The Banana Peel Project

Development means forward movement—movement away from ignorance and inefficacy and towards knowledge and agency.

Except, of course, that it doesn’t.

Yrgö Engeström proposes that we use the concepts of a “contact zone” or a “third space” to describe the fertile space where “seemingly self-sufficient worlds” meet and form new meanings.

Development isn’t about getting better. It isn’t about moving forward. It isn’t about branching out.

Engeström argues that theories of development need to take into account that “the mediating artifact not only amplifies, it opens up new possibilities that lead to surprises.”

Development emerges as everyday creation or construction of the new in zones of uncertainty riddled with contradictions and surprises and heavily dependent on re-mediation by cultural artifacts.

Development proceeds not up or down, not outward or inward, but in all directions simultaneously: constantly, creatively, and rhizomatically.

So, what can we take from this reconfigured concept of development?

At the intersection of these narratives lies a space for a new kind of story about human development. In this contact zone, each story will contradict and transform the others without losing its essential identity. Here, the entwined strands of biological and cultural narratives will still determine our path of development—but the uniquely human ability to disentangle and reweave those strands will allow us to choose whether or not to follow it.

Engeström, Y. (1996) ‘Development as Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to. Vygotsky and Piaget’, Swiss Journal of Psychology 55: 126–32.