Thriving too

A(re)imagined Library: organizing by doing part 2 (of …)

My head is still spinning from last week’s events. Two and a half months ago I wrote about my day in the park, trying to start conversations with people about organizing an alternative to the library which was closing. What I didn’t know then, was I would be co-organizing a 5-day festival showcasing to everyone what kind of ideas we picked up during the first 6 months of conversations.

There is a lot to tell about the festival, but my head is too tired to write it down (and I have to take a step back first too, something which writing this isn’t helping J). But I want to reflect a bit on the reason why we organized the festival the way we did it.

First why a festival? Why not take everything we learned during our conversations, turn it into a project plan and ask people to back us? Why not write a proposal and see if we could find partners which can help us launch the Reading Room? Why pop-up for 5 days, make people excited, and then close shop again? These are good questions, but part of the answers is we weren’t sure what we wanted to create. The conversations gave us first glimpses of what it could be like, but no clear indication of what it should be. So we decided that we needed to experiment. On my desktop I have this picture from a slide by Tom Hulme from IDEO, and that is exactly what we did in this case. By organizing the festival we gave ourselves the opportunity to learn what we want to create.

Secondly by organizing the festival we could directly engage a lot of people. The whole festival was only made possible by the involvement of some 70 volunteers. Some just added a small bit, some were instrumental to the success (spoiler alert: yes the festival was a big success. The space looked stunning and most elements where well visited and liked). During the day in the park we met Martin, who was into Linux and computers and who volunteered to create a whole network for us with 5 working computers and wifi. Then there was Ruud, who is an interior designer by profession and who volunteered to create a stunning space. And then there where Karin and Merel. The first designed our logo and flyers, the second our pr-plan and our website. They all added their professionals expertise to enable us to make an even better statement.

Because that is the third reason why we organized the festival. Because no matter how good Joke and I can write, we would never have been able to put into words what we created during the festival. First of all, we would never have set out for a building of such scale. For we got a building from a housing corporation for free for a month which was 300 square meters. It was a former hamam which had been empty for more than a year. The scale of the building was a bit frightening at first, but once we got used to it and started to work there, we saw all kinds of potential. Since there was no natural light in the back of the space, and it was partly closed off, we added a cinema to the original plans, showcasing films by Rotterdam filmmakers. All these little surprises added to the great programmed we put together. We organized the festival around 5 themes: learning, reading, reading to, meeting and sharing. Each theme was made tangible by organizing related activities during the day. This ranged from organizing workshops on day one (based on the principles of Trade School) to readings by poets and a meeting between reading groups on day two. Day three all kinds of activities for kids were organized and the fourth day was a day full of events set up for like-minded people to meet each other. On the final day we explored the possibilities of sharing by hosting several conversations. We closed off the week with great lentil soup from the neighbors from across and music by Jaap Hekman en Klaas Blonk (you will hear them in the video attached at the end of this post). 

And next to all these activities we had fresh coffee and tea, wifi, magazines, daily newspapers (3 dutch, one Turkish, and one Chinese) and more than a 1000 books which people could just take home. So even if there was no program people came to talk, work, take a book or just drink a cup of coffee and enjoy the nice atmosphere.

Adding all this together, we now have a great argument in our hands to start conversations with all kinds of parties in the city to see how they can help us to keep this public space open. So we have been creating a community by doing the festival and together we can now make a better argument of what we want to do. And even more so, we now actually have an idea what we want to create. And finally we want to do it in this particular space if possible. For where the space first was a bit frightening, I now can see no other use for it than a Reading Room.

There is much more to reflect back on – which I will be doing over the coming weeks – and I will be sharing this with you. As things stand, we now aim to open our doors again in 1 march. In the mean time we will be making plans, talk to a lot of people and do small interventions from time to time (so people won’t forget us, but also to test out new ideas). But first I’m going to close my eyes, think back about all the exciting stuff which happened in the last week, and smile!

leeszaal delen from fcr on Vimeo.

 

 

Tech-enabled radical transparency anyone?

The Knight Foundation in the US has developed a project, the SuperPAC App, where users can simply hold up their iPhone to any presidential ad, and using sound fingerprint technology the app determines who funded it. 

 

Last week we mention that the Austrian city of Klagenfurt has unveiled Projekt Ingeborg, which aims to provide residents with a virtual library through QR code stickers placed around the municipality.

The project seeks to make literary classics more easily available to citizens of the city, which currently does not have a public library. Some 70 recognizable yellow stickers have been placed in locations around Klagenfurt – mostly at bus stops courtesy of support from STW Mobilitat – and passersby can either hold their smartphones next to them or use a QR code reader to be directed towards one of 70 different titles.

So, super easy knowledge sharing - could lead to 100 ways forward to the kind of radical transparency we would all like to see from business and government?

 

Social Objects and Triangulators - a quick reply

This blog is more a reply to Tessy's blog from earlier today. But because I didn't want to leave out the pictures I post it seperately.

Today a social object emerged justed opposite from where I live. A small open wound in the street - where there used to be a three - was turned into a beautiful garden by my neighbor. Using plants from his own garden, and stone which have been laying around for more then 6 months on the other side of the road, he created a beautiful garden.

And the three things Tessy talk about, using the blog post by Project for public Spaces played out:

1. While creating the garden at least 20 people came up to Willem to ask him about the garden, praising him, bringing him more plants, sand, drinks and thanking him he took care of two places which where bothering a lot of people
2. It was a very mixed group of people - from students to housewives with veils and my other neighbor with her two year old daughter.
3. My daughter and the girl of my neighbor where immediately circling around the garden and another man from across the street volunteered to take care of the garden in the future.

I even had a very long conversation with my neighbor - whose name is Willem by the way - and we learned a great deal about each other which we didn't know before. While reading Tessy post, this story immediately sprung to mind and I just had to share. There are more fascinating things to tell about this conversation, but I will keep those for another time.

Social Objects and Triangulators - yet more good excuses to meet people

The most striking observation since starting the analysis of innovative local projects that lead first to Hand Made – and since then the 50+ local editions of Community Lover’s Guide, has been that these projects come at things in a different way.  Traditional means of ‘getting things done’ in a community has been to adopt the logical starting point of ‘what can we fix?’.  It is a sort of housekeeping approach.

However the projects that we focus on understanding and spreading define the problem from a different stand point ‘people need to be better connected – how can we do that?’.  And this isn’t with a view to being better connected to then ‘fix things’ - although they often have more than one effect.  It is better connected to start having important and meaningful secondary effects like increased employment opportunities, or decreased isolation and depression, or less crime etc.

As I observed in Hand Made many of these projects included making, sharing or learning – common denominators that bridge and connect – activities which overcome barriers of age, culture, language, income. 

We have described these for a while as ‘social objects’.  Light, interesting, social activities that give us an excuse to come together productively and enjoyably. And some of these feel like a cultural change. John Dewy regarded it as philosophically important that 'culture comprises both artifacts and humans in their mutual interactions'.

 It also isn’t ‘social’ in the traditional sense of small circles of friends spending time together, nor is it charitable as in ‘lets do something for the people who need our help’.

I was delighted to come across this book by Nina Simon called The Participation Museum  (about participation in museums!) in which Nina Simon gives a really lovely description of social objects:

“Social objects are the engines of socially networked experiences, the content around which conversation happens. Social objects allow people to focus their attention on a third thing rather than on each other, making interpersonal engagement more comfortable. People can connect with strangers when they have a shared interest in specific objects.”

What's also interesting about the book is how much applies to other institutions: membership,social, voluntary etc

On the Project for Public Spaces they have been talking about Three Reasons That Bikeshare Stations Are Ideal Triangulators:

1. They’re natural conversation-starters: You can’t participate in bike share without visiting a bike share station. Stations bring people together around a common interest, giving them an opportunity and a reason to communicate with people they might not otherwise meet.
2. They attract a stream of diverse users at all times of day & night: A truly great place facilitates a mix of uses over time; if there’s nothing to keep a space active at night, it can create uncomfortable or even unsafe conditions for passersby, and detract from the entire community.
3. They act as casual landmarks that concentrate activity: Bike share stations, with their colorful bikes and signage, help to make a place more comfortable and navigable for people who might not be familiar with a neighborhood.

Triangulation is a term devise originally by Holly Whyte:

"Triangulation is the process by which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to other strangers as if they knew each other” 

And I am stopping now ... although keen to write a list now of all the other 100 strange and wonderful social objects I can think of --- including some really wonderful people!

Spontaneous Interventions - A celebration of the power of individuals to change society

Really excited to see the first images from the US Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Architechure Biennale which started a couple of days ago.  They have produced such a stunning exhibit that they have won an award ..." This interactive installation impressed the Jury with its celebration of the power of individuals to change society in small but effective ways. The unpretentiously simple presentation was a delight."

The exhibition and beautiful website highlights100 projects

 "In recent years, there has been a nascent movement of designers acting on their own initiative to solve problematic urban situations, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public. Provisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, opensource—these are just a few of the words that have been used to describe this growing body of work."

 "Spontaneous Interventions will frame an archive of compelling, actionable strategies, ranging from urban farms to guerilla bike lanes, temporary architecture to poster campaigns, urban navigation apps to crowdsourced city planning. These efforts cut across boundaries, addressing architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and the digital universe, and run the gamut from symbolic to practical, physical to virtual, whimsical to serious. But they share an optimistic willingness to venture outside conventional practice and to deploy fresh tactics to make cities more sustainable, accessible, and inclusive."

The collection includes some of our favourite projects - many overdue for wider recognition - and the website will be a wonderful source of inspiration!

Bringing big ideas to life

Pop-ups events are becoming a very important part of our work.  The reason is that bringing things to life in a visible tangible form is a very exciting thing to do.  You can talk and write all you like – but if concepts are new to your audience they can remain sceptical unless they can see and feel the difference you are trying to describe.  In the next few months  we are helping a few communities pop-up in spaces they would like to re-imagine.  Like books, workshops and exhibitions these pop-up events provide a concentrated way of introducing new ideas for projects and intiatives, while giving people the pleasure and inspiration of experiencing a new type of social space – usually one they can create collaboratively together long term.

One of my favourite stories on re-imagining spaces was via the Ted talk I saw over the weekend given by the lovely Jason Roberts from Better Blocks. 

Jason had become rather hooked on his new habit of conjuring up new civic projects – one of them a pretend group to bring back the local tram – which has since turned into a live project with masses of funding.  And “drunk with excitement and enthusiasm” he looked at a local parade of dead shops and started to wonder how he could bring some magic there. 

He looked at the city regulations and discovered that there were so many old regulations that people weren’t even able to but chairs and tables on the pavement. I particularly liked the rule on 'crowds'.

So he arranged a pop-up day where the community designed some interventions expressly to break all the rules.  In so doing the community came together to show what was possible – including detouring trees and starting one-day restaurants.

Last year we saw a wonderful pop-up phenomenon sparked by friend Dan Thomson.  He started the #riotcleanuptag on twitter which led to 90,000 people spontaneously coming out to help their communities clean up.  This has led to a new project recently launched with Dan, Sophie Collard and Lloyd Davis called We Will Gather which supports people using Twitter to make projects and ideas happen locally. And it is really great to see the support being given to the project by Nesta, the Cabinet Office, VInspired and the RSA!  If you would like to attend the launch on the 11 September please register here.

And later on October 20^th I am taking part in a panel at Battle of Ideas called Pop-up communities: here to stay? where with fellow panelists Hugh Flouch and Dave Clements we will to talking about active citizenship and the role of the state in trying to stimulate and support communities to do new things.

We are also producing an event with 00:/ to reimigine St Laurence Church in Norwich on the 13 October with the Church Conversvation Trust who are doing some incredible work bringing churchs into new use - including a circus school! So if you live in Norwich and would like to help us co-produce the event please get in touch!

Helsinki Beyond Dreams

A delightful new book just arrived from Hella Hernberg.  Her collection of perspectives on projects and ideas in and around Helsinki is subtitled 'Actions towards a creative and sustainable hometown'.  She introduces the book:

 

"You are witness to a documentary of a new Helskinki, a city where grassroots culture is flourishing.  In the past few years our previously quiet and reserved Nordic hometown has been a source of constant surprise.  Thanks to a new we-spirit and the enthusiasm of its people, Helsinki is breaking free and becoming a more intreguing and enjoyable place - a city where you can feel at home.

 

The Finnish traditions of "sisu" and "everyman's rights" are merging into a new urban attitude that has the potential to take Helskini beyond our dreams. Sisu is our word for fortitude - the special Finnish kind of perseverance and guts.

 

... When you want to make something unusual happen in Helsinki it still takes a great deal of perserverance to wade your way throgh the jungle of the city's strong bureaucracy. Knowing this we cannot but admire the people who take the initiative."

 

Such inspiring stuff!  Thanks Hella!

 

Books, Boxes and Bartering

It feels like its been a long summer.  I thought it was going to a good time to read, write and generally catch up with things, but instead of catching up on the blogging, as I intended, it has been full of things going on, stuff to be designed, projects to launch and appointments to keep.  Along the way we’ve tripped over a few great things I wanted to share.

Together with 00:/, Maurice Specht in Rotterdam and Jerry Stein in Minnesota we have been collecting innovative library through the Library Lab collaborative project related projects and keeping track of them on the The Library Lab Tumblr.  We were kindly asked by 00:/ to contribute to their consultation event earlier this month for Brent Council for their proposed new library building at the Library Lab in Willesden Green. {You can see more pics from the event here and here} We did a fresh sweep of new or innovative library, space and book related projects for a mini-exhibition that we intended to work as one of the stimulus for the ideas we were hoping to gather from the local community. 

There is a lot original thinking going on out there about libraries, predominantly about incorporating new activities into library spaces as they are doing at Library Lab (working space, crèche etc), putting books into new spaces (stations, parks, shop fronts, churches) and pop-up and mobile solutions to making books even more accessible.  I really love what is happening – in some respects it feels like a real shake up, a major disruption that makes us re-examine books and knowledge sharing in fresh ways. 

Our love affair with libraries is wonderful and powerful – they represent the open and equal access to knowledge and in many places are the few remaining common spaces that feel that they belong us as citizens - places were we can go for stimulation and companionship without spending a penny.  At the same time it is very exciting to see some of the original ideas that are emerging around books. They are disrupting not just the physical aspects of space and books themselves – they are challenging our notions of the commons, knowledge sharing and and the role of the citizen in participating, owning and contributing to ideas of what The Library means to us in the widest sense. 

Here are a few of my favourite examples:

The Uni project in New York

“The Uni is a portable reading room. Sharing books, showcasing the act of learning, and improving public space. It all starts with a cube... Many cubes hold books. Some hold activities like origami, flash fiction, and chess. Some are in Spanish, and some are in Chinese. Some special cubes are curated by others (institutions, educators, and individuals) who have a passion and depth of knowledge on a specific topic. The Uni Librarians mix and match the cubes depending on where they go.”

 

A47 Mobile Library in Mexico City

“A Freightliner M2 20K lorry full of books and supported by a cultural programme is travelling the streets of Mexico City, providing the residents of various neighbourhoods in the capital with access to its contents. Every centimetre of its 20 square metre surface area is in use as a venue for book presentations, film clubs, poetry readings, workshops, as well as the opportunity to meet and socialise in a busy city.”

 

Outdoor Library in Magdeburg, Germany

"This library in an abandoned district in East Germany is built from recycled beer crates and wood from an old warehouse. Residents were involved in the design, books were donated to fill the shelves, volunteers ran the cafe, and people took part in poetry slam events and book readings. The library is open 24/7 and book borrowing and returning is managed entirely on trust."

 

Virtual Public Library in Klagenfurt, Austria 

"A public library using QR codes and stickers. The QR codes act like barcodes, that users can swipe with a mobile phone, and be directed to a website where they can download free e-books. The books chosen often have a historical or cultural relevance to the location of the sticker. The group responsible are aiming to release instructions for replicating their system soon so anyone can turn their city into a library."

Below is the full mini-exhibition - If you would like a pdf copy to use as a stimulus in your library projects please drop me a line.

Open publication 

The Uni Project reminded me of this very cool project 'The People's Kitchen' by the talented Stiftung Freizeit which also brought boxes to the street - this time to ask people to barter for food. 

 "As part of the city, invited potential 2011 "The People's Kitchen", a project of the foundation "Leisure" on August 12 for a meal and exchanging. In the forecourt of the Ferdinandeum prepared Pinchos were not sold, but exchanged for a personal value of passersby. In the workshop of ideas that could make the passers-trading items as drawings, collages and models themselves." {Google translated}

Which in turn reminded me of our much loved Trade School founded by Caroline Wollard and co where people barter for knowledge. Look out for new Trade School London groups starting soon - one in Tulse Hill Estate in Brixon {A great project we are working on with Lambeth Council} - and another in Westminster.  The lovely folk at Hub Westminster are calling out for a founding group - so please do get in touch if you would like bring some imaginative informal learning to life - perhaps even in your lunch hour? 

And if you are living in Rotterdam - please contact Maurice for details of an exciting Library re-imaging event they are holding in the Autumn!

Social Dining: Big tables + New Behaviours

I had the pleasure of have having lunch at Hub Islington last week. Laura and I popped over there to meet Amy Smith the new editor for The Community Lover's Guide to Islington and to talk to the Hub team about their clever use of The Civic Crowd website to map and connect with projects in the local community.  I really enjoyed the friendly and fun lunch – and the delicious food which magically appeared through everyone bringing and making a range of salads, soups etc. 

Food sharing in a community setting is much more than sharing big tables. There is a whole range of new ideas and behaviours springing up  - but overall from our work and study there are lots of signs that people want to spend time together in a way that goes beyond arranged social lunches and dinners – and moves towards a more inclusive, community feel, using food as a way for getting to know people in an informal setting.

And people are so clever - especially with a small amount of inspiration from what other communities are doing. In two of the workshops we did with Neighbourhood Challenge groups, one in Lower Green and the other in Boothtown, people came up with some fantastically imaginative ideas on how they could possibly use food and cooking to build relationships and using their existing resources, without waiting for big events, lots of funding... or permissions.

The Lower Green group had the idea that although they didn’t have a big enough kitchen for shared cooking on the scale they would like, they did have a big hall.  So their idea was to come together, prepare the food together, and then take it home to their own kitchens to cook it…. And then come back together to eat it.  The Boothtown group thought that rather than trying to engage everyone in a big street party straight away, that they would hold weekly suppers in the street, moving from one house to the other, growing the number of people taking part each week.

Sharing food is as old as the hills. But below are some examples of how social dining looks and feels different to a regular restaurant’s consumer-based offering (as lovely as that is too)... or indeed a lunch or dinner at a friends house.

Update: If you are interested in encouraging more social dining, where you live, or work for a local authority, here's the brilliantly easy way that the Hackney Chief Exec and team have decided to do it.

Bring Your Own Restaurant

Do it yourself fine dining on the streets of Holyoke. A plein air potluck held every other Friday.

Outdoor Community Kitchen - Copenhagen

I visited this last summer.  Every week up to 80 people in the local neighbourhood bring dishes and share a meal together.

School Kitchen in Rotterdam

Maurice Specht (right) in the kitchen of a [very inspiring] school in Rotterdam - made completely available for the community to use.

Kitchain 

Modular furniture designed for social dining in a public space.

Collaboration O 

Communal dining area at their collaborative workspace.

Sunday Soup - Meal-based micro-granting events (below pics from Bologne and New York's FEAST)

Streetfeast  A day of local lunches across Ireland - as an excuse to share good food, meet new people who live near you, celebrate our streets and show what is possible when a group of people come together to do something special. Organised by Community Lover's Guide to Dublin editor Sam Bishop, and crew. 

Somewhereto_ … Can we have one for everyone?

I was invited to an Action Group last Tuesday on Giving Spaces at the Cabinet Office, set up by the people at Somewhereto_, led by Sam Conniff of Livity.  If you aren’t familiar with Somewhereto_, it is an amazing project which has been unlocking empty spaces for young people to experiment and use. 

somewhereto_ aims to:

• unlock space to help young people
• create a movement which will enable young people to engage with their creative and cultural passions
• transform use of space throughout local communities

To date, somewhereto_ has…

• unlocked 308,000 sq ft of space,
• negotiated 1732 somewhereto_ space matches, between young people and space holders
• worked with youth partners to engage with young people and space partners who have access to the space which young people need
• highlighted we have potentially leveraged £1.6m in premises costs^.

 I have been a fan of the project since it was in planning and have been astonished at how well the project has been implemented.  On Tuesday we heard from two young people who had used the spaces that were made available to them, not only to fulfil their own aspirations and showcase their own talents and ideas… but also to support other young people do the same.  It was pretty inspiring.

Also inspiring was the dedication  and enthusiasm shown by the local project organisers who have been taking on the tougher side – speaking to local councils and businesses to release the spaces and to cut through red tape … of which there is a lot.

The frustrations won’t surprise you. How do they get more spaces unlocked quicker? How can we change some of the systems which mean the local authorities act with extreme caution, rather that with realism and imagination?

There is certainly willing… but a long way to go …

The meeting was under Chatham House rules, but I do feel at liberty to quote the Minister that was present who called for local authorities ‘to be bolder’ and to use the ‘General Power of Competence’ to find reasons for saying yes to more of these initiatives.

I came away inspired by a brilliantly conceived project, being brilliantly executed … and wishing that we could have a bigger Somewhereto_ that unlocked spaces for everyone’s use,  as well as young people … and also with renewed conviction that these sorts of projects only work this well when there is expert facilitation.

Thanks to Sam for the invitation and to Miranda Sawyer for such animated faciliation and Oli Barrett for bringing his whistle ... and in particlar to the young people who came and shared their inspiring stories! 

Community Lover's Guide: One down, many more to come!

Almost a year after suggesting we make a local edition of Hand Made, 9 March saw the official launch of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam! A collection of 14 initiatives highlighting inspiring and creative ways in which people have been forging bonds and creating communities. Using empty spaces, shops, kids, food, greenery, sand, books, stories, art, and symbols in new and old ways has resulted in some amazing projects.

Making the book has been a thrilling experience. In showed me again how many people are actively trying to make their city into a better place to live. I decided to start the book with an introductory chapter explaining this feeling. So the first draft of this chapter was called 'For the love of public space'  because what I think all the projects collected in this book show is the care, pride and ambition people show for their environment and each other. But it didn't quite get to the significance I started these initiatives had.

So I ended up writting a different chapter called 'Desire Lines', arguing that we should see the projects brought together as social equivalents of the desire lines you see in public space. And just as city planners don't really know how to deal with these desire lines (ignore them, take them into account and make them into official roads, or pave them over from time to time to keep the appearance of the official world as the only way up) policymakers, scientists, media and fellow citizens also find it difficult to relate to these projects. They like them, but what is their particular value? I don't have an answer to this question, but have put it out there as an invitation to explore this with me.

We launched the book in a ‘Community Lover's Lab’ over the course of 3 days, in an empty shop on one of the main shopping streets in Rotterdam. People were welcomed in with a Pie Lab (offering free pie on a china plate), and invited to share what they wanted to see more of in their neighbourhood, and to add assets to a big map of the area. Some were just curious and left after a small exchange, others stayed for an hour talking about the neighbourhood, but also the economy, the value of money, education and coffee shops. It was a really fun and energizing experience.

more pictures of the lab can be found at: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/communityloverslab

Other activities included a conversation with a mixed group of project initiators, urban professionals and researchers gathering to try and find the right language to grasp the value and meaning of the projects brought together in the book. In turned out to be a very difficult thing to do; to have a conversation publicly allowing for doubt in understanding what is happening around us. It has led to a new experiment called 'Doubt-lab' in which we will be trying to find safe conversation formats to publicly express and work with doubts. More will be up on the Social Lab before too long – and it would be great to share others experiences.

You can find all the Dutch chapters here, or buy the book here. The English edition of the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam will be available online for free, and in hard copy print from mid-April. So keep a close I on Twitter (@mauricespecht) for the announcements 

We have also developed a 3 day ' Immerse Learning'  experience around the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam in which we invite people from abroad to explore and learn from these inspiring projects first hand. We call this trip 'Into the Field'. More details can be found here 

All in all what started a year ago as a quaint remark has now gone into its second phase. With the first book coming out, and other editions from different cities as London (Hackney), West-Alabama, Birmingham, Utrecht and Minneapolis around the corner, the potential of this project is becoming more and more clear to me. It's an inspiring way of building a local and an international network of people changing the world bit by bit.For an overview of all the future edition visit Community Lover's Guide to the Universe.

 

Social Spaces: Business in Beta

I tell this story about how Social Spaces started at nearly every workshop - people seem to like the unexpected sense of joie de vivre it introduces.  David Gauntlett and I had been working on this idea for several months - it went something like this "people are doing things differently, they are showing us that the traditional ways of doing things in communities needs to change".  We spoke to funders, considered a research bid... etc.  Then one day, inspired, infected almost, by the stories of the projects I was getting in for Hand Made, I had an idea while doing laps in the pool.  I wasn't going to wait around any longer, I was going to take these ideas on to the road, in a mini, and see how people responded to these new ideas ... see what happened...what could be learned ... and that's what I did for 6 months, travelling 20,000 miles, in 40 workshops with about 1000 people. I had no funding at all.  The communities that requested free workshops helped to cover petrol ... and they kindly put me up over night.  I found myself in student digs, sofas, *terrible* hotels ... and beautiful guests rooms. It was an incredible experience ... and didn't feel very much like prototyping new concepts ... which is what it was all about.

Time goes on and we are always looking forward.  But yesterday I was emailing this very nice lady at IDEO Patterns about Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam  launch and I had reason to look over the list of patterns they have been highighting.  The very first edition was in 2009 called Business in Beta - Don't wait for perfect, launch and learn - by Colin Raney- and I had forgotten all about it.  Looking back I think that this issue was one of the single biggest influences on taking the ideas on the road in the Travelling Pantry in 2010... and reading it over yesterday made me think how much of this attitude is now in everthing we do ... and everything we encourage for community projects to do as well ... sort of in our DNA now...And it is really adictive working in this unbounded way.

Here were their suggestions on taking action:

1. Go early, go often

Building experimentation into your business is harder than you think. Start small and stay focused. Try everything, but don’t try it all in one prototype.

2. Learning by doing

Build value for the business as you prototype. If you fail, what will you have learned? What will you salvage?

3. Inspiration through constraint

Don’t exhaust yourself searching for money and resources. The tighter your constraints, the more creative your prototypes will be.

4. Open to opportunity

Look for unanticipated ways customers are using your offering. Their improvisations may be the future of your business.

So, just wanted to say a big thank you to IDEO for Patterns... and giving this project the inspiration it needed at exactly the right moment it needed it!  And it has turned this project into a open, collaborative adventure... 

And if you are intested in news ways of developing business and ideas the Design the new Business film released this week (and embedded below) is really fascinating. 

Surfacing the good stuff - and then showing it to everyone ...

Some conversations this week have reminded me of some projects that I thought I would share with you,  All of the projects below  have used photography to highlight people and activities in communities.  Photography is used a lot for this purpose - and you may have done something similiar yourself - these projects just stand out a little in terms of showing different ways of doing it.

Hello Neighbour

"Students from ten middle schools across Portland and Central Oregon are participating in Caldera's Hello Neighbor project. Along with photographer Julie Keefe, the students have begun to identify, interview and photograph diverse people of all ages in their neighborhoods. 

From their work, the Caldera students will create photo-and-word portraits to be displayed on large, 7 foot by 5 foot banners throughout their communities."

Rotterdam de Zuiderlingen

In 2008, 155 portraits with between 4,000 and 5,000 residents of Southern Rotterdam were shown through a book and an (outside) exhibition. They also mapped all the groups.

Birmingham Community Tea Room - I am Stirchley

I did a workshop/surgery in Birmingham last year in a pop-up community cafe arranged by Inhabit. In the cafe was an amazing exhibition of photos by Jane Baker - featuring local people working - really beautiful and inspiring work.

JR

And of course all the amazing work of photographer JR.

 

Do these sorts of projects make a difference to a community?  I think that they do. Work around 'social norms marketing' would suggest that by revealing actual activities in a community you can alter a community's perception of where they live.  Social norms marketing (different from 'social marketing') came out of research that showed that young people at colleges in the US perceived that other people drank more alcohol than they really did... and this exagerated perception of what others were drinking made them drink more.  So they went into a community, did quantative research into the real drinking patterns and then promoted those real figures, instead of the inflated ones that students were imagining.  This reduced alcohol consumption.  Rather than broadcasting, revealing the reality has powerful effects.

There is a common perception that people are disinterested in getting involved in their communities, that they 'don't care anymore'. Another is that there 'isn't that much going on around here'.  This is where these sorts of projects become invaluable.  They don't broadcast a false 'this place is great'.... but instead they show good stuff that is just a bit hidden from view.

It is one the great things about the Collaborative 3D Asset Mapping activity we do in workshops - people are pretty thrilled when they discover that when all their collective knowledge is pooled to make the map their neighbourhood is full of activities and opportunities that they didn't know about.  The act of revealing these people, ideas, spaces and other opportunities means there is much more chance they will be connected and built on.

Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam

This revealing process is what we are doing with the Community Lover's Guide to the Universe project.  Yesteday I had the thrill of seeing the hard copy of the first of the series to be published.  Edited by Maurice Specht, the Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam is launching with a 3 day event on the 8/9/10 March - in an old laundomat in Rotterdam.

 

How many radicals do you know?

It was very exciting to see the new list of 50 Radicals published by NESTA and the Observer on Sunday as I think that radical thinking can create important social change. The published list is of course brilliant – full of incredibly clever people, original thinkers and a real inspiration to everyone in the sector. Congratulations to everyone that made the list!

I am also very appreciate of the list on a conceptual level as it gives people doing important work a platform that challenge in some part superficial celebrity culture and also served to highlight the growth and importance of this sort of work.  So overall the idea is great, the people listed are great, the projects are great.  What’s also great is that, as Yvonne Roberts has said, it’s a starting point and way to begin a new conversation about this topic.

It occurred to me that not all radical people are strongly in the public eye (perhaps they never will be), nor do all racial efforts have a strong supporting project that can be evaluated in this light … and unfortunately even those in the public eye can often have their most radical efforts unnoticed or forgotten - we have very short memories - particularly in remembering the context that new things started in.  I have often noticed that you have to get to know someone personally to fully appreciate their thinking and work.

This list is of people I know ...living the UK only .... I hope that it will encourage other people to talk about the radical thinkers that they know personally so that can collectively build on the very good platform for this discussion that the Observer and NESTA have kindly started.

My definition of radical

Radical thinking has to challenge the status quo of an organisation, society or common wisdom in some substantial, imaginative or collaborative way. Radical thinking often starts small, and isn’t always recognisable immediately.

A radical person, or group of people, has to be bold enough to challenge the current situation with confidence about of an idea or vision,without any certainty of the outcome. Its generall an intellectually high risk endevour.

And of course collaboration is very radical - if you try it you will know what I mean ....

This isn’t an exhaustive list – so please forgive me if you aren’t mentioned here.  If you aren’t listed, and you think you should be, the most likely thing is that we haven’t seen each other for a while, or I don’t know about your radical actions. Let me know ...

Richard Gerver and Co - for radical imagination at Grangeton.  Richard transformed his Primary School in Long Eaton into a working virtual town – Grangeton – with working businesses, councils,  a mayor, a radio station etc. The curriculum was changed to work in 4 streams culture, enterprise, communications and wellbeing.  

Anthony Seldon, Ian Morris and Co - For radical boldness at Wellington College. When Anthony announced in 2007 that he was introducing happiness classes at Wellington College, it was pretty radical.  

Michael Coughlin and Co - for radical collaboration at Reading Council.  Consistently finding ways to promote a new collaborative conversation with local citizens.  

Carrie Bishop and Dominic Campbell and Co - for radical innovation at FutureGov.  Designing imaginative digital tools in some of the tightest systems spaces in local government e.g. Patchwork .. and for creating remarkably effective collaborative thinking events to tackle difficult problems.

Matthew Taylor and all of the RSA - for radical persistence.  Transforming the RSA into a lively exciting membership institution in the face of natural difficulties inherent in changing organisational culture.

Indy Johar, Alice Fung, Joost Beunderman, Tim Ahrensbach and Co -  for Hub Westminster and The Compendium for the Civic Economy

Cassie Robinson- for Our Intimate Lives

Anab Jain and Co -  for Superflux

Tim Smit and Co  - for The Big Lunch

Deborah Szebeko – for Think Public

Melanie Bryan - for work with women and enterprise 

Louise Macdonald – for Young Scot

Lesley James and Co – for RSA Opening Minds curriculum

Lloyd Davis – for Tuttle Club and for being the first ever Artist in Residence!

Mike Chitty – for Elsie

Heather Ring – for Union Street Orchard

Kristina Glushkova and Karen Martin – for Makerhood

Anthony McCann - for Hedgeschool21

Sarah Drummond and Lauren Currie and Co - for My Police

Jocelyn Cunningham, Sam McLean and Co - RSA Citizen Power Peterborough

Lucie Akerman and Co – for The Motorcycle Showroom

Julian Dobson – for Living with Rats

Stephen Frankel, Harry Wild, Shayne House and Co – For Wadebridge Renewable Energy Network

Dan Thompson – For @riotclearup and Artists and Makers

Scilla Elworthy – For Peace Direct

Anne-Marie Culhane – for Grow Sheffield

Ty Goddard and Co  - for The Education Foundation

Karl James and Co – for The Dialogue Project

Anthony Zacharzewski - for Demoncracy Society 

Daniel Snell and Co – for Arrival Education

Tracey Todhunter and Co – For Low Carbon Communities

Henry Playfoot - Stealth Education

Jonathan Rowson and Co – for RSA Social Brain Project

Caspar Lampkin – for work at Aberdeen University

Richard Tyrie – for Good People

Clare White – for her work in Burslem

Amisha Ghadiali – for Think Act Vote

Nick Booth, John Popham and Co  – for Social Media Surgeries 

Dougald Hine - for The University Project

Casper ter Kuile – for UK Youth Climate Coalition

David Gauntlett – for Making is Connecting 

Jonathan Robinson – for The Hub and for helping make The Mountain of Hope happen in Soweto in 2002 

David Barrie and Co – for Middlesbrough Urban Farming and The People’s Supermarket

Paul Smyth, Andy Merritt, Sam Henderson, Kristen Cheng, Laura Billings, Lucinda Gosling, Courtney Erwin, Laura Ellison, Lindsay Noble and Co – for FARM:shop

Ivo Gormley, Mark Herbert and Co – for The Good Gym

Nick Gardner and Co - Project Dirt 

Tracy Currer and Meriel Lenfestey – for Ecomodo

Russell Collins - for Community Lover's Guide to Jewish Community

Roland Harwood and Co – for 100% Open

David Robinson and Co – for Community Links

Keith Kahn-Harris - For Conversations and Dinners

Dan McQuillan, Paul Miller, Anna Maybank and Co - for Social Innovation Camp

Anna Pearson and Co – for Spots of Time

Lambeth Council - for the Co-operative Council

Vinay Gupta – for Hexayurt Project and the 500 of them that popped up at Burning Man last year....

Noel Hatch – for We Do What We See

Simon Berry - for Colalife

Alice Osborne - for The Nan Project

Toby Blume and Co – for Groundswell and Urban Forum

David Wilcox – for creating the practice of Social Reporting

Trudy Thompson – for Bricks and Bread

Eileen Conn – for Community Engagement and the Social Eco-system Dance

Sophie Howarth – for School of Life

Jane Mason and Co – for Virtuous Bread

How many do you know? And what do you think makes for 'radical'?

 (Image from Stichting NAC - Rotterdam)

Social Brain Lab: Introduction to Social Cognition

Last week I introduced the Social Brain Lab, and our intention to work with others to create some helpful tools based on selective, condensed knowledge about how people function.

The key points from the learning models I described from my research is that firstly, when knowledge is applied well it can make our interpretations of situations more accurate and interpersonal exchanges more positive … and secondly, that the knowledge itself can trigger an ongoing learning process of self-observation and self-direction.

In a series of posts I wanted to focus on some aspects of social brain research, which might help a person working in a community achieve more positive results. 

What is social cognition?

Today I am going to introduce social cognition, a term used in a few different ways.  The social cognition I am referring to here is the ability to understand another person’s mental states and thought processes.  From the age of 5 children start to understand that other people may think differently from them… this natural phenomena is labelled Theory of Mind.  This whole area of study has become very intricate and over recent years a number of extremely detailed and interconnected disciplines have emerged, many resulting from the application of new research from neuroscience. An example of this is 'social neuroscience' which is a relatively new field first developed by John Cacioppo at Chicago University.

Although I am personally fascinated with the academic research, what I am most interested in is the key pieces of knowledge that a regular person might find helpful in managing themselves and navigating interpersonal relationships. In the Social Brain Lab we are intent on focusing on how key pieces of knowledge might be helpful in community/social settings.

The community scenario

The scenario you could imagine is that you are regular person who is interested in making your community a nicer place to live.  You know that this will require a great deal of collaboration and co-operation, with groups of people working together to make positive things happen.  Your motivation for getting involved in such community building activity is that you would like to see divisions between age or culture bridged… and believe that a genuine opportunity now exists among residents to make and shape their social and physical environment of the neighbourhood.  You are realistic however, and understand that this can be difficult. New community activity often challenges existing social and professional structures and hierarchies and even the most positive activities can create controversy – in turn possibly leading to difficult conversations.  

In these complex situations you want to be able to communicate well.  You want people to understand what you are saying in substance, but also clearly understand your intentions and motivations.  You also want to be able to understand other people well, not misinterpreting what people say, or making negative assumptions about their intentions. As well as the diplomattic communication burdens you recognise that communicating ideas, stimulating ideas in other people and helping groups work together productively is very important in achieving your aims. 

In his important the new book Together, sociolist Richard Sennett is very persuasive in his argument that co-operation requires skill as well as goodwill - particularly when trying to work with people who aren't of the same mindset or background as ourselves - the type of co-operation that puts a much higher burdern on social cognition. You can listen to his recent RSA talk here.

Understanding what is going on in your own head is difficult.  Monitoring a conversation in a live situation to ensure that what you say is an accurate reflection of what you mean, is even more difficult.  Then when you add ‘social cognition’  - trying to understanding what is happening in the other person’s head as they process what you are saying… is very challenging indeed … but not impossible.

Communicating well in every single situation we find ourselves in is too much to ask of any undividual in my opinion, there are simply too many stresses in daily life to demand that degree of concentration of ourselves.  But we can learn to communicate well regularly with some practice, improving our social cognition abilities over time, but not without understanding how our minds work - particularly many minds together.

Applying social cognition to workshop activities

We use this understanding of social cognition thinking and Theory of Mind in some of the activities we have designed for workshops already.  We call them ‘talking tools’, but basically they are activities to help a group of individuals surface and share their mindsets.  We used these activities in public workshops with Reading Council, and are about to test a similar new health related activity later this month.  Our experience is that these tools perform an interesting function – people are genuinely surprised to discover that people think differently from them, that they have differing attitudes to the role of the council vs the potential role of local residents., and the way the conversation is structured through the activity leads people to be intrigued to find these differences.

What to learn more?

There are two ways you can explore social cognition in more detail if this topic interests you.

Firstly, you can start to delve into the academic research.  A good place to start would be to listen to some of the free lectures from Berkeley that you can get from iTunes U – I would recommend as a good starting point lectures 19, 20 and 21 from this series of lectures by John Kihlstrom. 

Secondly, you can look at the more practical literature on communication. The two best books I have read on communication are Crucial Conversations and Crucial Confrontations. 

In summary

High level communications are incredibly valuable. They can be learned, with knowledge and practice, but the type of good communication that I am promoting here is not the same as masterful manipulation - smooth talking attempts are often designed to get people to do what others want them to do - and thankfully they regularly and predictably get exposed for what they are. 

In my experience, important collaborative relationships, creating genuine mutual understanding and dialogue, can only be developed with completely ruthless self-honestly. We need to challenge ourselves constantly to avoid getting stuck in our own group mindsets, defensive, inaccurate or unhelpful narratives. Genuine dialogue also requires generosity of thought - ingredients for understanding the frames and perspectives of other people.

Which leads me neatly onto the next post on the Social Brain Lab .... where I will talk about trust building. 

The Ad Hoc Enquiries: Do you have a new theory?

Starting in February 2012 Social Spaces will be running a series of 12 exploratory new events at Hub Westminster.

The primary assumption for the project is that there is new knowledge to be built and that we need to find new collaborative ways of building it.

These weekly Enquiries are structured events designed to give people who have designed and implemented innovation local projects an opportunity to describe their work and their emerging insights to a group of interested and experienced peers. These innovation projects are required to be working specifically in the participatory paradigm where creative and strategic solution seeking and collaborative working are their most evident characteristics. 

What happens at an Enquiry?

The evenings will begin with a sociable supper, during which the ‘theorist(s)’ will present their project, their theory of change and new emergent theory - followed by a number pieces of evidence to support their theory. 

Each participant in turn will state their core disciplinary perspective e.g. science, philosophy, design etc and offers either a supporting or challenging statement for the theory, connecting with other knowledge bases to understand and interpret the new theory. 

How will the Enquiries be documented?

Each week the event will ‘extreme’ recorded to a structured and pre-set format and set into a large format digital/on demand book including all participants names and responses. The events will be audio live streamed - and later converted into podcasts.

Why are they called The Ad Hoc Enquiries?

Enquiry

The name ‘enquiry’ goes some way to describe the format for the evenings. The name implies that the answers to our new questions are not currently evident and that some specific process is needed to draw out the ideas and examine the evidence.

The purpose of these events is a serious one, and the idea of calling it an ‘enquiry’ implies that some noteworthy and important work will take place during these evenings.   ‘Enquiry’ is also an academic term to describe an investigation into a specific topic or question.

Ad Hoc

The word ‘ad hoc’ is a term used in a number of contexts including scientific and philosophical theory; national investigations; technology systems and networks theory. There is also a link to the term Adhocracy, described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock to mean an organisational structure working in the opposite way to a bureauracy.

How have we developed the format?

We have used understanding of how thinking in a new type of social setting might take place to develop this new format.  The events are structured to achieve knowledge creation through social and intellectual interaction and to be respectful of people’s ideas and the time they are offering to the project through the documentation and sharing process. 

The format takes account of the different phases individual and collective cognition might take place: stimulation/processing/connection/discussion/synthesis/building further on emergent ideas. 

The structure secures the serious aspects of the project's aims, and will therefor also allow a great deal of playfulness and fun to be injected into the evenings. We will be running these events in *very* strict order... possibly even using a gavel....

Call for new theories - do you have one?

 The first stage in preparing for these events is to ask people to submit their ideas for a theory they would like to present.

1. Have you developed an innovative local project?

2. Does this project work in the Creative/Collaborative paradigm?  

What we mean here is the work should not work in the Consumer, Representative, Charity or Challenge participatory paradigms.  There may be some of these in the mixture - but overall the project needs to work more collaboratively with communities and local authorities, possibly reconfiguring existing systems and fundamentally changing the way the community interacts in some way (See here and here for more details on how we see the Creative/Collaborative paradigm)

Apply here!

Deadline for applications to present a theory: 25 January 2012 

Register early interest to attend and participate in an Ad Hoc Enquiry here!

More pics of our cubes

 

Social Spaces: In Praise of our Skills Game

A few weeks ago I blogged In Praise of Lego Serious Play about how we use this methodology in our community workshops as a visioning and co-design tool.

We wanted now to also share a little about the Social Spaces Skills Game that we developed originally for the Travelling Pantry workshops, but now that it is tested and fully developed, wish to give away for communities to use.

What it is

The Social Spaces Skills Game is a very simple game indeed.  I collection of skills are printed on 100 cards, which are read out by a workshop participant, and with the help of the group are sorted into:

-       skills that the group can do

-       skills that their friends can do

-       skills that to their knowledge neither they nor their friends can do

How and why we designed the game

When the initial Travelling Pantry workshops were designed, they specifically wanted to avoid traditional problem-solving methodologies.  Instead, the intention of the workshops was to test the idea of shifting mindsets in the following ways:

-       direct problem solving --> secondary effects

-       single projects --> strategic transforming vision for the community

-       needs --> assets

-       first step funding --> first step revealing and connecting ideas, resources etc

On the day before the first workshop I wrote:

"There are a number of really very inspiring community projects which focus on maintaining (or even better refurbishing) the community  - and making your environment beautiful for the community is a wonderful and creative thing in itself.  The difficulty with the problem-solving format in a workshop situation in my experience, particularly if you start with grass cutting, is that typically, at community level at least, all these roads lead to ‘maintenance thinking’.  Once you have started, it becomes a list of pot-holes and dog mess, road works and graffiti and litter … and half an hour later you are talking about ‘hoodies’ being loud and rude and how lonely elderly people are and how bad the NHS is, and why aren’t trains on time, or the leaves collected quicker … and before you know it you are a sad heap of exhaustion and frustration just thinking about the terribleness of it all.

So we didn’t think we would do that."

The other activities that we designed for the workshops were all included to create a sense of possibility – for people to leave the workshops feeling excited and capable. All the activities were also designed specifically to ‘reveal’ aspects that are often invisible, such as ideas (via the LEGO), resources and talents. We were also aware that many projects never get off the ground because ‘projects’ are seen to require difficult skills such as writing constitutions, opening bank accounts or writing funding bids and we knew that in most new-style community projects that these particular items that put people off getting involved, represent a fraction of what is needed.

Like all simple and successful things, the thinking and inspiration behind the game came from multiple sources.  We were at the time immersed in design thinking, prototyping … particularly trying to make visible and tangible concepts and ideas as well as inspired by the work of Albert Bandura on self-efficacy and beliefs.  Having worked with Lauren Currie on Mindapples ideas, I was very inspired by her awesome ability to make things physically real.  Crystal Campell and Saskia Van Oosterhout had described how they incorporated cards into their Narrative Ecology and this had worked well.  David Gauntlett and I could see how all this added together could help workshop participants ‘reveal’ their talents and skills in a light and enjoyable way, which did not embarrass them by making them feel boastful.

We were also very inspired by the work of John McKnight and John Kretmann at the ABCD Institute, who had in 1993 developed a Capacity Inventory that community development workers make use of in interviews with residents in the community to create a database of skills in the community.  Although we were not using this idea in the same way, but rather trying to increase a sense of resourcefulness in a workshop setting, we found this inventory very inspiring.  We borrowed about 50 of the Inventory’s 200 skills, added 50 new ones of our own, including some humorous ones such as ‘sit in the lotus position’, ‘chatting over coffee’… and ‘making people laugh’.

We printed them up through marvelous Moo… and took them on the road…

What we discovered

Through workshopping with over 1800 people in the last 14 months we have discovered that this activity, but some miracle, did exactly what we hoped it would.

-       Without exception everyone enjoys this game – people always laugh and joke their way through the game which takes about 10-15 minutes – we have even had frequent demonstrations of ‘sitting in the lotus’ position.

-       It is informal and people interact in light ways that help them get to know one another better.

-       Of the 100 activities a group of 4 or more will be able to do, or have a friend do, over 90% of the skills.  The percentage between how much an individual group can do themselves varies on size of group, but generally speaking most skills can be done in the community.

-       It does make people feel capable – we have frequently had groups spontaneously applaud themselves at their collective cleverness.

-       It genuinely surprises them how much can be done around the table – and through this are also blown away considering how much skill is lying dormant in the community.

We have found that the Skills Game is great to end a workshop - but others who have experienced it, including Nick Bird, have thought it would work well also at the beginning as an ice breaker and to set the tone of the workshop right from the beginning.

If you think you might like to try the skills game you can buy a set on the Social Spaces Shop – BUT before you do, please be aware that you will be able to request a free PDF of the Social Spaces Skills Game in the new year, which we are making available free for community's use via a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs] licence.

Pic above from the workshop held in Torwood on the 22 October 2010

 

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

Social Spaces: In Praise of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY

David Gauntlett, professor of Media at Westminster University, and co-founder of Social Spaces, introduced me to LEGO SERIOUS PLAY as a tool for helping people share their ideas through making. David has been working professionally with LEGO for some time, using LEGO for research and engagement and in helping to think around many of the concepts he wrote about in his important book Making is Connecting published earlier this year.

Thanks to David a year ago LEGO SERIOUS PLAY donated several boxes of LEGO to the Travelling Pantry.   The Travelling Pantry worked for 6 months giving free workshops to people in communities around the country…. Travelling 20,000 miles and working with well over a 1,000 people.  Since the Travelling Pantry project has been completed we have continued to use LEGO in a variety of contexts and settings to a further 800 people (approx) and wanted to feed back some of our experiences.

What is LEGO SERIOUSPLAY?

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a methodology that LEGO have developed to use ‘making’ as a way of co-developing business strategies.  From their website:

“The underlying values of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY include the belief in the potential of people, and also the belief that everyone within an organization can contribute to the discussion, solutions, and outcomes…. It is a language, a communication tool and a problem solving methodology”

How we use it at Social Spaces

The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY methodology is well developed in business settings and they have made their work and ideas open source (you can download their paper here). However, with the Travelling Pantry we wanted to take the simplest version of this methodology into communities to see how it would work in this new setting, to share ideas and create a collective vision for communities.  We wanted to see if it worked as part of a set of new activities we had designed which used tangible objects to collaborate and co-design.

We usually do the lego activity early in the workshops. Participants are asked to make a small model of ‘something they would like to see more of in the community’.  This usually takes about 10 minutes.  Participants are asked to share their idea with the group in turn.

What we have noticed during these workshops

• Often people are surprised by the request to make something with what they think of as toys. This usually leads quickly to delight and conversations and joking follows while people make their models.  This isn’t just about being offered LEGO, but about being offered any sort of materials to make something with.  Most communities are usually offered only verbal and written tools to communicate their ideas.

• Community meetings often favour boldness – sometimes leaving shyer people at the edges – which is both unhelpful and a waste of creativity and ideas. With the LEGO activity all members have an opportunity to share their ideas, with a visual prop to help them communicate what they mean.

• While people share their ideas, other participants are often surprised at the warmth and optimism of these ideas, which frequently ask for more neighbourliness and beauty in their neighbourhood. People get to know each other at quite a deep level through this sharing process.

• Once the models have been shared participants are asked to place their model on a single table in order to start to build up a collective vision of what they would like to see more of in their communities. This is a very important and positive step.

• Taking photos of individual models with their description cards and loading them onto a spaces on the internet gives the opportunity to share with others not at the workshop some of the ideas in a very visual way.

• Making a model really does reach parts of the brain that other activities don’t. We have also found that doing the LEGO after a short talk on inspiring case studies stimulates the creative process and helps people think about their communities in a different way.

• We have researched and  thought long and hard but haven’t been able to find any other materials which offer such quick access to 3D model making as LEGO, particularly in this community setting.

Most common themes....

So many original, unusual and interesting ideas.... And also tons of wonderful gardens, bridges and community created new spaces! 

You can see all the Travelling Pantry models here.

Points to note 

Respect

Respectful framing of this activity if very important. Communities are often dealing with difficult, complex or emotional situations so it is vitally important that this activity be framed to ensure that the fun ‘methodology’ not be confused with not taking people and their concerns seriously, in effect be seen to be taking them too lightly....

Taping into people’s imaginations

While being respectful of difficulties and concerns we are normally very clear also about the purpose of the activity being to tap into their imaginations and build a positive collaborative vision of the future, rather than cataloguing issues.

Different contexts need different framing

If you are using the activity as a rich research tool  in a consultation, in a focus group … or using it to stimulate ideas and problem solving, we have found that some careful framing is needed in these different contexts.

One example of different context is that following a workshop I did for Forever Manchester, they have been using the activity in their Focus Groups with good effect!  More pictures of their focus groups can be seen here.

If you are a community that thinks they might like to use LEGO to develop their ideas I would suggest coming to one of our workshops to see how it works in practice.  If you haven’t been to one of our workshops but are keen to try it straight away please contact me and I can send you some notes that might be useful. If you are introducing this activity into an an existing group where you are a member yourself, can require some confidence, and having a sound understanding of why you want to introduce it, possible reactions and planned outcomes can be helpful.

And if you are using LEGO SERIOUS PLAY thinking and methods please do give them credit in your activities – it has taken them years to develop this important methodology, they have generously made it open source … and I am sure that they will be delighted to see it used for social good … as well as see it continue to be tested so widely and thoroughly in communities through Social Spaces.

BIG THANK YOU! 

I would like to offer a huge thank you to LEGO and David Gauntlett on behalf of Social Spaces for supporting us and for helping us and the communities we have been working with to get inspired and active in making our communities better places to live!

Innovations in Consultation, Engagement ... and possibly Democracy

I wanted to write to share some reports on two fascinating events I recently attended focusing on community engagement, consultation and democracy.

The first was two weeks ago hosted by Involve and NCVO at an event focused on Local Engagement and Democracy, based on their superb qualitative research paper produced on Pathways to Participation.

Some of the key findings from the Pathways to Participation report was that from the 100 in-depth interviews conducted for the report there wasn’t a single report of a person being happy with a local consultation:

Interviewees’ experiences of formal public consultations were almost entirely negative. Concerns included:

• Consultation processes feeling tokenistic or repetitious, with lots of consultations on similar issues and no sense that anyone was bringing together the results.

• Decisions already having been made prior to the consultation, which was only carried out to meet a legal obligation or as a public relations exercise.

For many interviewees, these negative experiences reinforced an existing ambivalence and lack of trust in political processes in general. As a result of this lack of faith in the system, people often stopped attending consultations and public meetings and sought to express themselves in different ways; one interviewee’s experience of a consultation concerning the closure of a local hospital was that:

‘. . . it was so poorly done that you could say that’s why I went on the march in the end because I felt your voice wasn’t being heard as part of that [consultation] thing.’

This point was further re-enforced by Rhion Jones from the Consultation Institute at the LGinsight event on Tuesday ‘Improving Community Engagement’.  Rhion Jones argued that government was moving away from ‘evidence-based’ decision-making – to ‘permission-based’ decision making, where the rise in campaigning and activism was altering these dynamics in a purposeful way.

Personally I consider the poor consultation and permission-based decision-making described a very unsatisfactory scenario going forward – and as I commented at the Pathways to Participation event – it isn’t a status quo that we should be prepared to accept as the way to improve things in the future … that we need is to be more radical and self-critical about ensuring both democracy and good-decision making – which should go completely hand-in-hand. 

My comment on this included:

“Good decisions come out of everybody’s knowledge being pooled together. The citizens don’t know everything and the local authorities don’t know everything, but I think that good decisions come out of blending those two together. That it is quite a difficult thing to do. Poor decision-making can lead to unnecessary levels of local activism; there are necessary levels of activism and then there are unnecessary levels of activism, and those normally come about through bad decisions. Not only that, I think bad consultation actually wastes the very genuine opportunity to collaborate and design projects and services that draw on the intrinsic strengths of both citizens and government. That isn’t just about skills or knowledge or time. I think that we need to start to think much more about pulling on the imagination of citizens and local authorities alike. And that I think is why consultation is so important.”

.... But things are changing for the better - most exciting of all we are seeing Local Authorities that are taking a much more collaborative approach – moving forward the practice of consultation and engagement into the creative/collaborative space it needs to take if the full potential of citizens and government and professionals are to be utilized for social good over the long term.

Lambeth Council

Rebecca Eligon, Head of Strategies and Equalities, spoke on Tuesday about the ‘Co-operative council’s’ very practical and strategic efforts to engage in a new relationship with citizens, arguing that LAs need to expand their repertoire of research strategies and methodologies to really understand and surface citizen knowledge and capacities. This was exemplified by their swift actions following the riots – where the Town Hall became a vibrant and engaging space for residents to share their concerns and offer the ideas and talents to improving the places where they live.  Lambeth Co-operative Council is leading a much larger group of councils who are developing this new approach which looks to co-produce both services and communities.

Reading Council

In September Reading Council conducted 30 ward-based 2-hour workshops with local residents.  Using innovative, rich-research ‘talking tools’ and methods the workshops aimed to genuinely understand the concerns and desires of local residents, to paint a collective picture of what sort of communities people wanted to live in, but also aimed to change the conversation between residents and council staff to one less about linear services… and more about what transformations might be achieved by working together. The workshops were delivered by 30 council staff ranging across all departments trained specifically for the project. Resident feedback on the workshops ranged very positively from between 4 and 5 out of 5.

Norfolk County Council

Presented by Anne Tansley Thomas, Senior Consultation & Involvement Officer and Matt Dobin from Discovery, the work of  the council again looks to change the conversation significantly. Taking a workshop approach, using innovative activities, the council presented the work of the council to residents in a new way – resulting in a long-term piece of work that has gone a long way to effectively engage residents in knowledge sharing and decision-making.

Harrow Council

Harrow Council have been taking a very novel approach to consultation.  As described by Lindsay Coulson, Head of Communications, the council have taken to the high street with pop-up living rooms and gardens where local councillors have been invited to talk to residents in a very new-style of surgery.  Their Let’s Talk campaign has been integrated into much of their work and has received a great deal of praise from residents.

Perceptions of Place Report

If you get a chance please do have a read of the research report Perceptions of Place report by Keep Britain Tidy, presented on Tuesday by Joanne Butcher.  Of particular interest was the data on complaints from deprived communities being ‘the tip of the iceberg’… while in less deprived communities the level of complaints is more likely to be representative.

Are there other Local Authorities that are engaging with citizens in ways that genuinely attempt to change the relationship to a more creative and collaborative one - let us know - everyone is interested ....

How do you think consultation adds or harms real democracy and good-decision making?

I will end this by quoting Rhion Jones from Tuesday “"wanted: more candid consultation - tell the truth"

Big thanks to Rebecca Eligon and Neil Wholey, from Westminster Council and Chair of LGinsight for their invitation to ‘speed workshop’ on Tuesday – phew! ... and to Tim Hughes and Simon Burall at Involve for inviting me to comment on Pathways to Participation –  even suffering the odd joke! 

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

Social Spaces: Urban Farming Tools

"Urban farming tools is a set consisting out of five tools and a backpack. The tools can be stored inside, while the handle of the bigger tools can be taken off and mounted on the side of the backpack. Like this you can transport everything nicely on the way to your plot. Urban farming makes sense in so many ways: It is good for your health, fitness, the environment and since you grow your own food locally even for your budget."

Social Spaces: Real Time Farms

There are many social media driven platforms out there which are are going to waste... but Real Time Farms has enormous potential to drive proper change around food production - both perceptions and behaviours ... and works with the whole chain - from grower, to markets, restaurants, cooks, to consumers.  Look forward to this one spreading!

Social Spaces: Parklets --- A San Francisco Wonder

In San Francisco they have a new type of urban re-occupation called Parklets.  Basicially a restaurant or shop extends from the pavement area to occupy the parking spaces in front as well! They are getting pretty popular - being described as 'parking for people' .... even appearing outside residential homes recently.

"Livable City director Tom Radulovich also spoke at the event, talking about how the streets were traditionally the gathering and social spaces in cities, until transportation planners started to value the efficient movement and storage of automobiles over a more inclusive view of streets. But the parklets – along with temporary street seizures like the Sunday Streets events – are part of a movement back to a more holistic view of city spaces."

 

Social Spaces: Stored Potential

I missed this project last year, but it is being done again this year!  Stored Potential is a large-scale installation covering the silos of a vacant grain elevator near downtown Omaha, Nebraska in order to reposition the structure in the landscape. 

Through a competition the designs were chosen and draped dramatically across the visible silos.

An empty grain elevator - one of hundreds across the US - has been transformed. The project has become a focus for a huge amount of collaborative effort - not least in the numerous chefs involved in putting together the massive celebratory meal the had last year (hopefully to be repeated this year!)