Thriving too

Bootstrapping, discipline and designing change

We are big fans of Theory of Change thinking. It’s a planning methodology originally designed by the Aspen Institute which helps you break down big visions and goals into small steps - working backwards to consider what pre-conditions are necessary for each step to be successful.  You also document your assumptions along the way. It is used increasingly in US by funders as an evaluation framework – you can measure different points more easily.

We’ve been using TOC  in a number of different ways:

-  In community workshops.  Our activity helps groups to think about what the essential small steps that need to be taken (usually the social ones), and often lead people to come up with some really imaginative solutions to getting their projects unstuck.

-  Theory planning based on our research.  We have studied over 100 innnovative local projects to understand how they designed and managed change.

Now we are looking at developing a third use – this one to collaboratively gather learning and help people iterate on their change plans.

With the Collaborative 3D Mapping activity we developed we are using the highly visual mapping process to gather knowledge from a group of people – insights that can be surfaced and shared within a group wishing to start a project from resources they already have.

Theory of Change MAP-it

Working in collaboration with Social Spaces Belgium - a research group based at the Media Arts Design Faculty in Genk – we have developed a proto-type methodology to collaboratively gather learning and insights from a group of people who have already developed a project.  Essentially mashing together Social Spaces Genk's participatory mapping - Map-it - technology, Theory of Change principles, open source icons from the amazing The Noun Project, plus collaborative participatory methodologies, we intend to help develop a new way of collective learning.

Would you like to help us test it?

Principles

In any project designed and implemented, different members of the group have different roles, make different observations and often come to different conclusions.  We are constantly trying to make sense of our experiences and learn form them.  What can happen is that we come to conclusions based on small sets of information.  In trying to get a broader picture to evaluate what happened, what worked etc, we often rely on interviews and a single person analyzing and reporting the results. Or we have open meetings to go over progress or achievements without a significant structure to document our ideas and conclusions. The shortcomings of these methods is that it relies on one person to reveal insights. A common problem in qualititive research is that we all have our own knowledge bases and experiences through which we interpret our observations.  This can lead to criticisms of bias - but more importantly it doesn't capitilise on the collective knowledge bases that could be drawn together to reveal unusual, and perhaps more acurate, insights and learning.  And sadly, people don't seem to read reports anymore. Knowledge therefor needs to be more collaboratively built, more digestable and more accurate if it is going to help us make better decisions when designing change.

How TOC MAP-it will work

As a group a TOC diagram will be drawn to document what happened on a project.  Using sheets of icon stickers the process will surface observations, draw out pre-conditions, discuss alternative view points and help the group to analyse and draw out collective insights together. The icon stickers provide a visual language so that the diagrams are more readily understood by the participating group (and others who will want to understand it from a distance) and will work also as research prompts to aid the facilitation process. These charts with visual references will also serve to make different TOCs more comparable by creating a common framework.  The second stage will be to draw a revised TOC for a future iteration of the project – gathering the collective learning from the first stage not just into a list of observations, but rather a critical, analysed and disciplined strategy and framework for doing things better.

Why we think its important?

The literature on business is now dense with advice on how to avoid business failure by working to different sets of rules.  But it is hard to find much writing about other types of initiatives - either within a community or a non-business based organisation. We think that we need some smarter ways of designing change and learning more collectively and transparently in the social sector.

Business researchers and writers often come at the issue from different perspectives and research projects into the subject, but there are a number of books I have read recently which, although they offer very different advice overall, share some key messages:

Don’t borrow a lot of money to start your business. 

Bootstrap, work with what you have, certainly in the beginning.  It’s a great constraint for ingenuity, it means that you own your work 100%, you won’t hire too many people before you need them … and most importantly it gives you the freedom to work iteratively.

"Don’t rely on others to fund your idea, imitate creatively, keep value higher than price, pivot often, and more." The Rebel Entrepreneur (by  Jonathan Moules)

Be disciplined

Observe, measure … base your decisions on lessons emerging from your actions.

"When faced with uncertainty ... not look primarily to other people, conventional wisdom, authority figures, or peers for direction; they look primarily to empirical evidence. They rely upon direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence. They make their bold, creative moves from a sound empirical base." Great by Choice (by Jim collins & Morten Hansen)

Work iteratively

Eric Ries – author of The Lean Startup – calls it pivoting, but it is basically testing, assessing and deciding about changing direction or persevering with your plan.

In The Rebel Entrepeneur Jonathan Moules has a detailed chapter called ‘Don’t get hung up on the business plan’, while in Rework (by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson) there are essays entitled ‘Learning from mistakes is overrated’, and 'Planning is guessing’.

What all these ideas do is attempt to bust myths around the visionary entrepreneur, living off his wits and intuition, walking into a bank with a 100 page business plan, which he then follows to the letter to a life of success and glory. Some estimate that 1 in 3 businesses fail within the first 3 years.

Some of the strategies around planning are new – some of them, such as being disciplined and more informed about decision-making, are much older and feel more like common sense - but they do challenge some common assumptions about innate brilliance and instinct - many of them we seem to have adopted in the community and social sectors. Research shows that many successes come from testing and thinking methodically and carefully.

What I find particularly interesting is a lot of it feels like applying research principles to business, which makes perfect sense.  Try something, observe and measure, change and begin your learning cycle again.  It’s a classic Action Research cycle and what design thinking folks also called rapid prototyping, live testing etc - which is what we are doing with TOC  MAP-it.

Would you like to help us test the methodology (while we also help you too)?

We are obsessive testers and we test in real life situations.  We don’t believe that doing something once or twice is enough.  Really useful new methodologies - *that work* - need testing in many different places and contexts … with lots of different people.  That’s why we have tested our community workshop activities in over 80 communities.

We know for example that with this TOC MAP-it we will likely start out with 3-4 times more icons that we will find we generally need once tested.

Have you recently completed a project and know there are things you want to learn?  Email me if you are a community group or funding-limited organisation and would like to have a free experimental mapping session!

{Note: We can only do free sessions at the moment where they can fit around our exisiting work and committments ... and in and around London areas. Organisations with regular amounts of funding should ask for an estimate.}

How Do We Create New Knowledge for Creative/Collaborative Participatory Paradigm?

Thank you for the fascinating response to my post earlier this week asking if we are seeing a new participation paradigm emerging called Creative/Collaborative.

Having read the post you may or may not be persuaded that perhaps something new is going on?  Perhaps you have noticed some ideas and projects that don’t fit into the more mature paradigms… 

To follow on I wanted to outline a bit more detail about what I think some of the strengths and vulnerabilities of Creative/Collaborative might be.

Strengths

The evidence is mounting that connected communities with active and involved citizen have wide ranging and important human effects – increasing protective factors through clever social means and secondary effects. These individual research projects (example below on unemployment) are painting a picture where we can begin to see that a higher density of coordinated and strategic activity at local level might produce secondary effects that no linear organisational service delivery would hope to achieve.

One example of how local government and citizens are working together is the Reading Council project where parents with older children are mentoring families with young children – called Expert Mums. It is more than an idea about how to deliver services more efficiently – it is about doing things better through creative thinking and collaboration.  Having spent time with the remarkable team, led by Melani Oliver, who have been developing Expert Mums it is obvious that this project is totally collaborative – both in its co-design with the parents – right through to the training ... in fact creativity and collaboration are completely woven into the idea's design.

Vulnerabilities

1. Because it is still emerging we don’t understand it fully yet

 Myself and others at Social Spaces have been studying this phenomenon for a few years now.  It is emergent and so we need to be constantly watching and analysing… as well as discussing and arguing.  It is both exciting and demanding work.  We have been trying to do two things at once – learning from communities that are being successful  - and seeing how to spread this emergent knowledge to others.  By taking a positive deviance approach, studying what key factors are making local projects successful, we have been able to make some significant headway in understanding new ways of working in this new paradigm. But it is ongoing work and we need many many clever people to take this emergent knowledge to the maturity needed.

2. It is difficult

Working in this new way is more difficult – no question about that. But less about the work being difficult in itself - but more because it is different.  It requires a whole new set of methods and ideas – drawn from a whole host of disciplines.  It also requires a deep understanding of how change might be designed – not with last year's methods, but right now.  The communities we visit are ambitious – they don’t want help to start a project, or write a funding bid… they want to transform their communities.  They want their neighbourhoods to be good places to raise their children – drug and violence free.  They want people to feel welcome and appreciated – not lonely or depressed or poor.  And they want to be involved in making that happen – they have a real conviction that they can make change.

But making change is not so easy.  In organisations, where employees are paid to change, the statistic for successfully achieving any type of transformational change is believed to be around 25%. In the Charity or Challenge paradigms making change is much easier – one using compassion and the other pressure. Using your ingenuity to make change is difficult enough – but to do this collaboratively – with other living humans – is tough stuff.

3. Patchy and ineffectual

The more we work in this paradigm we see that being inspired is part of the story - it is motivating and exciting. Having one's imagination captured, having a collective vision of a more positive future - one that you might be able to make happen through the contribution of your own efforts - is essential.  But we think it is going to take more than that to have real impact.  It will take new knowledge and facilitation (from government and other professionals). It will also require new structures of funding. We are seeing examples where wrong sums of money injected at the wrong time can kill this type of work easier at times than no money.

So failure to have collective impact, failure to co-ordinate, collaborate and build on small initial steps .... wrong, or less sophisticated types of evaluation ... over time this could all add up to people losing confidence in its potential.

4. It might threaten other paradigms

As described in this article by Philip Colligan “Equipping citizens with the skills and knowledge to help themselves and each other is clearly a good investment. But running through many of these innovations is a more radical idea that challenges the nature of professionalism and expertise.” 

Additionally there are many professionals working in communities who work only in particular paradigms that are currently not that compatible with Creative/Collaborative.

But that isn't the full story by any means.  Professionals have valuable expertise to offer citizens - as citizens are increasingly creating knowledge themselves.  This exchange needs to become two-way, open and collaborative.  If we think it is right (and ultimately effective) for citizens to take the lead on making and shaping their communities - what sort of new professional practices need to evolve to facilitate and support this new type of activity?

The Challenge – The Opportunity – The Invitation

In summary, I believe that there is a new paradigm emerging that requires intense study, investment and sheer hard work.  I believe it has the real potential to change how the world works.  Over the last year I feel personally that some progress has been made in understanding how it all might work - our work is improving every week.

But, unfortunately or fortunately, whichever way you want to look at it, I also believe that the only way to make some significant progress in surfacing, understanding, growing and spreading this new knowledge is – you probably guessed already – collaboratively. And creatively.

At this moment in time you cannot sign up to do a degree course in the new Creative/Collaborative paradigm.  But there are university projects which are working on bits of it.  I estimate that there are 30-50 university projects world wide currently working at the intersection of localism – either through environment/design/social/art/tech/philosophy/policy and so on.  These projects are very important – but equally important are the hundreds of projects emerging at community level which are creative and collaborative.  While we may in the past have labelled these projects ‘practice’… I don’t believe this is true.  These projects are generating valuable knowledge.  You could consider that these grassroots projects are in fact conducting action research – but currently much of this knowledge isn’t being gathered.

Howard Gardner once suggested that it took 10 years for educational research generated at university level to reach schools widely.  This knowledge is far too important and timely to wait for traditional methods of gathering and dissemination. 

To demonstrate the speed of emergence I can point to Hand Made. Last year it was difficult to find 28 projects or commentary that fell into this type of thinking.  Now we have 40 volunteer editors gathering local stories of making change in a Creative/Collaborative way for what has become the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.  This is significant enough to call a 'surge' in new types of activity.

Historically we have often regarded grassroots activity in a political context – often focusing on ‘voice’ and opinion.  If we regarded communities as makers and designers – generators of new knowledge and solvers of problems as well then we cannot rely on old ways of doing things. If we also regard that academics, theorists, policy makers and professionals have a rich and indispensible contribution to make to this landscape in understanding, gathering, applying valuable existing theories and knowledge.... we are left with a big challenge which I put to you.

How do we collaboratively create a transdisciplinary approach to people powered change?

‘[t]rans-disciplinarity emerges through a fusion and bridging of disciplines, not merely the bundling of multiple disciplines” Koizumi 1999

How do develop new methodologies of knowledge creation and dissemination which are faster and better? This is one discipline which isn't going to be developed in the office or in the field alone....

How do we generate new knowledge in such a way that we can make this knowledge open-source to communities - rather than proprietorial or commercial?

Is this the Big Society 'curriculum' that Matthew Taylor described in his post yesterday?

UPDATES:  

Brilliant post be Jocelyn Cunningham of the RSA about their experiences on the Peterbough project working in the Creative/Collaborative way...

Fascinating critic from David Wilcox on how the different models play out at the funding end of things....

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More collaborative

Unfinished Business

In the last two weeks a particular quality of community projects and spaces which seem to be working particularly well, has became clear to me: being unfinished as built in quality to engage people.This is counterintuitive to the way we have think about services or our public spaces. They are built around things being in order, sorted out, and meticulously planned out. (Social) Designers are very much consciously aware of this. They have all kind of possibilities of designing in, mostly unaware to us, a particular and desired kind of behaviour. Dan Lockton’s set of card ‘Design with intent’ offers 101 examples of things designers can do to influence our behaviour through design. His set of cards can be found here. Leaving things unfinished isn’t part of his extensive repertoire.

Thinking about changing people behavior through design has recently got a big push through the work of Thaler and Sunnstein on nudging. Their concept of a choice architecture deals with the same thing. Through this design thinking has been introduced to both a more general public and to a much wider variety of domains.

One thing we should remember is that people don’t always use the way things are intended. They deviate from the way things were meant to be used. A nice example in public space is offered by this picture (on the highly recommendable blog Urban Bricolage by Eric Hooge, a collection of people tinkering with urban space)

The caption of this picture reads: 

“A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.”

This deviating behavior already points to an openness in every design for users to explore particular ways of using it. But this deviant behavior is mostly seen, especially from the perspective from the designer or the planned world, as undesirable. But what if this openness is exactly what helps define a good public space or community project? And is keeping things unfinished as a design choice a way of designing in this openness? To explore this first two examples which made me realize ‘being unfinished’ might be a particular quality you could use and could help us explain their value and what it offers different from services.

The first time this became clear to me was while visiting the Arcola Theater during a study trip organized by Inspiring Cities. During this visit Ben Todd gave a talk explaining how the theatre came about and how it operates. There were many interesting things happening at this place, but one remark stuck with me ‘we try to keep the project unfinished to make people feel able to relate to it’. By keeping things open, you give people the opportunity to not only act as a user, a client or a customer. You give them the possibility to appropriate things, make them (part of) their own. From a user you are given the opportunity to co-own something. This doesn’t mean that you do not offer anything. It’s not about offering nothing; it’s about keeping a particular openness for people to relate to objects or spaces in a different manner than consumer mode.

 



The second recent encounter with the value of being unfinished occurred to me while visiting socialspaces.be at the Media, Arts and Design Acadamy in Genk. One of their researchers, Ben Hagenaars told about a former project of his, Animation Vegetation. In this project he has created 3D jute dolls filled with soil and grass to drop in the public space. Inspired by the graffiti movement, the dolls aim to generate more green spaces in public spaces. What makes this project interesting is that Ben has put a tutorial on his website which enables everyone to make their own. So he gives away a template to intervene in public spaces, thus enabling others to do something with it. Again this is a nice example of the added value of leaving something unfinished.

Leaving things unfinished invites people to engage with things in a deeper, more personal manner. It is an invitation to appropriate something, to make it your own, to add value and meaning to it. Moreover it hands over responsibility, ownership and control to people. It asks them to make something, not out of nothing, but at least make something happen. They can add their skills, knowledge, experiences and dreams. By keeping it unfinished people who join in later can still add something.

So where does this leave us. Should we just do nothing and leave it up to people to fill in all those things which we leave intentionally unfinished. No, that would be pushing it. Instead we should be looking at ways in which we could strategically built in the unfinished. To help me articulate this and finish off this post, I want to refer to a text by Joop de Boer en Jeroen Beekmans. They run a website 'The Pop-Up City' collecting examples of temporary and flexible Interventions in urban space. In the recently published book ‘The spontaneous city’ by Urhahn Design, they have written a text in which they argue that in a sense spontaneity is overrated, or maybe it’s too optimistic a view on how to work with and on cities. Instead they argue that we should not expect things to happen spontaneous by nature, we should try and induce spontaneous action in people. They call it ‘Artificial Spontaneity’. Although a good party has a spontaneous feel to it, it requires a lot of preparation. What this implies for designers is thus that is not about ‘the spontaneity of the intervention, but about giving rise to the spontaneous social interaction’. Leaving things unfinished is one way of creating such artificial spontaneity. I leave it at that, maybe unfinished, but ready for you to take it further wherever you want to. 

 

Social Spaces: Why Pie?

When the lovely people over at Westminster Hub asked us to hold some sort of event for their Changemakers’ Fayre on the 27/28^th October we thought long and hard about what sort of event we could do that would fit with the Hub’s ambitions to seed thousands of new conversations during the Fayre … and also our own ideas and work.

Our first thought was to shape an event that brought together some of the amazing people we know to share some of the research, strategies, and other transdisciplinary emergent community stuff our heads are currently immersed in.  Which of course would have been lovely… and we hope to be doing a lot of that sort of event in the coming months.

But instead we decided to do a PieLab event for the whole day on the 28^th  – thanks to some bright thinking from Laura Billings.  This means that we will just to be hanging out at the Hub, sharing free pie and chatting to everyone that wants to pop by.

In all our workshops we talk about PieLab in Greensboro Alabama – one of our most inspiring projects.  The Changemakers’ Fayre gives us an opportunity not only to talk about PieLab, publish books about PieLab … but to actually ‘do’ PieLab.

We talk about PieLab for two very important reasons:

There are no short cuts

PieLab is a brilliant example of how a project can (and should) start from the smallest point of contact between people.  When we look at the Theory of Change and assumptions that people are working to on many existing community projects we often see that a common ‘failure to engage’ is often caused by a ‘failure to start small enough’.

And with so much talk around at the moment about taking over community buildings and services, and even social enterprise, it is easy to see how in our haste we could forget that absolutely nothing happens in communities without the relationships that drive any ideas and projects forward. 

PieLab started by holding free pie events, with the simple proposition that ‘life can be bad, free pie isn’t’ …. And now have permanent premises in the high street out of which they still produce pies, but also have created an amazing community space through which all sorts of enterprising initiatives have emerged – from BikeLab to apprenticeships …

Below is the PieLab piece that they wrote for  the Hand Made so you can read their story for yourself.

Social is Social Change

So while we might see that building on relationships can be a great strategy for developing bigger more transformative projects, for many people the social can be the social change they really need.  We spent some wonderful time last week in Oldham, Manchester with a group called the Friends of Stoneleigh Park, that had started by focusing on their local park (which is beautiful), but now hold a lot of events for the community more widely.  We found that the level of care that this group are showing as they plan their events really inspiring – right down to picking elderly people up from their homes to attend a coffee morning or book swap… and even making sure they had someone they knew to sit next to.  Bringing people that might otherwise be isolated or lonely into enjoyable and comfortable contact is vital and valuable social change in itself.

Noel Hatch mentions the PieLab in his post here, quoting Toby Blume's post 'Food is Love' "If the ultimate act of love is to nurture another human being, then how can providing nutritious and delicious food be anything other than a hugely caring and generous deed?

My friend in the US, Jack Ricciuto in this interview extract  talks about exactly this point – saying that when you have a lot of money you can be preoccupied with scaling up as fast as possible, but when you want to engage people in the community it is the ‘small acts’ which really make a difference.

Invitation to PieLab

On Friday myself and Laura Billings will be bringing lots of pies (some we will even have made ourselves) to the Westminster Hub and we hope that many people will stop by and talk to us about their ideas and plans for social change – what they think community is all about and how we can all ‘do’ community in our own places and spaces.

A Big Thank You

We also wanted to give a big thank you to Tim, Alice and Indy at the Hub for letting us loose on their formally pristine greenhouse meeting room to bring in our This is Community installation - pics here and here.  Thanks for the confidence and trust… and above all the sense of creativity and fun you’ve allowed us… and of course to make something beautiful, visual and tangible out of our ideas and work.

And thank you also to all the lovely folk over in the US who created PieLab from the beginning – especially Megan Deal and Amanda Buck  who have wished us a lovely day on Friday and have always been so supportive of the Social Spaces project!

 

Update: Nice commentary piece by David Wilcox reporting the event

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community

Agendas vs Emergence

Hello y'all. How's tricks?

So today I was at an RSA Thursday talk on Manavodaya - values based development. And it really struck a chord with what we do at Social Spaces so I thought I'd share a few gems...

The basic premise of this way of working is a belief in capacity. People are the experts - they are steeped in their own experience and know much more about what is going on in their lives and ways to change things than you do. Professionals need to work with humility, understand the limitations of their role, and take care to leave power in the hands of people.

The alternative to this tends to be a pre-set agenda of people's requirements and a planned service. We, the professionals, know what your issues are and we have designed and will deliver the solution to you. Well meaning and often with positive outcomes, but perhaps not sustainable in the long term as it sets up a dynamic of professionals providing services to people with needs. Sounds pretty disempowering to me.

In contrast, the asset based / values based / social design approach seeks to make an initial connection on a human level, with no agenda. Well ok. Perhaps a bit of an agenda to help improve a situation or offer support, but an openminded manner in how this could be approached and the belief that the answers are to be found along the way together rather than provided at the start. Great things can grow from small beginnings. In this case, a conversation and a connection. ( Free pie anyone?)

Which leads me to a few questions...

If we think that collaboration and human scale connections are the way forward, how do we redesign our 'service' industries to facilitate this? Charity, public sector, education...

If funders need to be sold on positive outcomes and targets, and want to know where the money's going, how do we prove if the open ended approach is more fruitful in the end?

If we don't know precisely what the outcomes might be, how do we measure impact and share what works? How do we quantify the qualitative?

If people need to come to their own conclusions and definitions in order for change to be effective, how do we create a shared vision and work towards it? How do we tap into the amazing capacity and knowledge in each one of us?

Let's talk....

(You might have guessed I do have a few thoughts on this... but I'll leave that for another story.)
Pic: community asset map in production. Boothtown, Halifax.

Social Spaces: First Community Kitchen in Lambeth Tomorrow Night

Lambeth Council, better known as the first Co-operative Council, is hosting a 'Volunteering Speed Dating' event tomorrow night 17th August between 6pm - 8pm.  The idea of the event has come out of the many offers of support the council has received over the last week following the civic disturbances.

As Lambeth have described, the evening will be an opportunity to:

• Meet people like you from across the borough
• Talk to community organisations and groups needing further support
• Get advice on how your skills can be used in Lambeth
• Commit to volunteer or just talk to experts about the sort of thing you want to do
• Get involved or be a wallflower, you can just listen to what's being discussed
• Celebrate what they have here in Lambeth.

Social Spaces will be running a Community Kitchen workshop in the Canteen between 7pm - 8pm for all residents who would like to start conversations about how the community can build further in the wonderful spirit in the area.

In planning for months now, the Community Kitchen is a new project planned to launch in the next few weeks, but we are bringing the project out early for this event.  Community Kitchen has evolved out of the Travelling Pantry project, and aims to give communities a new tool around which to hold positive conversations for stronger communities.  Community Kitchen will take on different guises and formats, but we hope that they will become, with the help of some accessible tools, regular self-arranged get-togethers for communities.  

Unlike traditional committee meetings and forums, Community Kitchens will encourage informal and creative conversations around developing new community projects with an asset-based focus rather than a problem solving or deficit-focused one.  The full launch of Community Kitchen will officially begin in September, and will see a large number of workshops being rolled out by a Local Authority as part of their innovative Community Engagement Strategy. 

Please join us on Wednesday 17th August between 7pm - 8pm in the Canteen (appropriately) at the Assembly Hall, Lambeth Town Hall, Town Hall, London SW2 1RW

We will be re-opening the free Travelling Pantry project in the next few weeks  - offering workshops to community groups in response to requests following the riots -  in Lambeth and Peckham... and other areas .... so please register your interest here.

Social Spaces: Loving Everything in Rotterdam

I have been off the blog for the last few weeks - mostly enjoying a break and working on Hand Made 2 (much excitement once again!)

But before all that I had 3 heavenly days in Rotterdam plotting and planning with Maurice Specht.  We spent a lot of time in his shared office space (pic above)... but also a fair amount visiting projects and talking to people working on local projects.

One of the unusual and beautiful observations in Rotterdam are the hollyhocks growing between the halls of the houses and pavements... and not by accident either.  It is a project called Stokroostegel and has been created by Patrick Kruithof (pic below) who describes himself as a designer, writer and explorer.  Patrick has designed and manufactured special bricks which replay normal paving stones - the new ones designed to all the plant to gorw through and the rain water to reach the roots.  Brilliant!

He told us all about the project and their hopes to continue making Rotterdam a more beautiful place to live.  It was interesting to Maurice and I that during the conversation it was clear that social engagement hadn't yet become a priority yet for the project - but we discussed quite a lot about how local schools in particular could become showcases for the idea. 

More on Rotterdam projects to come!

the subversive interim

Two things I read while on the train to localgovcamp in Birmingham, prompted me to write this blog and take a book I read a couple of months ago off the shelf. First was this tweet by Richard from www.guerrillagardening.org who wrote: “I see there’s no crime of ‘subversion’ in the UK J Preparing for my speech at RIBA on subversion in public space”

The second was an invitation to a meeting under the title: Pecha Kulcha Night Rotterdam: Space in the Interim.

Many of our cities are filled with vacant building sites and buildings, some of which stand empty and undeveloped for years, while construction projects are being delayed or even abandoned completely. Standard approaches to urban development, which still often concentrate on the envisaged end results, need to be radically re-examined. We must reflect on what can be achieved en route, rather than focusing solely on the lure of distant promises. This perspective repositions the interim as a phase with scope for experimentation and the creation of new values.

The two things fit nicely with my recent posts on interim-space or the in between (I know I still have to make up for my promise of writing a blog on inter-persons). Where I see the different examples I talk about as interesting, positive, social experiments, you could also see them as subversive practices. Once you start looking at them in this way, it brings back the political and social dimensions Richard (and I) have mostly refrained from inserting into this conversation. But actually picking this dimension up, might be helpful to explore what’s going on when we start occupying public space. Helpful, because it can help us better understand the anxiety (a quick aside: for an interesting discussion on anxiety, see the latest RSA animate by Renate Salecl on choice) and difficulties people run into when they occupy start working on and in these interim spaces.

Reading both thing closely after another, I immediately saw a link and made me remember a book I reviewed a while ago, titled ‘Subversive Citizens. Power, agency and resistance in public services’ edited by  Marian Barnes and David Prior. I won’t put the review up here (don’t know if I’m actually allowed, hmm, not very subversive myself), but will draw from bits I wrote there. However I urge people who are into this to read this book.

In this book they develop the concept of subversion as an analytic category to analyze: “transformations in the institutional structure and organizational practices of public services and the creation of new spaces of engagement where public officials, professionals and citizens come together to develop and implement public policies (p. 10)”. Using such different conceptual frameworks as the notion of governmentality, social movements, neighborhood policy, assemblages and citizenship, the different authors try to spell out both what subversion is (‘alternative expressions of agency (4)’, that ‘obstruct, deflect or subvert desired policy outcomes (8)’ thus exposing the’ ambiguities, contradictions and tensions that exist within public policy’ (200) and ‘bringing into view – rendering visible and uncomfortable – the network of assumptions that sustains and supports the existing field of distinctions, regulations and practices’ (76))the different forms subversive strategies take (collective resistance, exit strategies, ignoring or bending the rules, declining to take the expected or allocated roles, acts of disruption, sabotage, and non-compliance and the , renegotiation of identities, rules of conduct and roles within forums and other arenas) and the potential sources of subversion in the field of public policy (contingency and situated judgment; internal negotiations and competing interpretation of policies goals and aims; new assemblages of power, resources, ideas, interest and agents). Given these dimensions of subversion it would be interesting to see what this would make visible with regard to the practice of occupying public space, occupying the interim and what the reactions, etc tell us about the network of assumptions in which we live.

Given that this particular angle only just occurred to me, I have not yet used this particular angle to think about what it can help us reveal when trying to understand these interim space. This is going to be one of those summer projects, which will have to wait for autumn to actually materialize. But just as I promise with regard to my blog on inter-persons, I will come back to the notion of subversion in relation to the interim.

One final element which I don’t want to keep from you. As most authors in the book, I intend to use the concept of ‘subversion’ as an analytical concept with which to analyze the political, social, hell maybe even the economical dimension of taking up public space/interim space by residents and see how it challenges or makes visible this network of assumptions under which we live. However, ‘subversion’ is not the prerogative of citizens only, as John Flint reminds us. The concept of subversion is also used in policy documents to create the grounds for specific policies. Being deemed subversive then gives the government a reason to intervene. ‘Subversion in this sense represents a process whereby an individual or population is viewed as challenging, reinterpreting, realigning or redirecting the perceived ‘original’ purpose of social policy or the ‘traditional’ settlement between citizens and the state (Flint, 2009, 83). He then goes on to point out how four kinds of citizens are being treated in this manner by the UK government: antisocial’s, the workless, immigrants and Muslims. Just something to keep in mind!

ps: after I finished this post on the airport, I read this post by David Barrie titled Tahrir, cities and a new enterprise of public place, which links up nicely with the more political and social discussion the notion of subversion helps us see.

 

The Burning House

The Burning House is a fascinating and beautiful blog were people submit what they would save from their home in case of a fire. 

A Little Book of Friendly Services

A Little Book of Friendly Services is a delightful community piece by Emily Colombo that has come out of Brokencitylab's 30 Day SRSI project.

[wow!]

 

Friday evening just gone I was sitting in Goodenough College listening to a variety of speakers share their vision of 'In 10 years" at a TEDx conference with some colleagues and friends from my previous job with the RSA.

We heard Christian Busch of Sandbox talk about socially aware business models, Jan-Emmanuel de Neve shared his work on the genetics of happiness, and Bia Carnieiro on the ways that sport can develop young people from her work in Brazil.

I went out feeling full of ideas, and carrying a goodie bag with Penguin books and some tea bags, both of which I have tucked in to this weekend. (I've not read Alain de Botton before, but 2 pages in and it seems interestingly wide ranging and poetically detailed...goes quite well with a strawberry tea.)

So this evening, while I'm sat re-hemming a dress from the thrift shop that needed a few inches less frump before being wearable, I tuned into again, and the film above reminded my why I love it so much and how amazing we really are.

Total Transparency and Trust

Many people enjoy the level of transparency that social media has brought into their lives. I think that this level of openness can lead to trust on lots of different levels.  By revealing everything we can about ourselves, our work, ideas, beliefs, we give people more opportunity to trust us, because we aren't hiding very much.

But we often conceal our sadness or disappointments from social media because we don't want people to give us attention about this, or we think it makes us look bad in some way. How we stay authentic without showing our moany side too much? A modern dilemma. 

So would you be prepared to wear a flashing pendant that reveals to others what your heart is doing? This new device called HeartSpark shows to other people if your heart starts beating faster, through fear or excitement or anger or any other complex emotional cocktail which changes your physiology. 

Except when it is on the Fake setting, that is....

 

Big Society: Falling in Love, Inception and Pigs

Last night’s Travelling Pantry workshop was in Laurencekirk, which is a small town of 3,500 people, south of Aberdeen.  I had been invited by Caspar Lampkin, a recent graduate from Adberdeen University who is now Chairing the Transition group in Laurencekirk, where he went to school.  I will write a special post on Caspar when I have the full extent of all the work he is doing- particularly with the university where we are doing a workshop today to launch Transition. But Caspar is a wonderful inspiration already and my new Social Spaces poster child!

Two things to highlight from last night. 

We were all serial volunteers… everyone there had several community commitments from Scouts to PTA to maternity group.  The similarities in these terms with the group we worked with in Torwood a couple of weeks ago was striking.  We discussed what the characteristics might be of ‘initiators’ and how understanding what drives people to engage fully with their communities might help nurture a greater number of people to be involved. 

It is something that totally fascinates me, and I hope through the project some real clues will emerge as to how and why this motivation emerges.  We know already that parental involvement is a big influence in civic involvement as adults… and that social norms play a significant part.  We can certainly factor in personality – intervert/extrovert etc

It could also be much more fundamentally about our world view and how we see how part in it. In the film ‘Inception’  the premise, apart from all the confusing mental layering, is the concept that once an idea is 'planted' or emerges in our heads, it can take root and be almost impossible to expel. Like Japanese knot weed or bracken.

E Paul Torrence, the inspirational researcher into creativity wrote in 1983:

“My experience and research have increasingly made me aware of the dreadful importance of falling in love with “something” - a dream, an image of the future. I am convinced that the driving force behind future accomplishments is the image of the future of people. Positive images of the future are a powerful and magnetic force.”

So have people, who are prepared to come out on a Tuesday night in November to talk for 3 hours about ways that they can engage their community in making new things collectively, ‘fallen in love’ with the idea of making their community better ... do they have a particularly strong sense of their own agency and ability to effect change... and if so where did this come from?

The second fascinating aspect of the workshop yesterday was how the mapping activity worked. It was quite astonishing just how many community spaces there were in Laurencek itself and in the surrounding villages. On top of that were the enormous number of groups… mums groups, vintage car groups, scouts, SWRI…. We couldn’t make flag labels fast enough!  So how could the Transition group connect these groups to make the market, the community garden, the bike workshop, the men’s shed, the women’s shed … using some of the thinking around harnessing the drive of ‘involved’ people, whatever their core interest?  We will have to wait and see….

Special thank you to Theo – 18 weeks old - who was a dream all through the workshop – no doubt from the relaxing effect his mother Danielle (who is also a pig farmer!)

 

Big Society: Permanent, Temporary and Mobile

One of the questions we are asking in the Travelling Pantry workshops is how a project idea could relate regarding their fixture in time and space.  In a typical community centre for example the space is designed to be flexible: playgroup unpacks for the morning, the WI has a meeting in the afternoon, the evening is a local event of some kind.  The space is often treated much like a stage set, trying to get the maximum use by the maximum number of people.

But is it a bit like renting a house… you never unpack properly and these spaces can remain empty shells with no atmosphere.

The project which has most reinforced that this ever-changing has been limitations is MensSheds in Australia which are community making sheds (there are now over 400 of them).  They are fully equipped for making and repairing permanently.

Equally there are many projects now making use of empty shops on a temporary basis – to fantastic effect. Some concepts lend themselves to a temporary treatment, including art exhibitions and pop-up community initiatives, such a Community Sharing Lab, an idea to kick start some community interaction.

There is also using the temporary to test an idea before making it permanent in the way that PieLab did.

Then there are temporary spaces which feel more like permanent 'making spaces'. Above from the Reware Upcycle Craft Market one of the amazing projects from City Repair, who work with volunteers to bring life to physical spaces in Portland.  It reminded my a lot of the wonderful Brixton Market, and also offers inspiration to how the Brixton Market project might extend its activities in to the community - already a hub of citizen-led creative activity! And of course there is the marvellous work of the Meanwhile Project and Artists and Makers!

There are also quite a few spaces like this mushrooming in Bristol - several of them around the Coexist project. (The Travelling Pantry will be holding an 'open' workshop there in January)

But of course my present obsession personally is mobile projects… so below is selection of my current favourites.

Edmonton CommuniTEA Infusion

"The CommuniTEA Infusion experience is essentially a mobile tea house that comes to a neighborhood street and creates a kind of town square where people can come together, get to know each other better and strengthen connections.  One reason this is important in our fast paced society today, is that fewer persons are connected in meaningful ways with community.  If however the gathering place comes right to your door, there is a greater chance for meaningful exchange to take place."  

Design Revolution Road Show

"Earlier this year, Project H Design founder Emily Pilloton and project architect Matthew Miller bundled 40 humanitarian design solutions into a vintage Airstream trailer and went on an American road trip. An extraordinary traveling showcase, the Design Revolution Road Show made stops at 35 high schools and university design programs where students of all ages got the chance to see up-close how design can make a difference."

Truck Farm

"Using green-roof technology and heirloom seeds, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis transformed an '86 Dodge into a traveling produce patch and educational tool.

The mobile garden project soon grew: Truck Farm visited 40 schools and the USDA on an Earth Week Tour. It inspired 65 student groups to start their own gardens in unexpected places. And now, as the star of a documentary film, Truck Farm is set to showcase innovative urban agriculture taking root around the country."

The Big V Bus

"Students are being invited to get on board and discover how volunteering can provide skills to help candidates stand out from the crowd when applying for a job, as well as being a fun and rewarding experience. There will be a range of talks and activities, lasting from five minutes to an hour to suit the amount of time people have available."

The WhoFarm

"The mission was plain and simple. "We the people respectfully request that an organic farm be planted on the grounds of The White House, at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC." We journeyed out across America on an upside-down school bus, talking common sense to farmers and to folks who shopped at farmers markets, to students and teachers, to young and old. Our bus was not just a means of transport, but a platform to invite discussion, and we brought a lot of good attention to the cause. Our recipe for success recommended that DC public school kids work in the garden, that seeds sourced from Thomas Jefferson's gardens at Monticello and that the harvest be shared with a local hunger relief organization. These are all elements incorporated in the White House Kitchen Garden!"

Bus Roots

Still at concept stage... Marco Castro Casio proposes we put green roofs on buses:

 "Reclaim forgotten space, increase quality of life and grow the amount of green spaces in the city. 

Green roofs and vertical gardens have been used as solution to provide green life to space constrained spaces.

If we grew a garden on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the MTA bus fleet, we would have 35 acres of new rolling green space in the city… The equivalent to Four Bryant Parks."

He has quite a lot of ideas in fact!

Land Carpet

 

Brilliance by designer Florian Pucher

Change Connections

Interesting new site called Changed Connections - a collaboration between The Feast social innovation conference and NOKIA.

"We’ve undertaken a series of conversations and events to find out where the future of communication technology could help billions of people around the world better their lives — from organizing for collective power, to accessing health care, or learning even when getting to school is not a possibility. Along the way, it’s become undeniable that this happens by building community. That’s why we’re connecting with you, here, now: to create a space for open ideation and change."

Mud on Your Pants

 Mud on Your Pants (literal translation) is a project which is designing and building more playgrounds with natural materials (pic above) in Holland. 

It reminded me of an article in Good Magazine a while ago about natural playgrounds in the US.  The article quoted form research published in Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods, which showed that 'there is now new, compelling evidence that playing in natural settings has specific benefits beyond those associated with free play.' 

There are also many who would support kids being allowed more freedoms and less structured play.

I am pretty convinced that together with new evidence that exercising outdoors boost mental health that we should be doing more to tune into natural rhythms. 

Another great example of natural play is the adventure playground in Berkeley in California (pic below) where kids are allowed to play with crap materials - from loose wood to old tires - to promote creativity and responsibility.

Jonah Lehrer: Too Cool For Just About Anything

Here is his talking about the virtue of being an outsider at Pop!Tech

Jonah Lehrer: Creative Insights from PopTech on Vimeo.

David Report: Time to Rethink Design

 I like the David Reports.  There is a new report out, questioning quite powerfully the role of design, asking for a focus on life cycle instead of lifestyle.

"Let’s face it; design is now a major source of pollution, as process and a phenomenon, design has degenerated into a state of aesthetic proliferation that has reached accumulative and destructive levels, in terms of loss of meaning, value, and identity." 

Urban Beekeeping Now Legal in New York

 According to Good, New York City’s board of health voted Tuesday to lift a ban against beekeeping, legalizing the hives of hundreds of residents who have tended bees in defiance of the law.

"The unanimous vote amends the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Beekeepers will be required to register with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and to adhere to appropriate practices. That means they must be able to control bee swarms and ensure that the hives do not interfere with pedestrians or neighbors."

Culture Sharing Lab

 I was ill all week and had to cancel nearly everything! The thing I minded missing the most was the Culture Sharing Lab at University of Surrey on Wednesday - the result of our workshop a month ago!  The student produced a number of interactive art pieces, including the hanging postcard display (image above).

It looks fantastic! Can't wait to see the digital re-capture!

Newspaper Club

 Never have I wanted to produce a newspaper more! So exciting!

"And if you want us [Newspaper Club] in a nutshell it's this; we think the web is wonderful and printed newspapers are a tremendous, highly-evolved way of reading stuff. We think combining the two is a good idea. We're not about news or any particular form of content, we're about ink on newsprint. Whatever you think would be good to print that way; we think you're probably right."

Sea of Foolishness

 

The Map of Humanity

"From the mythical cradle of human thought in the Garden of Eden, to the farthest reaches of human imagination, the map plots out mankind's achievements, trials, and tribulations throughout history. We have constructed a world made up of our own actions and beliefs, as much as the one formed by the land we live on. The map of humanity is formed by our thought, our feelings, our dreams, and our nightmares."

Via: Nicola Avery

This is It

Nathan Williams, a photographer, has produced a beautiful booklet of words and images called Worthy Read Two.  He sent it to me today and I thought it was lovely. You can request it by leaving a comment on his blog. The quote below I believe is from Walden, and Civil Disobedience (1858) by Henry David Thoreau. Click on pic to enlarge.

Rethink

 An installation by Anna Garforth Rethink was located in front of two main resources we heavily depend upon, gas and water. The word communicates a need to rethink about what we consume and how we consume it.