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.
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...
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...
By the end of November 2021 I finished up my second year deliverables for the OpenDoTT project. They are:
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...
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...
Smart cities, superficially understood as "using information technologies to make urban management more informed, efficient and easy", are a trend already being implemented in many parts of the world. Trying to persuade municipalities to use more IT is not something I feel my research would contribu...
Repair tech at MozFest
In one week I will conduct the first public activity of my research project in 2021. It will be an open discussion during the Mozilla Festival, called "Universal Registry of Things - promoting the reuse of materials and objects in smart cities". This year the Festival will...
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...
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...
! 0.2. This is a snapshot of the working version of a text I wrote for the OpenDoTT blog, as part of our training on Internet Health and Open Leadership. It feeds from and interacts with other materials kept in this repository.
After an unusual summer (wasn't it?), my second year at the O...
! This post is oudated. Its contents have been moved to my research wiki.
In the Repair Journey, I have asked a group of participants to choose an object they would like to repair or repurpose, and spend some weeks keeping a diary of how the repair (or attempt to repair) went.
Design of
...! This post is outdated. Its contents have been moved to my research wiki.
See also
- Repair Journey, my research study exploring individual/citizen perceptions, behaviour and decision-making around the reuse of things.
- An Ecosystem Mapping of reuse and repair.
- Concept Ideas based on b...
! This post is outdated. Updated contents have been moved to my research wiki.
For the Ecosystem Mapping, I have interviewed people who are related (either professionally or informally) with repair and reuse. The main idea was to understand how the value of discarded materials can be assessed...
! This post will be updated every time my research questions have changed. Current version: January 2021, following my successful Annual Progression review.
Research Question 1 (RQ1): What prevents more widespread reuse of discarded materials in contemporary cities?
To address RQ1, I will inv...
At the current stage - August 2020 - of the OpenDoTT project, I am working on design concepts that respond to data collected in this first year of work. The data comes from two design research studies; my explorations towards literature review; and reflection upon projects I have been involved w...
Head
In recent weeks I've been skimming through interview transcripts and my (copious) notes. It's a tiresome but rewarding phase of research. Things are starting to make sense, even if I feel it still is over my current grasp. As I work through, though, I find different forms of useful informatio...
Sketching...
The common sense associates recycling with sustainability, leading citizens to think that ideally, all the materials disposed of in a city should undertake that path. Evidence indicates, however, a different reality. There are solid arguments proposing that recycling is not the most...
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...
This post was originally published in the OpenDoTT website.
It’s been a little over four months since I moved to Dundee from Brazil. Besides the sort of activity more commonly associated with research—reading and taking notes, writing down findings and perceived gaps, discussing ideas and planni...
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...
