CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This paper draws on a collaborative ethnographic research, developed with members of a waste pickers cooperative located in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires located in Greater Buenos Aires. Due to their growing institutionalization, waste pickers cooperatives have achieved some key improvements in their working and living conditions, as they have been recognized within waste management public policies and legal frameworks. However, this process has contributed to crystallize the waste pickers only in terms of an emerging workforce, skilled in collecting and sorting recyclables from waste, at the most. Other valuable contributions, such as the development of a practical pedagogy towards the segregation and recycling of materials, or the design and manufacturing of their own technological devices, has not been yet equally recognized or strengthened in the same way (Carenzo, 2014 and 2017).I bring up some key ontological challenges regarding the design of those innovations, as rather than linearly and sequentially unfolded (imagination - projection - representation - materialization), their design is recursive, as it is performed in action, confronted with the material correspondence of the surfaces, volumes and forces they manipulate. Thus, experimental design is unfolded by the composition and recomposition of artefacts, materials, senses and bodies in complex assemblages, that goes far beyond a mere cognitive operation located in their heads. As Céline Rosselin pointed out this kind of processes are driven by "the body-with-their-objects" (2009: 294).To frame the waste picker`s experimental praxis in terms of design, is not innocent. Precisely because it challenges the epistemic and political foundations that crystallize their savoir-faire as a mere practical expertise, derived from the mechanical repetition of a simple routine. On the contrary, my data shows to what extent, their savoir-faire is derived from the embeddedness of creativity and sensory-motor skills, by which they develop innovations that impacts on the recyclability of mass-consumption goods. In this sense, we still owe a proper recognition to them for their social and environmental contributions, even when they could be considered too bold.

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