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
More Brazilian films about (and around) landfills: Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land) (2010) On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro is Jardim Gramacho, the world's largest landfill, where men and women sift through garbage for a living. Artist Vik Muniz produces portraits of the workers and learns...
Posted on 29th Oct 2019
Over the last couple years I was collaborating with Coco e Cia, a co-op in Ubatuba that collects and sorts recyclable materials and drives it to the correct destination. Whatever little support they have in the city was only achieved with a lot of struggle, and they are far from having the ideal wor...
Posted on 21st Oct 2019
About to complete three months since I started my research, I decided to better organise my literature collection. I now have a selection of over 260 documents (papers, books, magazine articles, podcast episodes, blog posts), which are labeled with the following tags: circularity coop, commo...
Posted on 21st Oct 2019
Recent suggestions made by supervisors, colleagues and other parties about my research: Look into diary studies as a way to approach my research questions Bottom-up solutions to recycling Blockchain registry of physical objects Use value / exchange value Libraries of things Levels of r...
Posted on 17th Oct 2019
In September 2019 we had the first general meeting of the OpenDOTT consortium, with the five fellows, supervisors and members of all partner organisations. The meeting took place in Dundee, and as well as being the perfect way to get acquainted with that many people in a short period (there were alm...
Posted on 17th Oct 2019
During the OpenDOTT Consortium Meeting last month, I figured I did not know how to call those objects that people did not want anymore, but were not yet to be destined to recycling nor landfills. The sort of material that either remains sitting in lockers or garages, or in some contexts have prope...
Posted on 17th Oct 2019
Short description to circulate during MozFest 2019 Cities, things and people are inseparable. From primitive settlements around natural resources, through guilds of skilled artisans along castle walls in the middle ages, then on to becoming the very site and battleground of the industrial revolut...
Posted on 16th Oct 2019
I said a couple times: there are (at least) two books called 'Makers'. People usually read the wrong one, one trying to promote a 'new industrial revolution' even before we solved the many problems generated by the previous ones. Makers, a novel - available here: Perry and Lester invent thin...
Posted on 16th Oct 2019
Excerpts from Evgeny Morozov's review of Shoshana Zuboff's book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers a thorough examination of how advertising-supported firms have incentives to extract ever...
Posted on 15th Oct 2019
Just spent some days visiting friends in Madrid. In the neighbourhood we were, waste collections happens during late night. Garbage trucks coming and emptying the containers, making a lot of noise. It is inconvenient for light sleepers (as I am), but a way to avoid the traffic disruption brought abo...
Posted on 7th Oct 2019
Doch Chkae, the metal band born on a rubbish dump "I just stood in front of the stage and was like what [...] is this music?" Vichey says. "I didn't understand what they were singing. The drums and guitars, I really didn't understand. "But after the show we got interested in this kind of music,...
Posted on 7th Oct 2019
After attending the Beyond Smart Cities Today conference in Rotterdam, I boarded a train to Berlin. I would be participating in the Reparatur Festival, German edition of Fixfest - the festival originated around the Restart Project originally from London. Coincidentally, the first day of the ev...
Posted on 5th Oct 2019
Industrial production unaccounted for its externalities is akin to populism, in the worst meaning. Immediate results in detriment of future conditions.
Posted on 4th Oct 2019
This post collects notes taken during my first research trip in Rotterdam. It is followed by another post with my notes from Berlin. On my way It's interesting to see the Netherlands from the sky, at night. Smart cities? Cities? From here, the whole country is a conurbation. Yesterday Nick...
Posted on 4th Oct 2019
I believe it was on one of my first supervisory meetings with Nick Taylor and Mel Woods somewhere in August that Mel mentioned a conference being organised in Rotterdam. The title was promising: Beyond Smart Cities Today, which to me echoed of this 2011 blog post by Adam Greenfield. Adam's crit...
Posted on 2nd Oct 2019
A researcher wasting time? -- A researcher timing waste?
Posted on 23rd Sep 2019
It's not only because this film was made in my hometown, Porto Alegre. Or because I enjoyed attending one of its makers' classes at the University. But Ilha das Flores has impacted me from the first time I've seen it. I have used it in a couple workshops and courses, and like to think of it as a bra...
Posted on 18th Sep 2019
What happens to things after they are made, sold and used? Should we talk of an afterlife of things? Or are they eternal (while they are 'things')?
Posted on 13th Sep 2019
My reading notes are below. Chapter 4, Digital Fabrication: Towards a new political economy of matter p. 92 And, above all, what they are imagining is a material production that is ultra low-cost. The unstated premise behind all of these visions of the future isn't merely an economy in w...
Posted on 10th Sep 2019
Collecting references about electronic waste. David Li - E-waste: an open source solution In Focus: Congo's Bloody Coltan E WASTELAND - Full film in HD (20mins/2012) More Digital Handcraft. China`s global factory for computers...