Naveen Bagalkot

I am driven by learning about and understanding how a certain practice has come to be in a place, and the work and labour that goes into evolving a practice into a form of knowledge. I am also interested in exploring how both, a new form of local knowledge practice and enabling infrastructure can co-emerge through collaborative exploration and experimentation with the communities of the place. In exploring both these strands, I draw and intertwine from across disciplines and practices such as history of place and technology, spatial organisation and architecture, technology product design, ethnography, participatory design, and speculative narratives

On learning

Since 2015, I have worked to create environments of learning through which learners can expand the horizon of their emerging creative practice through critical, dialogic and situated engagement with technological ideas and real-world settings. I believe each learner brings a unique perspective and practice, and I foster spaces and structures that enable the learner to realise the outcomes through the actions of collaborative conversations, observations, creative and critical making, reading, writing, etc.

Learning is driven by an inter- and trans-disciplinary engagement with theories, methodologies, activities of making, but all situated in specific time and place. We learn through engaging and experiencing with the everyday settings of people, their practices and places, to not only value the ideas and constructs created by others, but more importantly question, reframe and reformulate them. The acts of learning are created in a collaborative manner, with a clear focus on building the capabilities of the learners that are long-standing while also attempting to enrich the communities and places we work with. Broadly, the outcomes of such a learning proccess enables informing an independent creative practice with capabilities to situatedly speculate, critically make, discern and align with care to be ethically responsible.

In other words, I enable and facilitate co-learning with the people, practices and places that my work is situated in.

Situated Practice

My practice started with a grounding in community-based design and research, and is shifting towards being place-based through co-learning. In 2016, I began by working with MAYA, a grassroots organization, where I, along with learners and students, co-imagined and created usable health technologies and infrastructures with the women Community Health Navigators in Channapatna, which emerged into the Channapatna Health Library, a co-constructed digital repository of local health knowledge.

Recently, my practice is also getting situated in Bidar and Kundapura, as a means to enable collective imagination and experimentation with community health & wellbeing libraries and other local knowledge repositories that are attentive to historic, cultural, and lived contexts. My work unfolds at the intersection of creative practices, technology infrastructures and social development, where I see myself not as a provider of solutions but as a co-learner and co-imaginer of alternatives with the communities, practices and place I engage with. This orientation allows me to build spaces for collaborative inquiry and place-based actions of change that challenge dominant narratives and foreground local knowledges.