Origenes

tl;dr

Origenes is an eco-centric innovation center and lodge driven by the Taino people, a historically underserved and underrepresented indigenous group of the Caribbean. As the flagship project of community development organization Archea (borne out of architecture schools across the globe), Origenes attempts to address two gaps;

  1. Flaws in current development models where local communities are always unheard and often displaced.

  2. Render visible and celebrate Taino practices, traditions and ways of life.

Q. how might we create an inclusive and equitable process to fully center Taino indigenous communities in development?

The project began by establishing a project charter through research, group activities and goal setting. To achieve these goals, Archea became a backbone mediator, continuing to facilitate conversations between stakeholders and community members.

  • long-form interviews

  • Archea team

  • As research consultant, I created frameworks for our workflows, providing precedents, creative direction and building primary research methods.

Project charter

Mapping stakeholders

In Taino agricultural practice, the conuco is a living polyculture of different species grown together, unlike the monocultures of modern farming. The conuco is much more effective at self-sustaining a nutrient replenishment cycle, symbiotically becoming part of the processes found in nature.

This agricultural practice is an apt metaphor for Archea’s mediating and organizational ethos, where community, development and advising stakeholders are interconnected. This process is long-term and often fraught with disagreement and different priorities. This network is built through a series of relationship exercises, such as interviews, workshops and town halls. Archea positions itself as facilitator and mediator, looking for and encouraging alignment.

Creating partnerships

To build out the network, the research team created a matrix of key people to speak with, experts, community members and representatives of institutions and agencies. These connections were then grouped into ‘committees so to speak, who would primarily work together to represent their interests at the design table.

These committees are composed of a diverse range of ages and expertise, to fully account for cross-generational thinking. Every connection we created had different levels of commitment and ability to contribute, the dots in the diagram referring to their availability and status of connection.

Listening interviews

Two meetings were arranged with each key member in the matrix. The first is an open listening exercise, aimed at fully understanding background, priorities and aspirations. Designed only as a series of potential questions, this interview is conversational, but also recorded. The recording was sifted through by the research team in a coding exercise, marking and grouping sentiments and ideas that might have been shared across different interviews. This information would be used to build future alignments within the design and within the different committees.

Understanding practices

The second meeting is designed to be more interactive and directed. Using our primary and secondary research on Taino traditions and practices, the research team created a series of thematic abstractions from an exhaustive library of myths, traditions and stories, grouping ideas together.

The values and needs abstracted are then used as linking catalysts to further understand deep alignments that our interviewees might share. Focusing on feelings and the senses, the exercise encourages embodiment, beginning to hint towards spatial visioning that could become architecture.

Programming

Along with collecting information through interviews, the design team slowly began to adjust ideas for programming on the site according to the values that were appearing in the interviews.

A resonant exercise in visioning and matching, we began sculpting ideas of what could happen to support the stakeholders of the project philosophically and economically. The next step would be to begin uncovering vignettes of what these spaces might actually look like, kicking off another round of interviews and interactions with the committees.

What next?

A huge challenge of building out this process is confronting our assumptions, biases and traditional roles as trained architects.

Firstly, as mediators and initiators, Archea’s position is distinctly different in the system of development than that of an architect, who usually enters the process towards the end of the conception of a project, when stakeholders are ready to build.

Secondly, the architect’s agency is often severely limited by the stakeholder that hired them, forcing a fine balance between representing the client’s interests with those of the communities architects often claim they represent.

Finally, we often think of the object or the result of what we build as our greatest contributing value. Instead, at Archea, we attempt to let traditional ‘design’ take a backseat and focus our energy on listening in all forms. Maybe this research will lead towards building, but will hopefully and most importantly lead to alignment and collaboration.

…Architecture?