Abstract Study Project

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Theme: Design anthropological intervention and experimental collaboration with the Tiny House Movement, a field that combines dwelling with social and political engagements in city politics

Title: Journaling as Method. A reflexion of doing fieldwork collaboratively and an analysis of political activism and participation of the Tiny House Movement in Berlin

Research question: How can anthropological fieldwork be combined with design processes that, through the publishing of thoughts as political participation, strive for initiating transformative processes in the future and how are those processes imagined in the present?

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Research interest:

Since the submission of my research design for last semester my research interest and -question have developed in a different direction. My research has started with the interest in the question, what kind of home culture it is that is in the making by experimenting with Tiny Houses in Berlin and in how far it creates alternative ways of living in the present. Yet, I was already interested in a collaboration with the field and to follow a design anthropological approach. I already intended to go beyond the description of the Tiny House Lifestyle and the Tiny House Movement and to follow a more transcendent and interventional interest in order to get significant findings about what kind of future the Tiny House Movement wants to create. The aim of my study therefore was, and still is now, to go beyond the description of the phenomenon by focusing on what is happening in between materiality and meaning, to regard prototyping as the link between thinking and building with focus on the thinking-part in Heideggers thoughts on his speech „Building Dwelling Thinking“. Therefore, instead of asking ‚what‘ the Tiny House Movement’s implication on home culture is, I am asking ‚how‘ it is imagining it and how anthropology can investigate in this design process that follows political ideas. A design anthropological approach is relevant to my research project because the context of my field site is one of intervention, it is conceptually open-ended and experimental and produces knowledge in co-developed and unanticipated ways.

Another question was: How can I as anthropologist, intervene in my field site and what would be my role as anthropologist in this process of intervention?

During my fieldwork at the two-month festival „Tiny Town Urania“ on the compound of the Urania, a cultural and educational association in Schöneberg, Berlin, where the building, prototyping, exposing, experiencing of, experimenting with and dwelling in Tiny Houses and the concept of an ‚open society‘ was happening, I was getting the chance to co-design the magazine „Tiny Journal“ and became its publisher. The design process of the magazine and the final content are the basis for my research question: How can anthropological fieldwork be combined with design processes that, through the publishing of thoughts as political participation, strive for initiating transformative processes in the future?

The Tiny House Movement has the political aim „to become active and to decide about the way they want to live in the city“ that is realized, in my case study, through the method of journaling.

What is the vision of the future for the city that is being prototyped and designed with Tiny Houses as artefacts as a device to ask questions about being-in-the-world?

Furthermore, my collaboration with the Tiny House movement is a device for reflection about the  possibilities of anthropology and anthropological research.