Design during COVID-19: agents and allies in the role of designer, digital fabrication and distributed production

During COVID-19 global emergency, designers proposed solutions at different scales, as quick responses to demands from different agents. In the same way, we critically analyzed the emergence of allies, protocols and tools, which allowed the optimization of fabrication, from traditional manufacturing into distributed co-production. The analyzed local networks produced global co-design experiences, with involvement of FabLabs and users from different disciplines. Through case studies and the evaluation of surveys and testimonials from users and makers, we analyze the global panorama, to finally explore the specific situation in Latin America. This establishes a relationship between medical demand and digital fabrication, which allows evidence of positive and negative situations to be consider as new, significant aspects for the design in the future. The leading role acquired by the ecosystem surrounding digital fabrication during the pandemic, could enhance its processes in the search for greater positioning, changing society from within the different communities.


MAPPING THE ROLE OF DESIGN BEFORE AND DURING COVID-19 GLOBAL EMERGENCY
The discipline of design studies is especially important in the context of the pandemic because it allows us to recognize, within a broad scenario of initiatives, the affirmation of trends, advantages and limitations of the role of digital fabrication as an ally in solving design problems.
One of the highlights in dramatic historical moments such as wars, natural disasters or epidemics is that its victims can be found in all contexts. The designer and the architect are not working for third parties, but for themselves, and they fall into this atypical situation of being both designers and possible future users. A notable example in the first half of the 20th century is the case of Aalto, who was ill and in bed during the design of the unbuilt project of the tuberculosis sanatorium in Kinkormaa (Colomina, 2019, p.65), forerunner of the Paimio sanatorium (1928)(1929)(1930)(1931)(1932)(1933). Being a real or potential victim of circumstances, and having to come up with first-person design solutions, places the designer in a strange moment of empathy from which few contemporary architects can boast. Since 2020, COVID-19, has put us in a similar situation, where we, designers, architects, urban planners, fabbers and makers, have become clients, generating empathy with the world in a situation that affects us all.

THE SCALE OF DESIGN AND ROLES
In the first months of the COVID pandemic, we found differences in the application and results of design on different scales: from objects to buildings. A direct parallel cannot be established, since architecture has slower processes and is dependent on much more complex production and economic processes, and therefore lacks the speed needed for immediate response. Unlike the design of objects during the emergence of COVID-19, the abundance of theoretical architectural proposals was only materialized in the installation of temporary health centers, adaptation of existing buildings for other purposes, and the use of technologies for the simulation and analysis that social distancing imposed.
The requirements for health and fabrication system specialists reached all scales of design.
Design patterns for non-specialists became more specific as the contagion behavior of COVID-19 was better understood. The medical devices generated parameters and the political, economic and health regulatory requirements defined the constraints. That combination redefined the designer's role in this emergency. Neumann (2008, para. 10) argues that the "roles are defined by specific attributes, behavior and social relations" that a society demands and determines, in terms of obligations and expectations through its norms.
In this research, we explore how digital fabrication laboratories became the ecosystem that allowed us to meet the demands of the health system, the government, society, and designers. This, in addition, occurred thanks to open source design environments and communications platforms that promoted the prosumer over the consumer, within a distributed chain of actions, which encouraged designs through open design.

Designer role
For the design of medical devices, the designer's role has been completely different from pre COVID-19 experiences. Privitera (2017), studied situations where industrial design meets the highly regulated health sector, identifying that this industry requires multidisciplinary collaboration between researchers and physicians, access to a repository of information, regarding the progress of the development medical devices, finding that "it was impossible for a single person to be a an expert in the clinical, technical, and scientific domains relevant (...) for the purposes of developing a medical device" (Privitera, 2017). Privitera identified the solutions were mainly limited to three aspects: (a) Aesthetic design, (b) Human Factors and (c) Branding. Some additional challenges were identified in the process: Value, Limited application and Specialization. Design in emergencies does not take any of these later aspects or challenges, because the spreading time imposes using the products while they are being fabricated.

Makers role
For designers with links to FabLabs and Makerspaces, the context of the COVID-19 was also a new circumstance, just like it was to industrial designers and architects. Not only required unprecedented health equipment, demanding designers' proposals from the scale of objects, products and services to architecture and urban planning. The situation added other challenges to the process, with new roles such as those proposed by Hasselblad (2020)  responsibility of manufacturing and ensuring the safety of medical devices (Azman et al. 2017) -a role that under normal circumstances it is delegated to other teams-making them challenges that have overcome the willingness to just design and fabricate in this emergency.
Among these additional requirements to the designer's role in this emergency, there is the need of thinking about four challenges: (a) products regulated and safe for patients and medical personnel, as argued by Ferracane (2020) from the "European Center for International Political Economy". (b) Solving disinfection, reuse of manufactured products, as well as waste management, as stated by Garmulewicz (2020) of Universidad de Chile (as cited in Singh, Tang &Ogunseitan,2020 andYou, Sonne &Ok, 2020); (c) Distribution of products when infections are very advanced, as Díaz (2020) of the FabLab Bilbao maintained. (d) tracking product performance over time and finally (e) preventing starting from scratch again, as argued by Garcia (2020), co-founder of Makerspace Madrid and Corona Makers Forum in Spain. This context clarifies the differences between the role of designers and makers before COVID-19 and their role as also clients and users in this health emergency. We believe that not only are objects important in defining the designer's role, but we need to explain the culture behind them, who demanded them and who promoted them, as Mumford argued (1998, p.22). In this research, we make a preliminary exploration of design studies of good practices around the world, with special emphasis in analyzing Latin America initiatives between March and July 2020.

ORIGIN OF NEEDS IN PANDEMICS AND COVID-19
Eleven years ago, between January 2009  On July 23, 2020, the confirmed total reached 15,445,043 with a global death of 632,173. In April the IHME (2020) projected that in August 2020 only the US would reach 60,415 deaths, but as of July 23, there were 144,242 deaths, even though the number of affected countries decreased to 188 (JHU, 2020).
Despite the promotion of public health policies, the percentage of cases and deaths created a greater need for health system services (Ferguson et al., 2020), increasing the demand for medical products. Without a vaccine, the only way to minimize transmission and spread has been non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). This includes four main measures and topics scenario that is not limited to the local but has the same conditions in the entire world. The role of design considered these measures as the basis for the proposals and solutions. For a designer, products usually respond to the understanding of the needs of a client (an individual or a society), but pandemics make the designer their own client, living in the same scenario, which gives them the possibility of being more empathetic with solutions for their own life and that of those around them.
In this context, since March 2020, the digital fabrication laboratories in the world have become the best allies of designers in their role in the face of this emergency. They became hubs of their own network where "all design is co-design", a phrase by Manzini (2014, p.99) who maintains that "in a highly connected society designing actors cannot escape from interacting and influencing each other".

METHODOLOGY
To examine agents and allies in the Latin American community of designers and makers, we draw on three main sources, to analyze countries with infrastructure and experience in digital fabrication. In the last 9 years, We, the authors have mapped initiatives of digital fabrication laboratories in Latin America (Herrera & Juarez, 2013;, Scheeren et al., 2018, monitoring 52 fabrication laboratories included in Homo Faber (Latin America Exhibition), created mostly in universities prior to the FabFoundation initiatives. The second source, from industry and government, was through the Latin America Fab Lab Network (FABLAT). Between March 24 and June 29, 2020, the Peru-based FABLAT organized 15 "FabTalks" including 73 FabLabs presentations from Spain and 16 Latin American countries. From these networks of contacts, we analized regional and global initiatives that, between March and July, responded with design-based proposals against COVID-19 (Network in Figure 1). (Awards in Figure 1), considering the study by Makkonen & Inkinen (2014), who argue that this is an indicator of the quality of innovation and produces a positive and significant effect on the future of the participants, increasing credibility even though the motivation is not monetary. Herrera et al. (2020) found that in the online content only 5% of the proposals that identify architectural transformations in the context of COVID-19 were from Latin America. With the same intention, and as a third data source external to FabLabs, but on the scale of the product and the object, we looked for calls and patterns of activities against COVID-19 registered between March and July 2020 by the main global design institutions linked to graphic design, industrial design, and architecture: World Design Organization, DESIS Network, Design Research Society, Cumulus Association, Industrial Designers Society of America, American Institute of Architects and the International Council of Design.
Finally, we analyzed the countries that participated in four global and regional surveys (Surveys in Figure 1) from academia, as an indicator that promotes future solutions if we understand the situation of confinement from the design.

Selection criteria and limitations
From north to south, Latin America is conformed by 20 countries. We did not consider seven countries (countries in red, see Figure 1): four of them (Guyana, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua) do not have FabLabs registered with FabFoundation, and Bolivia, Paraguay, and Suriname, although registered by FabFoundation, did not registered any activity common to the analyzed countries (see activities per country in Figure 1).
Thus, our critical analysis included initiatives from 13 countries (65% of the total number of Latin American countries) that evidenced at least two selection criteria (see activities per country in Figure 1), which allowed us to classify agents and allies and define the groups that make up this preliminary research. We refer that Paraguay registered activity during COVID-19 through "Makers for Paraguay" (https://makers.com.py/), which together with Suriname and Bolivia will be part of a future research.

AGENTS PROMOTING THE DESIGNER´S ROLE IN THE FACE OF THE COVID-19 EMERGENCY
In the critical analysis of these laboratories, we identified that industry, government, associations, design institutions, and academy partners brought together initiatives in

Industry
At this point, the results were not significant, considering that many of the 46 International

Associations
We selected the largest and oldest associations of graphic design, industrial design, and architecture, which adopted an empathetic position with the emergency, promoting the role of the designer in each of the specialties of the respective groups.
The International Council of Design, "believes that the future will, and must be, different" based on a pending agenda of necessary changes in the roles and responsibilities of designers, redefining the designer/producer/user relationship. ico-D considers that this disruption and crisis that we are experiencing is an opportunity that reinforces the need for change in the profession and education towards a new normality (ico-D, 2020).
From Montreal, Canada, the World Design Organization (WDO), formerly known as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) also maintained that "in times of crisis, design enables collective action to make the greatest impact" (WDO, 2020).

Academy
With a global and common problem, since March 2020 unprecedented surveys were launched from universities around the world to learn from problems in isolation (see Figure   3). Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru, which received more than 12,000 responses.
In education, the "Center for Interactive Living Studies" (NOMADS) of the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil (Tramontano et al., 2020), conducted a survey between June 24 and August 10, 2020, with 166 respondents (Brazil: 124, Latin American countries: 34, other regions: 8) to the project "Remote teaching of architecture in a time of pandemic". 14 countries joined, including eight in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay) with results that allow to identify remote teaching modes in architecture, urbanism, and landscape design during COVID-19.

Open source design environments
Before COVID-19, a lesson learned from 2009-H1N1 was the need for new tools for risk and outbreak communication (Abraham, 2011). Troxler (2010) proposed Fab Labs as a business model if they provide infrastructure and innovation. In the context of COVID-19, collaboration between fabrication laboratories through open design environments demonstrates the network response capacity to strengthen the de-centralized manufacturing chain between those who need help and those who provide it, integrating producers, suppliers, applicants, investors, and donors to achieve a common goal.
For this reason, this section draws a parallel between the evolution of COVID-19 and the initiatives that allowed designers around the world to join work ecosystems for local production from a global perspective. The cases reported in this section are of a global or

COVID-19 arrived in Latin America and the first cases appeared between February 27 and
March 13. Governments declared mandatory national confinement and the closure of their borders between March 15-24. Since then, initiatives were born from universities, which is where emerging technologies are promoted (Sperling et al, 2020). But unlike the Northern Hemisphere, Latin American universities were on their summer vacations, preparing to welcome 2020 students in March, therefore the closing and the difficulties for accessing fabrication labs was a problem. Days before confinement, some labs authorized the exceptional taking out of 3D printers to the coordinators' homes, but the access to equipment such as laser printers and larger CNC machines stationed at universities was almost impossible.
On March 17, 2020 Gershenfeld (2020) (Wikifactory), to understand the actions to consider as COVID-19 arrived in Latin America. In may, the C-19 FABLAT platform (https://login.aplicacionespymes.com/m/r5448/) was launched in Peru. In this platform, products, requests for donations and deliveries, suppliers, manufacturers, makers and fabbers are registered, in an initiative that placed Peru as the headquarters of the network.
The convening capacity of these institutions and their connection platforms were important factors to cross the local border to connect government, industry, professionals, and academia. This did not happen with other initiatives, whose success was mostly local, by grouping together a limited number of fabrication laboratories, such as Redmakers-Fab FabLabs initiatives that donated 950,021 face-shields in its country (FABLAT, 2020b).

Distributed fabrication against COVID19.
Due to its scale, the traditional industry supply chain does not have a coordinated scope. The solutions produced go through slow testing and prototyping processes, unsuitable for an emergency. Thus, the distribution processes that arise from local initiatives such as fabrication laboratories, use their small scale as an asset.
To this is added the close relationship with consumers (Kohtala, 2015), which gives off constant feedback that allows product improvements in a short time. "The customer is integrated into value creation during the course of configuration, product specification and co-design." (Piller et al., 2004, p.435) This will allow increasing efficiency and optimizing costs and eventually returning to the traditional supply chain, once the prototype has already been put into operation, in order to benefit from low-cost production and distribution ( Figure 5A). Since March, volunteer designers around the world started distributed actions, delivering hundreds and then thousands of free masks, valves, connectors and protectors produced in makerspaces and FabLab communities, in an ecosystem that includes networks of manufacturers, material suppliers, open repositories, product follow-up and monitoring. This made possible the financing of massive distribution and low-cost designs for their countries. These actions will have an unprecedented impact on the way of researching, designing, and innovating, because they rapidly united society, government and industry in the context of transformative and democratic design and open knowledge.
In the context of COVID-19, Rebel (FABLAT, 2020b), argued that distributed communities prevailed because private fabrication production did not have the speed to respond to this emergency. Wikifactory was available for this emergency, not only to collaborate with the distribution of the models, but so that anyone with access to open designs, including peer reviewers and specialists, could validate or observe products.

Protected design and open design
The designer's role in this health emergency has been divided into two groups: those who Between January and July 2020, Peru reported that 1,514 inventors applied for 833 patents, 38% corresponding to inventions developed and aimed at combating the causes and effects of the pandemic. In June, Peru, through INDECOPI, has been the only country in its region to promote protected design with the "Special Patent Contest against COVID-19" initiative that received 313 applications and awarded 45 inventions (INDECOPI, 2020). However, the FabLabs initiatives in Peru were different, democratizing their designs and seeking cooperative solutions. By August 2020, they had donated around 40,000 face-shields nationwide.
The case of medicines is different. In this global and international emergency, Brazil promotes a law that considers them as goods of global collective interest and not as a commercial product. Costa Rica together with WHO promote the initiative "COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP)" with 34 other countries (12 of them from Latin America) so that "Vaccines, tests, diagnostics, treatments and other key tools in the coronavirus response must be made universally available as global public goods." (WHO, 2020b). . Design during COVID-19: agents and allies in the role of designer, digital fabrication and distributed production. Strategic Design Research Journal. Volume 14, number 01, January . 236-251. DOI: 10.4013/sdrj.2021

DISCUSSION
The important production of digital fabrication in Latin America has already been categorized and grouped (Sperling et al., 2020, p.83), but the scientific publication of its practice is a pending task for the laboratory network. Documentation during COVID-19 has different perspectives, but through this research we approached its process using transversal indicators to 13 Latin American countries. Menichinelli et al. (2020, p.3) explain that open design and distributed production overcame the mistakes of indie designers and innovators during the COVID-19 crisis. In this context, we find that the anticipated coordination in Latin America between peers in the region minimized errors and anticipated problems that due to their complexity (distribution, permits, suppliers, etc.) forced them to different solutions from those of the northern hemisphere.
In May 2020, 42 FabLabs participated in the "COVID-19 Survey Fab Lab" (Armstrong et al., 2020) and nine laboratories responded from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru. In this survey, 48% FabLabs were closed, and 16% partially open. 76% manufactured devices through a distributed network lab and another 14% did so in their laboratories. The largest number of items produced were Face shields. This global context is specified in the different aspects of this research, including external indicators that allow us to understand the projection possibilities of some countries such as Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Mexico in emergency contexts (Activities per country, see Figure 1). They also show the need to stimulate other countries that require not only infrastructure or machines, but also to connect to a distributed collaboration network.
The long-term sustainability of these practices depends on integrating industry, academia, and government, with common objectives that enhance the tasks and actions during the COVID-19 crisis, to continue demonstrating the potential of the region in response to its circumstances and limitations.

CONCLUSIONS
Despite the fact that society values the quick-short term solutions (Giddens & Sutton, 2018, p.346) and designers compete to solve problems in less time, the speed of contagion and death from this emergency continues to exceed response time worldwide. Although the biggest demands for the designer's role in this emergency have come from the health system and governments, the designers themselves became users of their own products.
In this research, we began the analysis with the total number of Latin American countries (20) that host a total of 134 active FabLabs. We identified that 16 countries had at least digital fabrication infrastructure and machines registered with FabFoundation (FabLab Network, Figure 1). With the experience of the northern hemisphere, this infrastructure would allow the fabrication of medical devices considering the low installed capacity of the health services to face the exponential growth of infections in the region. As we reviewed in this research, COVID-19 spread from Asia to Europe and then to the United States. Once in Latin America, the response of governments was to close borders, start quarantines and impose a mandatory curfew, forcing the community of local fabbers and makers to dimension the problem from two contexts. Latin America in the FABLAT network. In our analysis, we found positive and negative solutions tested before reaching US and Europe's infections and death numbers. The role of designers and makers changed completely, as analyzed in the section on the scale of design and roles.
The health context and the challenges analyzed revealed the need to create actions, different from the traditional tasks of a FabLab. From Peru, FABLAT established a strategy of action distributed from the global to the personal to fabrication devices (masks, ventilators, connectors, and hermetic boxes). During the first three months of the pandemic, the 15 Fabtalks analyzed promoted the exchange of experiences between 13 countries for "3D printing just-in-time" solutions, in alliance with health services, medicine, industry, academia, and the military. In the confinement situation, we showed that the distribution strategy through the army overcame the device delivery problem that Spain warned us about, caused by the few personnel in the FabLabs and the danger of contagion.
The distribution of participants from Latin American countries showed that Central America did not participate in Awards and Surveys (see Figure 1)  In the region we find professional associations liked to architecture but not design. The analysis of the design institutions in the northern hemisphere and their ability to develop regulations and standards as a starting point for their members is a point that the region must consider, over the intention of promoting ideas' competitions that contributed very little to the emergency situation.
In the academy section, we consider that the surveys were an opportunity to systematically understand the needs of the confined society, possibilities for remote connection, and the evolution of priorities in a global emergency. Although Design for Emergency, CESUGA and PsyCorona originated in the northern hemisphere, the alliances with universities in the region included them in their research along with other global initiatives. Except for Bolivia, Guyana, Paraguay, Suriname, and Venezuela, 7 countries in South America participated in the surveys analyzed in this research.
FabLabs in Latin America faced the crisis from three contexts analyzed in this research: Open source Design Environment, Distributed fabrication, and the differences between Protected and Open design. As in the northern hemisphere, we found that these ecosystems drove the role of the designer. initiative, in less than 10 days the cost of face shields dropped from US $ 25.00 to almost US $ 5.00 (see Figure 5B). As a whole, there was an acceleration in the foundations of an open source design ecosystem that runs through the main FabLabs in the region.
We hope that this preliminary research, which explored an evolving scenario, will be the starting point for future analysis of new agents and allies in the role of the designer during an emergency, and thus allow us to act proactively in similar situations. This will be possible if we seek equity and drive transformations from communities, articulated with the society that demands them.