Reassembling People, Redesigning Forests, Reforesting
Democracy*
Barbara Peccei Szaniecki
Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil
szanieckibarbara@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
Redesigning Democracies is probably a new frontier for design.
This paper addresses the relationship between political and climate
denial and investigates possibilities for participatory practices to
change it. After observation of the recent COP26, it puts the forest
and its peoples at the center of the debate. Besides indigenous and
traditional peoples, who are the other actors and how their actions
in the forest can lead to a reforestation of democracy? Based on
these questions, it analyzes recent experiences of assemblies open
to different cosmologies, whether in the field of production or in
the political sphere, and in joints between them.
CCS CONCEPTS
· Human-centred computing; · Interaction design; Interac-
tion design process and methods; participatory design;
KEYWORDS
Participatory Design, Codesign, Infrastructuring, Reassembling
ACM Reference Format:
Barbara Peccei Szaniecki. 2022. Reassembling People, Redesigning Forests,
Reforesting Democracy* . In Participatory Design Conference 2022: Volume
2 (PDC 2022 Vol. 2), August 19–September 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne,
United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3537797.3537803
1 INTRODUCTION
Held at the end of 2021, the 26th edition of the Conference of the
Parties, better known as COP26, ended once again frustrating the
expectation of concrete results regarding global CO2 emissions. At
the UN assembly and on the streets of Glasgow, forests were present
somewhat abstractly and indirectly through their spokespersons.
Now, perhaps they are the most sensitive point of current environ-
mental and political tensions: in Brazil, for example, the way in
which the Bolsonaro government stood out with fires and defor-
estation shows how closely environmental denial and democratic
denial are intertwined. This relationship leads us to associate the
possibility of strengthening world democracies and the urgency of
reforestation around the world. Here, we propose the possibility of
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https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537803
a reforestation of democracy by means of design. To do so, follow-
ing some authors, we propose a reassembling of the forest people
that can inspire a redesign of democracy just as forests codesign
themselves. Hypothetically, the continuation of this exploratory
research may lead to the redesign not only of democratic processes
but of the very idea of democracy.
2 CLIMATE CHANGE DENIAL AND
DEMOCRATIC DENIAL: THE URGENCY OF
REASSEMBLING
In Down to Earth – Politics in the New Climate Regime [7], Bruno
Latour writes about the current and total political disorientation.
The book was written shortly after the shock of Donald Trump’s
election in the United States. The election of Trump in 2016, as
well as Bolsonaro’s in 2018, was the result of numerous factors, and
among them a popular dissatisfaction with representative democ-
racy eventually found a dangerous outlet in attacks against that
system. To grasp aspects of the trap in which we find ourselves, La-
tour addresses the spatial and temporal tension that characterized
the modern age: a first vector of impulse towards the łglobalž in the
sense of modernization continually conflicts with a second vector
of returning to the łlocalž in the sense of tradition. This conflict
itself is already complex, and when it embraces economic issues
and behavioral aspects previously categorized as łright wingž or
łleft wingž, it becomes even more confusing. When a third vector
is added to all this tension, it absorbs all our attention by compli-
cating the previous guidelines even more. Latour designates it as
łTerrestrialž and says that one of the best ways to grasp it is to
observe those who deny it. In opposition to the łTerrestrialž, the
łOut-of-this-worldž constitute the basis of climate change denial
and, not coincidentally, of democratic denial.
These considerations by Latour are recent, but he has been work-
ing for some time on a proposal of political ecology [6]. One of the
central axes of his proposal is to "bring the sciences into democ-
racy". In this sense, he considers that it is necessary to get rid of
the traditional distinction between "nature" as the domain of sci-
ences with its non-human objects and its eternal certainties and
"culture" as the domain of politics with its human subjects and its
continuous discussions. He criticizes this division into two "cam-
eras", one that chatters without knowing (the political sphere and,
more specifically, the spaces of representation) and the other that
knows without ever speaking out (nature). He criticizes łnaturež
conceived by the scientists as something indisputable, as well as
łnaturež conceived by environmentalists as something to be pre-
served. His proposal for a political ecology does not aim at nature
but at associations of beings with complex forms. Above all, it aims
at reuniting the two assemblies - the assembly of politicians and
the assembly of scientists - into a single collective of humans and
PDC 2022 Vol. 2, August 19–September 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
non-humans based on other notions of enunciation and action, as
well as on another relationship between interiority and exteriority.
Regarding what a collective is, he says he only knows that Cosmos
was the name the Greeks gave to well composed collectives. We
then move on to attempts at good composition through a design
that embraces diverse cosmologies.
From November 1st to November 12th, we observed the COP 26
through the press and especially through the images broadcasted. It
was a very limited but significant exercise where it became quite ev-
ident not only the difficult compatibility between scientific and po-
litical issues reported by Latour, but also the conflicting relationship
between the official assembly of the United Nations with state repre-
sentatives on the one hand and, on the other, street demonstrations
with their militants, which often manifested through assemblies.
But the porosities that allowed some guests or even non-guests
to circulate through both, and the coincidences of some images
that called for a concrete reduction of greenhouse gas emissions
through somewhat abstract messages - "save the planet!" or "There
is no planet B!" - did not go unnoticed. President Bolsonaro was
not present at COP26: if his absence is regrettable since Brazil has
played a key role in climate decisions in the past, it allowed actors
such as Txai Suruí, coordinator of the Movimento da Juventude In-
dígena (Indigenous Youth Movement), to show the world that other
brazils still resist. In the streets, a cardboard cutout of the minister
of the environment was displayed along with posters presenting
the endangered biomes. The Amazon rainforest is today one of the
most sensitive spots in the world.
Throughout the COP26, Brazil’s forests and forest populations
continued to be threatened by fires, deforestation and various forms
of appropriation and exploitation of territories. They were also
threatened by the coronavirus, among other diseases, including
those derived from gold mining, that is, literal mercury poisoning.
Forests are not virgin, they are populated. These populations, in
addition to the indigenous and traditional ones, currently include
many other actors with legal or illegal, beneficial, or harmful and,
eventually, ambiguous activities. Take the miners, for example: on
the one hand they are responsible for lethal and therefore crim-
inal pollution, but on the other they are subjected to inhumane
exploitation, including by drug traffickers. Thus, in the face of very
concrete situations, it doesn’t make sense to support posters with
abstract slogans. Many of these people are more worried about the
end of the month than about the end of the world. Faced with them,
we insist on asking: If democracy is "the power of the people", who
are the "people of the forest", and how can they, through new ways
of assembling, contribute directly or indirectly to a reforestation
not only of their environment but also of democracy itself? If we
understand that this contribution can happen in terms not only of
content, but also of forms and structures, we see a huge field of
action for a Participatory Design [1] open to different cosmologies.
3 REASSEMBLING PEOPLE FOR THE
CLIMATE, REASSEMBLING PEOPLE OF THE
FOREST
We know that Athenian democracy was direct as it was based on
assemblies formed by all citizens over eighteen years old and, at the
same time, highly exclusionary: women, slaves, and foreigners did
Barbara SZANIECKI
not participate. Assemblies have returned to the political scene in
recent years because of a huge dissatisfaction with representative
democracy: Arab Spring in 2010, Occupy Wall Street in 2011 [4],
15M Puerta del Sol Camp in 2012, June 2013 Protests in Brazil [3],
among others worldwide. Fruits of the desire for direct democracy
or greater participation in representative democracy, this cycle of
assemblies has not always resulted in democratic advances, but this
result does not lead us to give up on them. Quite the contrary, here
we will insist on those that focus on issues related to climate and,
above all, forests.
Many of Latour’s reflections are set in a French context of great
ecological mobilization, but also of reaction. France’s protagonism
at COP 21 in 2015 with the signing of the Paris Agreement has not
succeeded in dispelling internal contradictions. Starting in 2018, the
so-called "Gilets Jaunes" began to demonstrate weekly, for months,
against the increase in the carbon tax that made their circulation
more expensive. This type of demonstration started to take place in
several countries around the world and they reflect real difficulties
in transitioning to other forms of energy and adapting to other ways
of life. Climate policies voted by a strong majority of representatives
and supported by many experts faced enormous social resistance,
particularly among the working classes. Abstract principles crum-
bled in the face of concrete demands. Faced with this governance
impasse, in 2019 an initiative organized by French government and
civil society was born with the intention not only to bring answers
but also to ask questions: a Citizen Climate Convention. The Con-
vention is not a referendum, that is, polling citizens on a specific
issue formulated by government, nor is it a parliamentary assembly
composed of citizens’ representatives. It is something new, but not
that new. The first step was to select citizens. The selection was ini-
tiated with a draw followed by a delicate design of a heterogeneous
representativeness that we can call socio-diversity. The CCC was
finally composed of 150 people according to 6 variables (gender, age,
level of education, socio-professional category, type of territory
and region of residence) with practically no a priori exclusions: nei-
ther foreigners, nor people with activities that produce greenhouse
gases, and not even those who are against the ecological transition.
The selection process turned the "anyone" into a "someone" [9],
that is, an active citizen. Once finalized, the process of deliberation
was opened. According to Peck, it was about designing a prototype
that could allow the selected citizens to actually ’pre-legislate’ on
major public policies and not just choose between existing options
or make general recommendations. Conventions have a specific
temporality and one mission. In the case of the Citizens’ Climate
Convention, the time frame was 4 months, and the mission was to
promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, or rather, to
move towards commitments based on the diagnosis of global warm-
ing. The deliberation processes were based on scientific knowledge
and qualified information, but always leaving room for uncertainty.
The decision processes were based on the majority vote, but with
long periods of argumentation and careful attention to the expres-
sion of minorities. With its debates, the CCC achieved great reper-
cussion in the public sphere, thus broadening participation as well
as provoking a certain competition with existing institutions as the
Parliament, and thereby obtaining the implementation of some of
its decisions.
Reassembling People, Redesigning Forests, Reforesting Democracy*
In short, the Citizens’ Climate Convention performed several
functions: epistemic (producing well-informed opinion), ethical
(promoting respect among citizens), and democratic (including dif-
ferent voices and claims on an equal basis). More precisely, what
is its function within representative democracy? It is not a consul-
tative function (like referenda), because that would be too narrow,
nor is it a legislative one (like parliaments), because it would be too
broad. As a citizens’ assembly, the CCC was a project of socially di-
verse composition and direct political participation, with almost no
intermediation among participants, and thus subject to the frictions
inherent to democratic practice, but it achieved consistent goals. A
popular ecology is not easy, but the CCC participants were satisfied
both with its usefulness in terms of tackling the climate crisis and in
terms of improving democratic life. For all these reasons, this rare
national experience could be articulated with the next international
COPs. Now the issues become more concrete to the extent that the
actors (or actants, according to Latour) find themselves in territo-
ries such as forests and, even more so, when development projects
are at stake. Faced with the perception of the strong relationship
between climate change denial and democratic denial, we bet on
the possibility of unhinging one through the other and vice-versa.
With the advance of reflection, we bet on the singularity of the
forest to create other assemblies.
In her ethnography of global connections [11], Anna L.Tsing
tells stories from the Maratus Mountains in Indonesia. In 1989, its
inhabitants were already facing the destruction of the forest by
logging companies. Onde decade later, in 1999, Tsing observed the
positions of two young men from the same family (Ma Igul and
Ma Salam) against the Korean Development Company (Kodeco).
Represented by Ma Igul, the pro-Kodeco group advocated a right to
multinational development that included forest products. Among
them were the governor and other authorities. They needed to cover
up their transnationalism to make the participants imagine a local
populism. For this reason, they used a dialect - banjar - rather than
the national language. Represented by Ma Salam, the anti-Kodeco
group advocated forest conservation through village-based develop-
ment. And they made alliances with NGOs and the tourist industry,
which saw itself as threatened by the destruction of the forests. The
anti-Kodeco used English and transnational concepts: for them, the
conservation of the Meratus Mountains and its biodiversity was
linked to łpublic interestž and łintergenerational accountabilityž.
Tsing comments on the divisions of the groups within and between
themselves, specifically between the generation that fought against
the colonizers and the new generation, which is also divided be-
tween thse who have embraced entrepreneurship and those who
have chosen politics.
This experience led Tsing to the conclusion that there was no
"united cultural force" there, and to the conviction of the need to
consider all the fragments of the frictions present in the territory.
By friction she does not mean the antagonism typical of class strug-
gle, but rather the differences that paradoxically can strengthen
universalisms. Frictions do not prevent, on the contrary, they rein-
force collaborations between actors with different points of view
and experiences regarding the forest (indigenous people, activists,
academics, nature lovers, and even entrepreneurs), considering that
the forest itself is an assembly of plants in cooperation. Indeed, for
Stefano Mancuso [8], the body of plants differs completely from that
PDC 2022 Vol. 2, August 19–September 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
of animals. While the body of animals produces CO2, that of plants
absorbs it. While animals have organs with specific functions, plants
have their vital functions distributed throughout the entire body. So,
for example, they breathe with their whole body and not through a
specific organ such as the lung. Even more surprising is that, in the
face of environmental variations, their roots act collectively, in a
totally decentralized and de-hierarchical manner. In nature, large
organizations are distributed, without centers of control simply
because they are more efficient and resilient. Always according to
Mancuso, democracies should abandon the animal model and adopt
the plant model. We suspect that even under this model, because of
the diversity of forest people and people in general, reassembling is
always a challenge. What can participatory design, and especially
codesign do for democracy in forests interspersed with conflicts,
but also with collaborations between animals and plants, humans,
and non-humans, and beyond these categories?
4 REDESIGNING FORESTS: FROM
INFRASTRUCTURING TO REASSEMBLING
The Amazon Forest is inhabited and practiced by numerous eco-
nomic activities and is therefore open to various participatory de-
sign or codesign activities. Among the actions in some regions
of the Amazon, it is worth mentioning the work of Mapinguari
Design studio in Pará, one of the Brazilian states that share this
forest. According to the designers responsible for the studio, their
projects aim objectively at the development of visual identity for
local products and services, but the scope is much larger. It is the
increase of individual creativity recovering self-esteem, as well as,
through participatory processes, an integration among producers
to enhance the local culture and the quality of production itself.
Among the projects we can mention "Ver-as-Ervas" (See-the-Erbs),
with an association of herbalists, "Mulheres de Barro" (Women of
Clay) with a group of female ceramic artisans, and "Acoalfa", with
a communitarian association of lapidaries, all of them developed
in Pará. All these actors, human and non-human, participate in
the Amazon ecosystem and, each in their own way, persist in the
production of biodiversity, socially and environmentally.
We can also consider here a case of participatory design in this
"forest" that is Rio de Janeiro. The city has indeed several forests
and mountain ranges. Furthermore, it can be said that, with its
hills and favelas, it is itself an intermingling of urban and rural
areas. In Complexo da Penha, the Center for Multicultural Edu-
cation was articulated with several local partners by Ana Santos’
initiative: a municipal school, a technical school, a family clinic,
a public park, a cultural space, a social assistance center, and an
agroecological network. Outside the territory, CEM reached out to
Instituto Nacional de Tecnologia (National Institute of Technology)
and to Escola Superior de Desenho Industrial (Superior School of
Industrial Design). This extensive arrangement has been called the
Arranjo Local Penha and has initiated a project to encourage resi-
dents of Penha to practice urban agriculture. The activities range
from composting and planting edible seedlings that improves the
local population’s diet, to service design aimed at selling and ex-
changing the plants that generates income. Considering that the
processes were designed little by little by all the participants, it can
be said that ALP effectively came close to a codesign.
PDC 2022 Vol. 2, August 19–September 01, 2022, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom
Cases of participatory design or codesign in different kinds of
forests, therefore, are not scarce. These are in great part very rich
experiences, concerning direct and immediate needs such as food
(and this is no small thing in a country that, although a great ex-
porter of food, has unfortunately returned to the world hunger
map) as well as broader cultural aspects. In general, one can say
that these are sustainable development projects, with their qualities
and flaws and, in some cases, caring experiments of transition from
production systems (production chains) to engendering systems
(mixed arrangements) more focused on quality of life and based
on a different perception of the "culture versus nature" relation-
ship. These participatory design and codesign cases in the Amazon
Rainforest and in the peculiar forests that are the Brazilian cities -
formal and informal interweaving of urban and rural meshes when
not literally forestlike meshes - apply in a certain way what in PD
is called infrastructuring.
The concept of infrastructuring emerged in the field of infor-
mation sciences (information infrastructure) and was introduced
in the 1990s in the field of Participatory Design. Infrastructuring
implies not only recognizing the socio-cultural practices of a given
territory, but, above all, through design, interrelating humans and
non-humans (living beings, technologies, resources, and spaces)
by means of design for the emergence of new practices. Infrastruc-
turing requires distributed agency among different participants to
allow appropriation of opportunities and shared decision-making
within the design process itself [5] [10]. The cases described above,
both Brazilian, indicate an active participation in co-design pro-
cesses of local productive chains or arrangements, and therefore the
concept of infrastructuring as adopted in the Participatory Design
field seems totally adequate to analyze them. But it is perhaps insuf-
ficient to address initiatives such as the Conference of the Parties
and the Citizens Climate Convention because it does not place at
its core the issues of democracy, diversity, and difference. In the
context of climate urgency and political crisis we are experiencing,
the proposal of reassembling may touch the most sensitive nerves
of the relationship between climate change denial and political
denial, that is, the continued denial of global warming and demo-
cratic institutions. We could propose assembling, but we insist on
reassembling to emphasize on the one hand that it is necessary to
assemble in ways other than in modern forms, and on the other
hand, that it is an ongoing process. Reassembling is urgent.
5 REFORESTING DEMOCRACY
Based on the perception of a close relationship between climate
denial and democratic denial, exemplified by governments such
as Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s, we have hypothesized a
desirable and possible reforestation of democracy by reassembling
people and, in particular, "forest peoplež. We have followed the
enormous difficulties of international and national assemblies such
as the last COP26 (Conference of the Parties, UN) held in Scotland
(2021) and, at the same time, the relative success of initiatives such
as that of the CCC (Citizens’ Climate Convention) held in France
(2019). Both had a goal of reducing greenhouse gases, among other
strategies to slow down global warming. In the productive sphere,
we have mentioned some recent examples of participatory design
and codesign, whether in the heart of the Amazon rainforest or in
Barbara SZANIECKI
the heart of a community in Rio de Janeiro. However, something
seems to be missing to better explain the relationship between
forms of denial and, above all, the possibility of other ways of
reassembling in these difficult times. Thus, let us momentarily go
back to the forest.
Tsing tells how, in the summer of 2000, she made a trip to the
Meratus Mountains in the company of three young forest protec-
tors. Upon arriving in the village of Niwan, the activists proposed
activities without much success: the forest’s inhabitants were more
interested in the possibility of immediate earnings from rubber than
in their organization in the medium term. At a certain point, one of
the activists stood up and said: "there was a man named Chico". She
was referring to Chico Mendes, the rubber tapper leader who was
assassinated in 1988. And then she brought (in a way, translated)
the story to that place: "When they came to cut down the forest,
the women came out and embraced the treesž. What does Tsing
emphasize with this story? First, the confirmation of the impor-
tance of alliances and collaborations, even the most unexpected
ones: of the rubber tappers with the union movement, with the
indigenous people, and with environmentalists. Until then, rubber
tappers had no acceptance in these spheres. "Forest people" come to
be conceived not only as traditional populations, but also as rural
workers, and thus some of these people were moved away from
the field of the "exotic" and brought closer to the struggle for social
and environmental justice. Secondly, the apparently paradoxical
conception of "extractive reserves" that, designed collaboratively
by these actors and actants, proved that "preservation" and "income
generation" are not mutually excluding. Unusual alliances and para-
doxical concepts are some of the contributions that come from afar
to łreforest democracyž.
If it is possible to redesign forest assemblies, why wouldn’t it be
possible to reforest democratic assemblies? Perhaps the persistent
dichotomy between nature and culture, between forest and city
explains the difficulty of embracing other cosmologies and, there-
fore, of moving forward on such a path. Chico Mendes’ story is
also told by the anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha [2]. In
her report, she emphasizes that the rubber tappers thought they
only produced rubber when, due to the very characteristics of their
activity and ways of life, they also produced biodiversity. Part of the
Amazonian biodiversity has been as codesigned by the rubber tap-
ping activity, a contradictory mix of extractivism and preservation,
as the sociodiversity of the Citizens’ Climate Convention has been
codesigned by a conflictual interrelation between government and
citizens. One other aspect pointed out by Tsing can perhaps help us:
she was interested not only in the story of Chico Mendes itself but
in its travels so that she began tracing the story of Chico Mendes
as it moved from Brazil to North America, to Malaysia, and from
there to Indonesia. In such disparate contexts, forest care alliances
have held together in their differences, and perhaps precisely be-
cause of them, and because of their ability to move. Here we are
not talking about a social movement but a movement that, beyond
the local to the global, makes transnational connections or let’s
risk it, forestlike connections. Let’s return then to COP 26 among
other assemblies and to the environmental disaster that plagues us:
to generate such a movement and codesign such a mobilization, a
strong inspiration beyond the mere reduction of greenhouse gas
Reassembling People, Redesigning Forests, Reforesting Democracy*
emissions is needed, in short, the imagining as well as the materi-
alizing of a reforestation of democracy. This implies an effort that
is as local as it is global, to which Participatory Design with its
theories and practices, has much to contribute.
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