Actors, Agency, and Drifting Toward an Alternative Present

Throughout this research journey, my project has evolved from exploring public spaces and human interaction in La Florida toward a much more situated and collective practice: the making of inclusive, hybrid makerspaces. At first, I focused on how individuals negotiate contested spaces through informal economies, street culture, and grassroots organizing. But gradually, through engaging in fieldwork, interventions, and reflection, I realized that interaction alone was not enough—what mattered was the ability of communities to reclaim agency through shared making, collective knowledge, and tangible creation.

The actors present in my project are multiple and layered.

• Primary actors are the residents of La Florida, particularly those from marginalized or migrant backgrounds, whose cultural knowledge, lived experiences, and crafting traditions are the lifeblood of any intervention.

• Supporting actors include local organizations like Contorno Urbano, grassroots cultural activists, informal economy participants, and makers already reclaiming spaces of production.

• Technological actors (what Latour would call “actants”) include digital fabrication tools, open-source knowledge platforms, and digital prosthetics like AI, which can either widen access or reproduce inequalities depending on how they are applied.

Agency is distributed across this ecology. Importantly, I am not the central agent in this process. I act more as a facilitator or observer-participant, learning, supporting, and helping create the conditions for collective agency to emerge. My own biography—coming from outside La Florida, from an academic and design background—forces me to constantly navigate the boundary between facilitating and imposing, between empowering and overdesigning.

In my way of drifting, I moved:

• From observer → to co-maker → to listener → to participant in existing community dynamics.

• From focusing purely on public space as stage → to makerspace as infrastructure for integration, cultural empowerment, and community-driven innovation.

• From thinking of technology as a neutral tool → to technology as a cultural and political material, needing careful adaptation to different knowledge systems (ethnocognition).

The alternative present I am exploring and helping to shape is one where collective making spaces become not just hubs of creativity, but catalysts for socio-economic resilience, cultural self-recognition, and political empowerment. A present where cultural diversity is not managed from above (through policy alone) but activated from below, through practices of shared making, skill-sharing, storytelling, and reclaiming the production means.

Engaging in participatory, slow integration into the community has also made me realize the importance of humility. My role is not to innovate “for” the community but to make visible the rich ecosystems of knowledge that already exist, and to prototype pathways for them to flourish using new tools, spaces, and collective infrastructures.

This reflection will inform my final intervention: not a finished product, but a co-making process—a collectively created artifact or small piece of infrastructure that responds to the community’s real needs, values, and identities. A test of how ethnocognition, community empowerment, and hybrid fabrication models can converge into tangible action.