant and some of the lessons learned. Most of these h...
Posted on 13th Apr 2022
Let me start by acknowledging my ignorance, and perhaps a years-long negligence. I can’t tell for sure when and how the topic of coloniality appeared explicitly on my radar. I do recall my friend (and MA supervisor at Unicamp) Rafael Evangelista talking in class about (British) cultural studies an...
Posted on 3rd Mar 2022
One recurring question I face as my research progresses is if – and how – digital technologies can be used for the common good. I realise this formulation sounds rather naive, but it runs deep in my work. I will use this post to unearth it as much as possible and address my current understanding of...
Posted on 1st Mar 2022
By the end of November 2021 I finished up my second year deliverables for the OpenDoTT project. They are: Technology Demonstrators (README.txt) Updated co-design concepts (PDF) Documentation of prototypes (PDF) Deployment datasets (README.txt) Open Technology Workbooks (PDF)...
Posted on 14th Feb 2022
Some weeks ago I had my second Annual Progression panel meeting at Northumbria. Differently from the first one, this time I did not need to present my research. The panel was based on the documents I had submitted describing my progress during the second year. A public version of the documents is av...
Posted on 18th Nov 2021
The overall structure of OpenDoTT was designed around an expected sequence of events: each of us fellows would spend the first year in Dundee using design research to explore and scope our research focus and questions. Then we would move to Berlin to spend 18 months working as a group at the Mozil...
Posted on 14th Jun 2021
From this lab documentation log. I summarise: planning for a data commons that welcomes contributions from humans as well as non-human (more-than-human?) systems. (...) in at least one occasion during the reuse city workshop in April, we have discussed ways to balance the diverse interests inv...
Posted on 9th Jun 2021
As you can see elsewhere in this blog, I’m used to start my texts from a very personal, individual perspective. There’s always a lot of “me” and “I” and “mine”. And often quite a bit of “you”. I was trying to find a way to describe in English how I feel about that in present times. In my mother tong...