The 5 teams have developed the following prototypes:

• MakeIT Manifattura: a set of physical installations to map values and meanings that citizens attribute to Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence (Team: Vincenzo Rizza, Christia Tsrimpa, Margherita Vacca, Riccardo De Mei, Alessandra Bonelli);
• NEST: a dynamic, creative and modular makerspace to host making and design communities across the city (Team: Sophie Defauw, Paolo Ciarfuglia, Edoardo Dalla Mutta, Elisabetta Simone, Alessandra Galli)
• Carriù: an innovative camper redesigned to bring educational services in remote areas (Team: Tommaso Scavone, Liang Shuang, Marco Berni, Zhou Min)
• Sma_Lab: a device to create and develop creative collaboration between artisans, students and makers (Team: Francesca Gianassi, Silvia Nicoli, Lu Ji, Li Meng)
• CamperJob: a camper hosting innovative labour services in remote areas (Team: Beatrice Bettini, Camilla Franchina, Alessia Macchi, Anna Eleonora Fabrizi)

The exhibition has been opened up by Cecilia Del Re (Florence City Councillor for Economic Development and Tourism), while Stefano Ciuoffo (Tuscany Region’s Councillor for Production Activities) has closed the day with the delivery of the diplomas to students.

The exhibition has also hosted a workshop on circular, collaborative and distributed production facilitated by Chris Giotitsas and Alex Pazaitis of the P2P Foundation.

The post OD&M at the 83rd Florence International Handycraft Fair appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On November 30th the Italian OD&M course “Design Driven Strategies” began. The course is organized by the faculty of Architecture and Design University of Florence together with CSM – Centro Sperimentale del Mobile – a consortium association of companies operating in the furniture sector – and LAMA Agency, a consulting company and founder of the social innovation coworking space “Impact Hub” in Florence.

We interviewed the Professor of Design for Sustainability, Giuseppe Lotti and the expert of European projects of LAMA Laura Martelloni, to better understand the opportunities offered by the course, and its innovative features.

The word “Design” is now popular, but its meaning can vary greatly depending on its application: what is meant by “Design Driven Strategies”?

GL: The competitiveness of companies and territories depends on the ability to define innovative strategies. These can be guided by design, which can be considered as a discipline to foreshadow the future, to perform the function of synthesis and catalysis of interdisciplinary contributions, making innovation immediately expendable.

LM: The thought behind this course is to recognize that those who now design products, services, experiences, does it within an increasingly complex, in an interconnected and uncertain system. A need for a new set of knowledge and skills therefore arises, as well as a need for new learning environments, able to go beyond training ‘in silos’. With this course we move towards systemic skills and competences, useful to work in complexity, recognizing that complexity needs to be analysed from different points of view. The designer of the 21^st century will increasingly make use of a mix of “hard” and “soft” skills: therefore, we want to train designers able to involve different disciplines and communities, to find new answers within a context that changes rapidly, continually forcing us to change models and frameworks. In other words, the economic and social transformations encourage us to think designers as professionals who help to create hybrids between products, experiences and services.

The course is organized around innovative teaching methods: can you describe them?

GL: The course is the work of several actors, with different approaches, methods and tools. The methodological rigour and the importance of theoretical-critical contributions are typical of the university; the experimental approach from the makers and practitioners’ communities is LAMA’s added value; the challenges of companies from CSM brings concreteness, applications and impact.

LM: The training method has three main characteristics: it is experiential, distributed, collaborative.

“Experiential” means that we rely on real challenges around which students will experience a learning experience. We would like to try to challenge the traditional culture of ‘learning outcomes’ and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), to focus instead on the process as an experience of open learning, not necessarily predefined. In the course, through moments of peer review, students will understand what they are learning, considering the plurality of contexts in which they learn as the guiding principle of evaluation. Self-evaluation, peer evaluation and more traditional evaluation will all play an important role.

“Distributed” regards the decentralization of the method. Students will learn not only with traditional lessons, but especially through the experiences they will have and the people they will be in contact with during the whole process. We want to stimulate students to deepen the contents both in team and independently. We will use principles and approaches of communities of practice, stimulating the creation of a community of learners, operating with self-regulation and self-organization dynamics.

“Collaborative” means that all the work is done in a team, and that the ultimate goal is to build fluid communities of practice, that collaborate, experiment and learn.

Finally, I would like to underline how the recognition of skills is also achieved through an innovative method that will allow the construction of digital portfolios, able to read the entire hard and soft set of skills acquired through the learning path.

What is the added value of organizing a training course that takes place not only in university classrooms? And what are the challenges related to this approach?

GL: We are talking about design-driven innovation and research projects. Design, by its nature, is not a discipline that works only in university classrooms but has an innate ability to get your hands on, as defined above.

LM: Uniting Impact Hub Florence, the University of Florence and an ecosystem of local businesses is an opportunity for students to reconnect meanings and actions that we often live discontinuously and fragmented. It is an attempt to link formal, non-formal and informal learning contexts in a single sense framework, understanding how each of these contexts can bring value into a training experience.

The course is organized within the European Erasmus + program, Knowledge Alliances. What are the motivations and added value of working in parallel with other universities (in London, Bilbao Dabrowa Gornicza,)?

GL: The first added value is certainly represented by the possibility of comparing different production and research entities. This stimulates the development of good practices and the overall growth of our respective educational systems.

LM: The motivations are many: listening, exchanging practices, learning how others do things.

The project itself is a gym for us to work in complexity: when you work simultaneously with four countries, ten partners, the related teams, made up of people who perform very different functions, you are part of a great gear. From this point of view, I believe that programs like Erasmus have a great added value not only in supporting the innovation of training – today an urgent need in the face of the great transformations of the fourth industrial revolution – but also in bringing Europe closer.

Finally, who do you think are the right people to take part in the course? And for what reasons?

GL: The right people are first of all curious people! “If you are not curious, forget it”. Achille Castiglioni.

LM: The course addressed to anyone who has to do with the design of products and services, taking care of their social and environmental consequences. Personally, I hope that this will include also designers in the social sphere. I believe that in these areas the opportunities from the point of view of knowledge and skills are still untapped. The course could also be an opportunity for third sector designers to try to radically change the way they look at the design of their services.

The training brochure (in Italian) can be found here. A more detailed description can be found here.

The post Design Driven Strategies: A Course by Open Design & Manufacturing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Innovation is an obsession in our current society. We are enamored with technological innovations, we celebrate innovators. We want to be them. And yet when you look closely at the various crises and risks around the world, it becomes clear that the human propensity for innovation is again and again repeatedly at the heart of our collective crises.

Innovation in broad terms is responsible for the decline of critical ecosystems, the production of an unsafe climate, and an unprecedented level of risk that human beings face today. Nuclear weapons, which the US used against Japan to bring it to its knees and end the war, led to the Pandora’s box of weapons proliferation. Now US foreign policy is obsessed with the problem, involving North Korea, Iran, and the detente with Russia. The use of fossil fuels and the combustion engine, brought us among other things motorized vehicles, of course transformed our ability to travel. At the same time it is fundamentally complicit to air pollution in cities and carbon emissions, and of course automobile traffic!

Do not get me wrong I am actually a technological optimist! But my optimism does not come from thinking about the next great product, the next innovation. It comes from thinking about how as human beings we can change our consciousness, culture, worldview, our orientation towards how we interact with the world. So at the heart of innovation is a fundamental contradiction that as human beings we are being fundamentally confronted with today. Innovation and our capacity to transform the world around us is fundamental to our prosperity, our capacity to communicate with each other, indeed now it has become fundamental to the transformation of human knowledge. And at the same time it is brought an unprecedented scale of crises, risk and unintended consequences.

The solution is not to disown innovation, pretend that the 20th century didn’t happen. The solution as well is not to deny that innovation has a shadow — that it has contradictions. The solution is to engage with this contradiction actively and inquire into its transformation, the possibility of an integration, of a transcendent position that can hold the complexity of the contradictions we experience today. For thinking about our future, our shadow is our friend.

This is what I hope to develop in this talk. To do this we need a method like Causal Layered Analysis to help us go down the rabbit hole from symptoms to systems to epistemology and to core metaphors that help us understand our human predicament. So let’s begin.

Symptoms

The most basic symptoms that we see today are what most concerns us. A recent report highlighted the decline in insect numbers around the world. We see the collapse of bee colonies in many parts of the world. There is now a Great Pacific Garbage Patch that swirls around in the ocean, with the plastic slowly breaking down and filtering into every ocean-based ecosystem. And most reports on climate change are now saying that 1.5° to 2° warming is a conservative estimate, and when we look at the actual implications of 2° to 3° warming they are profound and disturbing. There are otherwise sane people talking about civilizational collapse. But, if we look at a deeper level, however, we begin to see that these are all symptoms of a system that ‘intentionally’ produces this as an outcome.

Systems

For example economies today are interlinked in a grand drama of industry, innovation and competition. This industrial innovation system is supported by every major player that is part of it. In the US this is largely funneled through the defense industries, which act as a subsidy for commercial applications. In Japan they have the ministry of industry trade and innovation. The EU has its own system. The field of foresight actually got its start supporting the industrial innovation system. I’ve call this the STIF model. Science technology and innovation foresight. Through futures research, research institutes identify the growth industries, technologies and opportunities, which helps governments to prioritize research areas, then the money funnels through. The system has been working for well over 70 years, at least since the 1950s. As R&D gets funded, the prototypes move into commercial application, driving industrial transformation. This has basically been the formula for the dramatic technological revolution that we have experienced over the last 70 years.

And yet, as the sociologist Ulrich Beck argued, the same system has produced risk at a grand scale — he defined this as the “global risk society”. Rather than some kind of fluky happenstance production of risk — his argument is that it is actually a systematic production of risk. And if we look at the complicity of this system in our most pressing challenges today, this becomes very clear. Today we see new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and machine learning, which herald an age of robots-as-servants. But it also has brought us into the potential death spiral of autonomous military robotics. We have systematically designed our global economic system to produce risk.

This of course was coupled with the growth mindset coming out of the 1940s and 50s. As a bulwark against communism, the West adopted Keynesian economics, with its emphasis on economic growth. Of course this economic growth was to be built on the back of this technological revolution, productivity gains and more jobs. And so we not just designed a global economic system to produce risk, but also to produce an unsustainable trajectory of economic growth, given the carrying capacity of our ecological systems. Current estimates show we are well beyond 1.5 planets of carrying capacity. A recent report shows that our capacity for resource extraction far outstrips the earth’s long term carrying capacity. We now have an “earth overshoot day” dedicated to highlighting this. We now use one Earth’s worth of resources in 7 months. The other 5 months are “deficit” or “loan” months — it will need to be paid back. And can I just add that eco-futurists and ecological economists like Hazel Henderson, Herman Daly and Donella Meadows have been talking about this since the 1970s! For 50 years!

Then there is capitalism. Now I am not going to argue here that markets and competition are not needed. I believe markets and competition are fundamentally needed. When I choose a cell phone provider I want to have some choice, and I want one group to be competing against another to provide me with the best service. When I want to go down the street and buy some bread, I don’t want to be limited to one business, whether private, public or otherwise. I want some choice where I buy my bread. I’m gonna buy my bread from the people that are friendliest to me and whose bread is the best and the tastiest. So we’re not talking here about markets and competition. But I am no Milton Friedman.

In simple terms capitalism is a system of accumulating value — by shareholder to accumulate value. This hasn’t changed much in about 400 years of history. The Dutch East India Company and the English East India Company, for example practiced this through a variety of methods. They were backed by their shareholders, their investors and they were tasked with bringing back / accumulating more value. The problem is having been removed from the source of where that value was coming from, terrible things can happen — the company takes land, kills, even enslaved people. We know this from the history of mercantile colonialism.

But the core capitalist logic has not changed much. So when you look at an operation like Facebook, we say okay Facebook is different. It’s connecting all these people, it’s making all kinds of things possible. But capitalism creates social externalities. In the process of accumulating value for shareholders, the company creates a problem somewhere else. So for example now we see a lawsuit against Facebook by content moderators, who are arguing that they experience severe psychological trauma for having to moderate disturbing Facebook content for hours on end — they have posttraumatic stress disorder. It’s like that scene out of the Mexican sci-fi film the Sleep Dealer. Technology has replaced human labor but it hasn’t replaced human exploitation.

And this is not to mention the way in which Facebook has driven social polarization. To be fair it’s not just Facebook but it’s a whole suite of social media platforms. But research that has come out recently essentially argues that the way in which content gets contained within filter bubbles, and the algorithms that govern the content that we see produces a web of self-referentiality — people are more and more exposed to the same or similar ideas reinforcing their thinking, indeed making their thinking more entrenched and extreme. And it’s not in their interest to give you content that’s going to contradict your worldview. Why would they? They just want you to spend more time in front of the screen so they can sell you more advertisements. If you get confused, experience cognitive dissonance and then have to work this out, that is not more advertisements for them. So we have Trump and we have Bolsonaro… and other countries where, the social externality of capitalist driven social media is social polarization. If you ask me this is a very high price to pay. So at a deeper level we have innovation and technology embedded in political economy.

Epistemology

But I want to take us one step deeper and explore something else. And this is that there’s been a fundamental disconnect in the way that innovation and technology have played out in the 20th and early 21st centuries, with respect to our understanding of ecological systems. It is a remarkable fact that in the West the systems literature only really emerged in the late 60s and 70s. Somehow in the madness of progress and modernity something profound was lost. There were presumptions about the distinction between man and nature. “Nature” is out there somewhere — “man” is here. I use the word MAN deliberately as this distinction emerged in a patriarchal era.

The fundamental premise here is that human beings are at the center of the world context. We can shape the nature to the will of the human. We can pour pesticides and fertilizers onto soils with abandon. We can divert water systems any way we want. We can operate as masters and controllers. Its humanity with a God complex! But in fact this worldview has fundamental blind spots. This is the same worldview that empowers a company like Monsanto to super-sell glyphosate to farmers as a way to kill weeds. The only problem is, the glyphosate also kills farmers. So in the US today there is a case in the upper courts where farmers are suing Monsanto for the effects of glyphosate. And it’s been implicated in colony collapse disorder. And what do farmers and bees have in common? Besides being very busy? They are both living systems. Glyphosate is both one of the key contenders as the culprit of colony collapse disorder, it is also a key contenders for a cause of cancer in humans.

Myth and Metaphor

This then brings me to the core premise of this talk — a fundamentally unprovable hypothesis, but to me it makes sense. I believe that hardwired into the human psyche is a technological bias. From our origins it was technology that became the success formula for our species. If wanted to defend ourself from lion, before technology we had our bare hands.

Some anthropologists argue that the physiological transformation of hominids was driven by the invention of cooking. By being able to cook raw food we were able to eat food quicker and digest faster — we were able to consume more calories. They argue that the evidence shows that the invention of cooking coincides with a rapid expansion in the size of the human brain, essentially that the capacity to absorb more nutrients through cooking was reflected physiologically. This might explain why cooking shows are so popular.

And this brings me to the wonderful image and metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. When the proto-human throws the bone into the air, it flies up and spins and becomes a space station. And we are projected hundreds of thousands of years into the future, to the year 2001 — (which for us has passed but those in the 1960s it was the future). The significance of this image cannot be understated. For me it is nothing less than the affirmation of who we are as technological beings. Humans don’t do technology — we are technology. But as we saw with the tragic unfolding in 2001 a Space Odyssey, the film itself, technology and innovation can have some unintended consequences. The artificial intelligence that ran the ship — Hal 9000 — went a little crazy.

And this brings me to the wonderful image and metaphor in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey. When the proto-human throws the bone into the air, it flies up and spins and becomes a space station. And we are projected hundreds of thousands of years into the future, to the year 2001 — (which for us has passed but those in the 1960s it was the future). The significance of this image cannot be understated. For me it is nothing less than the affirmation of who we are as technological beings. Humans don’t do technology — we are technology. But as we saw with the tragic unfolding in 2001 a Space Odyssey, the film itself, technology and innovation can have some unintended consequences. The artificial intelligence that ran the ship — Hal 9000 — went a little crazy.

And so embedded in our dreamscape of who we are is also a nightmare. I believe films speak from the collective unconscious. It’s an idea from philosopher Susanne Langer. And I believe what the collective unconscious is saying is that at a certain level of awareness we know here is a fundamental contradiction, and this unease, this terror, expresses this feeling in our relationship to technology — indeed who we are as technological beings. Humanity’s disowned self is speaking to us through the medium of collective dreams and nightmares — film. And this gets reiterated in film after film after film. We see this in films like Terminator, in Ex Machina, in so many films.

Reconceptualizing

So now this is a very good place to come back to the core idea for the talk — that we have a problem with innovation. But that there are some solutions. And so I want to provide a few design principles that we might think about in terms of solving the problem of innovation — in the way that it “defutures” to use Tony Fry’s terminology — in its current manifestation, and how it might “refuture” in its next manifestation.

So innovation that refutures — that gives us a future rather than taking it away — this is anticipatory innovation. It is not the next cool gadget for the future. Because as I discussed the cool gadget of the future, whether it’s an iPhone or a plastic bottle or artificial intelligence or whatever, it is an expression of humanity’s ingenuity but also its shadow, it is contradiction embodied.

But innovations that that come from an an awareness of this contraction and which “refuture”, this is anticipatory innovation. It is not really a new idea. People like Bucky Fuller, Lewis Mumford, Ivan Illich, Hazel Henderson, many others articulated similar and profound sentiments decades ago.

So drawing from this conversation there are four design strategies for anticipatory innovation here:

• Piecemeal amelioration of symptoms
• Cosmo localization
• Understanding the web of life
• Owning our shadow as technological beings

Piecemeal amelioration

At the most basic level, at the level of symptoms, we need lots of projects and lots of new technologies. Let’s clean up the great Pacific Garbage Patch. We need renewable technologies, we need low carbon technologies. We need to sequester carbon as quickly as possible.

Cosmo localization

But at the level of political economy we have to do something completely different. Instead of designing and producing something in two different parts of the world, meant to compete with each other, proprietary and un-shareable, producing as many problems in the long-term as it solves, we need to mutualise the production of value for mutual sustainment. This is Cosmo localization (also known as “Design Global Manufacture Local“), a political economic vision shared by a number of people around the world.

The basic idea is that we are in the era of planetary challenges that have local manifestations. To solve local problems we need to enlist a globally distributed community which can pool knowledge, expertise and resources. In biological terms this is called “stigmergy” — whereby as a global community we build on each others work toward shared goals and outcomes. Thus a “planetary stigmergy” is the mutualization of value, designs, knowledge and strategy at a globally coordinated level. Cosmo-localism entails developing such planetary contributory systems, meaning that for any one problem or challenge, local or distributed, people contribute to the problem solving from everywhere.

Michel Bauwens argues that “cosmo-localization is a new paradigm for the production and distribution of value that combines the universal sharing of knowledge (cosmo), but the ‘subsidiarity’ of production as close as possible to the place of need (‘local’), essentially through distributed local manufacturing and voluntary mutualization. The general idea is not to impede technological progress though intellectual property, in an era of climate change where we cannot afford the 20-year lag in innovation due to patents; and to radically diminish the physical cost of transport through local production. Cosmo-localization is based on the belief that the mutualization of provisioning systems can radically diminish the human footprint on natural resources, which need to be preserved for future generations and all beings of the planet.”

Cosmo-localization describes the process of bringing together our globally distributed knowledge and design commons with the high-to-low tech capacity for localized production. It is based on the ethical premise, drawing from cosmopolitanism, that people and communities should be universally empowered with the heritage of human ingenuity that allow them/us to more effectively create livelihoods and solve problems in their local environments, and that, reciprocally, local production and innovation should support the wellbeing of our planetary commons.

Likewise, Vasilis Kostakis and Andreas Roos argue “what is light (knowledge, design) becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local, and ideally shared. Design global, manufacture local (DGML) demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation. Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes application that is small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled.”

And thus Cosmo-localization is a conscious twining of a consequentialist cosmopolitan ethics with technology. It takes the view that technology is not value neutral, but rather proscribed by discourse, culture and worldview. The same cultural milieu that gave us “disruptive innovation” is one that is premised on individualism, disrupt or be disrupted, and lacks a concern for the social implications and applications for technology — and reflects an unconscious stance toward technology, as something “out there” rather than as an integral part of what human beings are.

This twining of a planetary ethics, with the emerging potential of open source design and the new localized production technologies being born augurs a transformation. A new universal human rights and ethics applies to the right to the human legacy of designs — a global design commons; This global design commons needs to be directed toward the production of goods and services within planetary boundaries; And thus a planetary contributory system emerges where people coordinate in solving shared problems. Problem solving is localized while simultaneously being supported by a global web of solidarity.

Understanding the Web of Life

At another level, though, we need to innovate with a clear understanding that we are embedded in the web of life. We are not masters of it, we are not controllers of it. In fact we emerged from it. In our DNA and in our physiology is the legacy of 4 billion years of evolution. So we need to innovate with a clear understanding of ecological principles. These principles can’t be covered here in great depth because it’s actually quite complex — there are many context and there’s a lot going on. There is permaculture, Panarchy, Regenerative agriculture, biomimicry, and a whole number of strategies and frameworks that can help us innovate using principles for ecological resilience.

For starters we need to understand that our fundamental life-support system is this complex living system which is our planet. This is the fundamental unit. At a bioregional scale we need to really understand the complex and nuanced interactions between species. At the level of the human body we need to see ourselves as living systems. Whatever we put into the environment will become us — whether it’s pollution or pesticides or radioactivity. And at the microlevel we need to understand the complex dynamics that provide the foundations for resilience — the health of soils, microbiological dynamics and what it means to have healthy gut bacteria flowing through our body. We are part of the web of life.

Already there’s plenty of projects that take ecological principles into account. The literature around the circular economy is inspired by how the web of life works — nothing is wasted, every output is an input for another process. And much of this also can be found in premodern systems of production. In Edo period Japan there were a very well developed systems of what we would call today a circular economy to deal with human waste in urban environments that was then used in rural farming, and how they had a complex artisanal system of repairing broken items. So today we also have the right to repair movement.

And in Mexico City, there is the precolonial legacy of Tenochtitlan. A city that, at the time of the conquest, had a larger population than any European city, and sustained itself through a complex system of what we would now call aquaponics. I don’t want to over-romantisize the Aztecs, but the main idea is that we can learn a lot from history — many of the “new” ways forward are embedded in the past.

The Commons

At the most fundamental level we are grappling with who we are as technological beings. Really until we fully accept the shadow of our technological self, we will continue to produce crisis after crisis, externality after externality. So the last key idea is the idea of the commons. I have defined the commons as that which we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, such that we are implied into new systems of collaborative governance of these commons. And when we look at what this is, there is a lot there — we depend on:

• Healthy soils
• A safe climate
• Water
• Honest media
• Good systems of governance
• The list goes on…

So when we think about our technological shadow, well indeed, we can also see that this is part of the commons. We need to innovate in a way that creates a future rather than takes it away — we need anticipatory innovation. We need to make sure innovation creates less risk and not more. And so, anticipatory innovation as a practice is part of our commons.

And indubitably, when we realise that we are mutually implicated in something that we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, well, that then is our call to action, that we need to engage in the governance of this, the management of this, that we become active shapers of it, rather than victims of inaction. This is “commons governance”, which has a rich literature, and as David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue, means we become “commoners” and practice “commoning”. In practical terms this means applying the precautionary principle more actively, as a partnership and political contract between citizens, the state and commercial sectors.

Conclusion

If we bring on board these design principles, we can create innovations that refuture, rather than defuture. We can practice an anticipatory innovation that can make our world a healthier and safer place for all of us.

I use a technique called the anticipatory experimentation method, that helps to challenge “used futures”, create new ones, to bring the preferred future into the present through experiments that can scale for impact. It’s a methodology for anticipatory innovation.

The great futurist Hazel Henderson talked about our entire planetary existence is one great laboratory of learning. The challenges we face collectively are like a planetary classroom. We are being asked to learn something fundamental about ourselves, about how we behave in the world, about a new level of thinking.

We can take the crises we face as a signifier of many different things, how terrible the human species is, how difficult the challenges is …. There are some lazy ways of thinking that lead to fatalism.

I prefer to take our current dilemma as a way to frame humanity’s evolutionary leap. We need to ask “what is this planetary era asking us to learn collectively today?”

If we can use Henderson’s metaphor, then the lesson plan for humanity becomes pretty clear.

The post Anticipatory Innovation: Integrating the Shadow of Design appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We human beings for most of our history have solved the problems of the present. Problem arises, people respond. See problem, act on problem. But now we find ourselves in a new context, beset by not just the problems of the present but as well of the future. These include automation and robotic’s impact on jobs, climate change, potential pandemics, energy transformations, youth bulges, the list goes on…. That golden or peaceful time, if it ever existed, when we could just pretend that the future would take care of itself is long gone. Today this attitude is tantamount to negligence.

So, today we need to solve the problems of the future — we need anticipatory action. This is new, and we are just beginning to get our heads around what this actually means. The fields of foresight and futures studies would seem a logical place for addressing this. But my own journey in futures studies, in this regard, started with some disappointment. Back in 2000, as a masters student in my early 30s, I noticed a disconnect — that futures studies and futurists were teaming with long-term speculations, forecasts, scenarios and the like. There was a lot of future-philia, but the present seemed to be disowned. Some futurists talked about how the future should be a principal of present action, but there were very few tangible methodologies that truly explicitly connected the future with present day problem solving.

In these early days I was inspired by people like Robert Jungk who developed an early participatory futures workshop for citizen empowerment. I also got inspired by action research in general and began exploring how one might use or comingle an action research approach with a futures studies approach.

Anticipatory Action Learning was a wonderful development in this regard, and its mature expression through the Six Pillars method of Sohail Inayatullah. Fast forward almost 20 years and today there are a variety of ways developed which link foresight and action in powerful ways.

My own modest contribution to this about a decade ago was to develop the Futures Action Model as a nonlinear research and development framework for how global foresight may inform localized action.

Feeling powerful?

When I’m with students, clients or just colleagues and friends, the question consistently arises, how can we have some agency, power, in this context of seemingly overwhelming change? We are beset by what seems like overwhelming complexity, overwhelming speeds of change, and overwhelming scale in the challenges.

A major concern for me has been how we recover a sense of agency and power in order to navigate these challenges we face. A sense of confusion or ambivalence or distraction or apathy or despair that many of us experience with regard to big problems are mind-body phenomena that stop people, stop us, from fully participating in the transformations or transitions our world needs.

If we each knew that we have the power to engender transformations and breakthroughs that our communities and societies need, then we would not hesitate to jump right in and begin doing so. It is this very mind-body phenomena, expressed as a sense of powerlessness, that acts like a suppressant on our capacities to jump into projects for change that indeed can change the world.

Creating social change is a social technology. Humans are unique in our adeptness and attachment to technology. From the most basic tools that we created over millions of years, a rock blade for cutting animal skins, or a basket woven from the long grasses around us that can hold and store food, we excel at technologies for transforming our environment.

Today we have a variety of social technologies developed to engender positive social change, from the many varieties of Action Research to Collective Impact, and many other methodologies, all of these in one way or another addresses questions of our power and capacity to navigate and engender the changes that we want and need to create. But can these empowering social technologies be bent toward addressing anticipated challenges?

Acting out used futures

There is a big problem with action that does not reflect on our assumption about the future. We live in a social context in which we are being told repeatedly to innovate, innovate, innovate, to be social innovators, to be technical innovators, to be anything innovators. I remember at a conference in 2016 at Tamkang University, Taiwan, in a debate with Jim Dator where he stopped the room when he said (paraphrasing) ‘we’ve got too much innovation already — we need less innovation!’. When we got through the initial confusion and shock of the statement, we learned that he meant that all too often our practices of creativity are locked into yesterday’s thinking. We fetishize innovation without considering the underlying patterns of creativity being expressed.

If we create ideas, designs, enterprises and other innovations from the uncritical or unconscious ‘used future’, as Sohail Inayatullah puts it, we will simply perpetuate and even exacerbate the problems that we are dealing with today. It reminds me of a recent article I read. Engineers had a ‘great idea’ to create little drone bees to replace the ones that are dying off en mass due to colony collapse disorder. Cue forehead slap. It is this instrumental mindset that created the problem in the first place. That nature is replaceable. A lack of fundamental understanding of the complexity of biological systems. An inability to see humans as part of the web of life rather than engineers on it or masters of it. It’s the old story of the lady who swallowed a fly. She swallows a spider to get the fly, she perpetuates a used future, I guess she’ll die! We do actually know why she swallowed the fly, the spider, bird, etc etc… because she never stepped back from action to see the world in its systemic complexity, she just acted out her unexamined assumptions and misguided confidence that the easy and simple way to solve the problem was to do what she had always done — and each time she does this the problem gets worse.

That is why it is so critical to unpack and challenge the used futures and to create alternative futures that expand options, and to create a new vision before even entering into the space of ideating action, be they ‘designs’, ‘models’, whatever. We need qualitatively new responses to the problems of the future. That old expression that one cannot solve today’s problems with yesterday’s thinking applies but needs updating too: ‘We cannot solve tomorrow’s problems with today’s thinking!’ Which does sounds a little absurd, given that all we have is the present, really. But we might say more accurately that we cannot solve tomorrow’s problems until we challenge today’s thinking, our assumptions and images about the future and our vision of our options.

Some metaphors and a framework

I’ve been at this for almost two decades. Sometimes I have felt like Captain Ahab chasing the white whale, obsessed with the prize. At other times I have felt like Prometheus, searching for the secret of fire. And at others Don Quixote, chasing windmills. None of these stories ended well!

These myths, however, symbolize some big lessons. First, we learn from Melville, practice non-attachment — or we’ll get sucked into the vortex of our obsession. Secondly, from the Greek myth, that any invention has a cost — something that is hidden or disowned, with unintended consequences. Creativity is a two way street. Thirdly, from Cervantes, we are all limited in our imagination by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the used future — our actions are often just expressions of old patterns of thinking from days gone by — but the context has changed. What all of these myths are collectively saying are to take a step back from action itself and reflect upon the nature of being and thinking in the world — if we are to be action oriented — then we must marry agency and action with philosophy and reflection.

And so, two years ago, from the depths of reflection sprang the next iteration in this journey for me. It emerged from owning a new metaphor of the self. This new metaphor had the logic of life, of living systems.

In one manifestation it was the seed from the tree, or inversely the tree that is born from the seed. It is the logic of birth, growth, propagation, and mutation. It showed nature’s way of doing experiments, through variation. And how the future is enfolded into the present as possibility through the logic of the ‘seed form’.

In another manifestation it was a solar system in its infancy, where one small intervention could have profound long term implications. This represented that our work today is on behalf of future generations. And intuitively, from the metaphors came the framework.

The method brings together three key dimensions and influences. The first two parts of the Bridge brings in futures studies as a major dimension, especially the work of Sohail Inayatullah with his emphasis on critical, deconstructive and integrative foresight. The keystone of the Bridge brings in my emphasis over many years on ideation of initiatives and enterprises, expressed through the Futures Action Model. And finally the last two steps in the Bridge express action research as a fundamental influence.

Practically the method entails five stages:

1. Challenging the used future

2. Developing a preferred future and open ended narrative

3. Ideating a number of prototype ideas from the vision or narrative

4. Choosing which prototype ideas to experiment with and running real-world experiments

5. Scaling and investing in the experiments with the best promise

Steps

First, the ‘used future’ must be challenged, as invariably we hold presumptions about the future that are uncritically held or untested. If we act from the used future we perpetuate the problems associated with such perspectives. This follows the age old adage that one cannot add anything to a cup that is already full. We can think of the metaphor of the teacup which is completely full. Nothing can be added to it. It is only when we empty the cup when we can add something new. Likewise we must empty our assumptions to renew our understanding and vision for the future, so as to not be hostage to old patterns of thinking, unconscious assumptions, and so that new ideas can emerge. As well, as we learn about the emerging issues, trends and weak signals that are transforming our social horizons, new and alternative images of the future emerge. This ensures that visions and pathways for the future are informed by an empirical understanding of change, not just unexamined assumptions, and that multiple possible futures inform action.

Secondly, we develop an integrated vision and a transformational futures narrative. Integrated visioning, first developed by Inayatullah, is a way to do visioning with a particular sensitivity to our psychological blind spots. It is often the case that our visions, whether idealistic or pragmatic, disown key aspects of what we need. Integrated visioning is a way to develop visions and pathways that are more holistic and, because they take a fuller account of an organization’s dimensions, are more likely to align across it and therefore succeed. Then we create an open ended narrative, the movement from our past to present to preferred future. This needs to articulate the way in which the world participates in its fulfilment, a call to action for others to work with us to create this future. This open ended narrative addresses the false presumption that an individual or single organisation can create the future on their own, and acknowledges that it is actually an ecosystem of coordinated actors (organisations, communities, networks, etc.) that are able to create the future together.

Thirdly, I use the Futures Action Model to bridge the preferred futures and narrative with ideation. The Futures Action Model (FAM) is a “keystone” method that integrates all phases of the Bridge, by providing a way for problem-oriented thinking to relate with solution-oriented thinking in a futures-oriented way. It relates foresight research and knowledge with identification of pioneer projects and responses from around the world, to the “design ecosystem” (stakeholders critical in the development of the initiative), and finally provides a space for articulating the bare bones DNA of an initiative. FAM can include the use of an interactive role-playing game, an R&D process, and workshopping. The output of FAM are initiative ideas that are deeply grounded across multiple critical spaces: empirical evidence on social change, real world pioneer examples from around the world, and present day stakeholder considerations.

Fourthly, ideas that emerge need to be vetted and selected for experiments. The experiment is that small piece of the preferred future we are bringing into the present. Experiments make sure that as individuals or organizations, we limits the scale and the risk to us, a tolerance zone for experiments that allow them to fail safely. They provide ways of testing the assumptions embedded within them, to make sure learning happens that builds in systemic capacity for renewed experiments.

Finally, experiments can be evaluated to see which ones showed the most promise and are best aligned to enact the vision or pathway. If an experiment holds little promise, it can be discarded. Or it can be adapted if it showed some promise. If it is demonstrated to work it can then be upscaled and invested in, in a way appropriate to the resources and risk tolerance of the organisation. This ensures that experiments can scale for impact when they and the organization driving them are ready. (Many thanks to my colleague Gareth Priday for helping me to see the importance of this last step).

In summary, first we must challenge the used future and deconstruct the unconscious patterns that dictates our awareness and images of the future. Otherwise we act out used futures. This then creates the space for new visions and preferred futures, and the new narratives that express this. And on the back of these new narratives and visions we ideate — we create ideas for change. Let’s have fun and let’s be bold. As we have deconstructed the used futures and created new visions, our ideas for change are bound to be interesting, different, potent. Then, filled as we are with these ideas for change we can choose one or some to bring into the world, through real-world experiments that will drive learning. These experiments will be the appropriate size, they will be safe to fail, they will be the seeds of the new. And finally, based on this learning and the evaluation of these experiments we can adapt, we can discard and we can scale them for impact.

Giving the baby a name

We can call this the Anticipatory Experimentation Method (AEM) or ‘Bridge Method’. It is a method for bringing the preferred future into the present through experiments that can scale for impact. It is a bridge between a preferred future and real-world experiments that bring that future into being. It combines a visioning approach with an ideation method that can bridge future vision with specific and implementable ideas, which culminate in experiments.

The method focuses on bringing a preferred future into the present, by running experiments that have maximum alignment with the enactment of the preferred future. Why do an experiment that is not aligned to our preferred futures? Let’s experiment with that which is going to get us there. Experiments are a vehicle for enacting new futures because they are “small pieces” of the preferred future brought into the present. Experiments are also time and resource savers because, rather than commit a whole organization or community to a new path (which is both risky and potentially costly), experiments are small scale and cost effective ways of testing a new direction. If some experiments show promise they can be scaled and invested in, accelerating organizational momentum toward enacting the vision. If experiments don’t work, the investment was limited and the risk was measured, people can still learn a great deal and nonetheless develop confidence in the experimentation process.

How do we respond, indeed create breakthroughs or transformations within a variety of domains of social life, where change is needed? There are many methods for social change, and as a student, practitioner and teacher of futures studies and foresight I have a deep appreciation for the variety of complex ways our societies change. There is no one size fits all. It is my hope that the Anticipatory Experimentation Method (AEM) or ‘Bridge Method’ adds meaningfully to the capacity for us to respond to our shared and emerging challenges, as anticipatory experimentalists, playfully yet purposefully to be in the service of long-term global foresight and the well-being of future generations and life on earth.

José Ramos is director of the boutique consulting / research / facilitation business Action Foresight.

The post Mutating the Future: the Anticipatory Experimentation Method appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Impacts of resource hungry exploitative economies

“What is 120 times the size of London? The answer: the land or ecological footprint required to supply London’s needs.” — Herbert Giradet

Our ecological footprint exceeds the Earth’s capacity to regenerate. A number of useful indicators and frameworks have been developed to measure the ecological impact that humanity and its dominant economic system with its patterns of production, consumption and waste-disposal are having on the planet and its ecosystems. The measure and methodology for ecological footprinting translates the resource use and the generation of waste of a given population (eg: community, city, or nation) into the common denominator of bio-productive land per person, measured in Global Hectares (Gha), that are needed to provide these resources and absorb those wastes.

Much of the educational power of this tool is its capacity to compare between how much bio-productive land exists on the planet with how much bio-productive land would be needed to sustain current levels of consumption. In addition it also helps us to highlight the stark inequalities in ecological impact that exists between different countries.

Source: Global Footprint Network

Ecological Footprinting is basically an accounting tool that compares how much nature we have and how much nature we use. He are currently using about 50% more ecological resources than nature is regenerating naturally every year.

Source: Global Footprint Network

This point of spending more than is coming in every year — or living of the capital rather than the interest — was reached by humanity in the late-1960s. It is called Ecological Overshoot and every year since Earth Overshoot Day — the day when humanity as a whole has already used up the bio-productivity of Earth in that year — is a little earlier. Here is a little video (3:30 min.) to explain the concepts of ecological overshoot and footprint.

Source: Global Footprint Network

The first Earth Overshoot Day (also referred to as Ecological Debt Day) fell on December 31st of 1968 and by the mid-1970s it was already reached at the end of November. Rapidly rising population numbers and rates of material and energy consumption, along with the accelerating erosion of ecosystems everywhere have resulted in the decline of the planet’s annual ‘bioproductivity’ and a reduction in ecosystems services each year since. Thus, the day on which we overstep the limits of Earth’s annual productivity is occurring earlier and earlier. By 1995 it was on October 10th, in 2005 we reached overshoot by September 3rd, in 2013 on August 20th, and in 2015 on August 13th, and by 2017 on August 2nd!

While agricultural inputs (fossil fuel based fertilizers), irrigation and technological advances have artificially raised the bioproductivity of agricultural land, the continued degradation of ecosystems everywhere leads to a drop in planetary bioproductivity every year. At the same time — the number of humans keeps rising, the average — or fair share — of bioproductive global hectares (gha) available per person has dropped from 3.2 to 1.7 gha from the early 1960s to today.

Source: Living Planet Report 2014

The global average ecological footprint per person is 2.7gha and therefore almost 50% more than would be sustainable (WWF, 2014). Averages are deceiving, as you can see in the graphic above, the five countries with the highest demand on the world’s bioproductivity and resources are consuming nearly half, leaving the other half to be shared among the remaining 190+ nations. We live in a world with extreme economic and ecological inequality!

Source: WWF 2016 Living Planet Report

Metaphorically speaking, if we think of global ecosystems as an apple tree, we can say that globally, until the late 1960s, we limited ourselves to harvesting the apple crop. Since 1968, we have started to eat into the wood of the tree, diminishing the crop that the tree is able to yield. In this way, we are eroding the habitats of other species as well as the bequest that we leave to future generations.

Finding an answer to this challenge through a shift away from fossil fuel and materials sources — a strategy that is moving towards the top of the agenda for today’s political and economic elites — will hardly address the core problem. Our numbers and the levels at which we are consuming are eating into the planet’s natural capital.

WWF’s Living Planet Index, that tracks populations of 3,038 vertebrate species — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals — from all around the world, has found that the Index has dropped by 52% between 1970 and 2010 (WWF, 2014, p.16). During only 40 years of unbridled consumption and exploitative economics the planet has lost natural capital, bio-diversity and resilience at a catastrophic rate.

Meanwhile, regular reports on fish stocks, the health of soils, rivers and lakes, depletion of aquifers, and rates of deforestation leave us in no doubt that the ecosystems on which we are dependent are under serious stress (see Brown 2008). Lester Brown’s Earth Policy Institute has a data centre that publishes up-to-date research on these developments.

Staying within ‘Planetary Boundaries’

Another way of looking at the ecological impact of our current industrial growth society is the planetary boundaries framework that as first developed by Johann Rockström (video, 4 min.), director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and an international group of researchers in 2009 (download paper). It has been revised in 2015 and the graphic above the heading illustrates the levels to which we are already outside ‘humanity’s safe operating space’ on planet Earth.

There are nine planetary boundaries:

1. Climate change

2. Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)

3. Stratospheric ozone depletion

4. Ocean acidification

5. Biogeochemical flows (phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)

6. Land-system change (for example deforestation)

7. Freshwater use

8. Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)

9. Introduction of novel entities (e.g. organic pollutants, radioactive materials, nanomaterials, and micro-plastics).

Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre (Steffen et al. 2015)

We — as humanity — have already crossed four of these nine boundaries (climate change, loss of biosphere integrity, land systems change, and altered biogeochemical cycles). This transgression is directly linked to the cumulative effects of human activity on the planetary system and many of the processes that lead us to crossing these boundaries are linked to our systems of resource exploitation, production and consumption. To address this issue we need a fundamental redesign of how we think about and do economics on a finite and increasingly fragile planet.

NOTE: this is an (edited) excerpt from the Economic Design Dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability. The first version of this dimension was written in 2008 by my friend Jonathan Dawson, now Head of Economics of Transition at Schumacher College. In 2015–2016, I revised the Design for Sustainability course substantially and rewrote this dimension with more up-to-date information and the research that I had done for my book Designing Regenerative Cultures.

The next installment of the Economic Design Dimension starts on March 19th, 2018 and runs for 8 weeks online. You can join the Design for Sustainability course at any point during the year.

Photo by brianscantlebury.com

The post Our economy is a degenerative system appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Elena Martínez Vicente is a product designer, specialized in designing better processes and more understandable products for humans. She was a designer with the P2PValue project and has extensive experience collaborating with commons, communities and P2P projects, including an ongoing collaboration with the P2P Foundation on our publications and the Commons Transition Primer.

Silvia and Elena are team members in  P2P Models, a research project examining the infrastructure, governance and economy of decentralized, democratic organizations, with a particular focus on value allocation and distribution.

We asked them to tell us about their experiences working in the commons, in academia,  and in the broader world.

Elena, Silvia, tell us a bit about your backgrounds, interests and how you came to be involved in the P2P Models project.

Elena: Since 2006, I have worked as an Interaction Designer in the private sector, also working for NGOs and cooperation projects in general, whenever I had a chance. From my days as a student, and intermittently, I have been in and out of activist groups, feminist and commons communities. It is not until 2016 that I could finally dedicate my entire time at work to “designing for the good ones”. Since then, I have been trying to translate difficult concepts for the common(s) people through infographics, post, illustrations and simple designs. I also try to bring some sanity to free software, since often in large projects, very good intentions are left on the wayside because it is “a pain in the ass” to use them as these projects do not give the right importance to design and user experience.

Silvia: Really, I was never in touch with these themes before, in fact, I think I always avoided using technology in general (I’m now more concerned about how important and powerful this kind of knowledge is). I was always very confused about what to study. I have a lot of diverse interests: dancing, carpentry, philosophy…and although now I find it positive, at that time I felt pressure to “find my speciality”. What I knew, was I liked to write and I was interested in social issues and this led me to Anthropology. Partly because of diverse life experiences, years later I started a master’s degree in Gender Studies and Development Cooperation in Madrid, which offered an internship in Colombia. This experience reinforced my liking for research. When I was back in Madrid, a friend told me about this job opportunity and I did not hesitate to try it.

Can you describe what P2P Models is about? Who else is on the team, and what stage is the project in right now?

Silvia: I am still understanding what this project is about…hahaha. I’m lucky enough to have some master classes with Samer, our principal investigator, to know more about the tech part. I have a much clearer image about the social side of the project. We want to better understand how the governance and the distribution of value work happens in the CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production Communities), in order to know how blockchain could be useful for them. Fortunately, we have a sociologist-computer scientist in our team, David Rozas, who can be the link between the social and the tech part. We are 7 people in total, with different backgrounds and education but with activism in common. Also, we have a lot of collaborators and advisors who help us. We are at the beginning of the project, still taking off, maybe in the most challenging stage or where we should take more important decisions.

Elena: P2PModels is a research project full of difficult tech concepts so it is a beautiful challenge for me. Basically, we can summarize it in a question: Could we advance to a Commons Transition with blockchain?

The project has three main branches to build decentralized, democratic and distributed organizations. We intend to collaborate with international communities to learn from them and to think about technologies that could help to improve the lives of the people who work in these communities.

The people involved are Samer Hassan, principal investigator, David Rozas and Silvia in the sociological part right now, Sem and Antonio as tech advisors and Geno, our word-translator for humans. And, we are hiring tech unicorns and project managers too.

What are some of the projects being studied?

Elena: Right now, we are centered in designing better processes within the team, building the basis as a group and rethinking our team culture. A very important (and invisible) task. In terms of productive work, we almost have the pilot communities, for the ethnographic research. Secondly we are working on the brand, the new website and the communication strategy. We are just a few people doing a lot of stuff!

Silvia: That is one of the important decisions we should take and we are still thinking about it. We have drawn up the criteria to choose which projects could be interesting to study, and it seems like in the next months we can start some provisional social research but as I said, this is also under construction! We are full of verve, and we want to take on a lot of case studies but we have to be aware of our capabilities, in terms of time etcetera.

Blockchain-enabled projects are meant to be about decentralizing power, but treat this in a technical way. How do you see this project addressing other issues about decentralizing power, taking into account gender, race, class…?

Silvia: Thank you for asking this question. We strongly believe that the decentralization of power is possible beyond the technical part. Because of that we are giving the same value to both the tech and social sides of the project. Personally­, I’m really focussed on bringing a gender perspective to the project, of course an intersectional one. We are going to put all our efforts into this in order to carry out gender-mainstreaming in the project, starting first within our team and our own culture. We believe strongly that “the personal technical is political”.

Elena: Decentralizing power is the foundation, in your own dynamics and in your relationships as a working group. And it is true, I can see a lot of white men people talking and talking about decentralizing power in both blockchain and the commons. What they do not ask about is their own race, class or gender privileges of being there, maybe they have some women people behind doing the invisible work? Are their personal relationships unequal? Great speeches, theories and papers are useless without considering this.

Communities involved in contributory accounting have different concepts of value and value tracking. Can we avoid the mindset that says that the only value worth tracking is exchange value?

Elena: We have to try it!! It is a partial way, inherited from capitalism and therefore a patriarchal way to see value. People contribute in different ways to the group. What about emotional value? I always work better with people who take care of me and who I love. I do not know if this type of value can be tracked, but we all know that it is there, we cannot ignore it and try to measure and track all the facts.

Silvia: Yes, I think we can. Feminist economy has been doing this, challenging the heterodox economy, for many years. It is a matter of having the will and developing a broader outlook. It is not easy, I have never worked before in tech and I am still struggling with how to apply my knowledge in this field. I assume it is going to be a very creative process.

What about invisible or affective work? Can these be tracked and measured?

Elena: Affective and invisible work is the base of all groups and society. I am not interested in measuring them, but maybe we could try to train in empathy, listening and learning a little more. In Spain, for example, assemblies, work meetings… are often held at 8 p.m. This is absolutely incompatible with the caring done outside of work, and nobody seems to mind. This makes people that have to care disappear from decision making and groups. In my opinion, it is a capitalist heritage that we need to rethink.

Silvia: I don’t know if it is a matter of measuring. The feminists working in development cooperation, for example, have done a really good job with time, using surveys or calculating the contributions of domestic and affective work to the GDP. On the other hand, I think a very important first step is to consolidate the idea of invisible and affective work as the base of life, and understanding how without it, there is nothing else. This kind of work must not be in the periphery, waiting to be measured or recognized; we have to put it in the center, as Amaia Pérez Orozco explains so well.

Although commons based peer production is an emancipating way of pooling our productive capacities, these communities are often dominated by male, white, economically privileged individuals. What is the role of “peer to peer” in confronting these disparities?  

Silvia: We cannot be so innocent in thinking that in “peer to peer” production there are no power relationships. These commons based initiatives have a lot of potential, challenging capitalism and exploring new ways to build economy, but of course they have to implement a lot of mechanisms to avoid reproducing patriarchy, racism, and other structures of domination. It is still necessary to make the struggle against knowledge- or power-inequality a priority in these communities.

Elena: P2P communities have made important advances in decentralizing power but, like Silvia said, we cannot think that everything is already done, because in most cases, we’re all white, first world people. We have to make an effort to introduce measures that help us to re-think and re-design real peer to peer values. I am not an expert, but I can still see, typically, a white, upper-class man doing free software or exchanging p2p value.

Silvia, how does your background in feminism and anthropology fit into the project? How do these affect Commons and P2P practices, in academia and “in the real world”?

Silvia: Well, the entire group has expressed from the beginning how important the social branch of the project was for them. They have helped me to overcome this “imposter syndrome” I had (I know the theory, however, I am still in the empowerment process…). Well, I think a new person on a team always enriches it. Because of my background, maybe I can give some different perspectives to achieve this non-techno-determinism view that the project wants to maintain. This maybe goes more for the academic part. On the other hand, I think my inexperience in tech makes me a good translator and mediator with the “real world”.

Elena, you have done design work on a number of P2P-related projects. Are there specific challenges you try to address in communicating this field? How can ideas like P2P and the Commons be represented visually, and especially to non-academics?

Elena: I am always thinking that we should be capable of talking about commons with the mainstream, and one way to make this possible is with design and communication.

Academic people have the ability to make a simple concept complicated. In this way, we need journalists and designers who translate these complicated minds, papers and concepts to the people. People can easily understand the value of urban gardens in their neighborhood, or the way energy cooperatives are an advantage for the environment and your pocket, but books or essays about p2p communities are very complicated and full of difficult concepts. In that sense, the Commons Transition Primer we did last year is an excellent advance. In the last few years, feminism has done this with excellent results, so, we should try, shouldn’t we?

We talk about a Commons Transition. Do the two of you see this taking place? If so, how?

Silvia: Well, to be fair, I would not say that this would be a transition, but a return to the past. Women have being doing Commons and alternative initiatives for centuries, the novelty now is the inclusion of some technologies like blockchain. I do not dare to make predictions… Deep down, what I would like is that this happens in a coherent way with the bases of the Commons, that is with equity, solidarity and an awareness of interdependence.

Elena: Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Silvia: I would like to give special thanks to my colleague Elena. From the beginning I’ve felt her sorority, and it is really a pleasure to share my workspace with such an experienced person and woman. It is great to have her support and knowledge in this uncertain and masculinized sector.

Elena:

 Elena Martínez Vicente studied Fine Arts in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she spent her final two years enjoying a grant in Venice, Italy.

Silvia Díaz Molina studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After two years living in Vienna (Austria), participating in different volunteer work and activism, she joined the Gender Studies and Development Cooperation Master’s Degree at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, because of which she had the opportunity to do an internship in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), where she wrote her thesis about “Afro-descendant women from the Colombian Caribbean, sexual violence and the construction of memories about the armed conflict”. In April 2018, she became part of the P2PModels project as a researcher, developing the social side of the project.

Lead image by Gaelx, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0; text image by Janita Top, Unsplash

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Its main objectives are to foster the development and recognition of emerging European Maker and Design culture by supporting makers, their mobility and circulation of their work, providing them with international opportunities and highlighting the most outstanding talent; improve the connections among makers, designers and the market, providing thus tools, strategies, guides, contents, education, events, networks in order to enable them to commercialize their creations; stimulate and develop a genuine Europe-wide programming of Maker activities in order to contribute to the development of a vibrant and diverse European Maker and Design culture that can be experienced by a broad range of audience across Europe and beyond as well as to enhance the creation of work and of financially sustainable business activities by makers and designers.

P2P Lab has the pleasure to collaborate with DDMP by organising a cultiMake event concerning the crowdsourcing of open source agricultural solutions.

Partners: Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalonia (ES), Fab City Grand Paris (FR), Pakhuis de Zwijger (NL), HappyLab (AT), Polifactory – Politecnico di Milano (IT), Machines Room (UK), P2P Lab (EL), Republica (DE), Dansk Design Center (DK), Fab lab Berlin (DE), Fab Lab Budapest (HU), Innovation Center Iceland (IS), Foreningen Maker (DK).

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Recently I was invited to speak at a major fashion colloquium dedicated to this topic. The event, which drew about 500 people to Arnhem, Netherlands, was sponsored by the ArtEZ University of the Arts and an annual exhibition called State of Fashion. The conference described its mission this way: “Fashion is in dire need of more value-based critical thinking as well as design-driven research to thoroughly explore, disrupt, redefine and transform the system.” It aimed to “collectively investigate how to move towards a fashion reality that addresses ethics, inclusivity and responsible consumerism in a more engaged way.”

Marlene Haase, Universität der Künste, Berlin: “Misfit” project dealing with donated clothing in Berlin.

[I remain a bit confused about the conference title, “Searching for the New Luxury,” because the event had few aspirations to make social minded innovations scarce and exclusive. I suppose the idea of “luxury” is too baked-in to the aspirational DNA of fashionistas to surrender easily.]

I was impressed by the range and caliber of approaches to revamping the fashion industry. One of the most formidable efforts is being waged by a group called Fashion Revolution, a global advocacy group that was started after the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,200 people. Fashion Revolution has tried to make the fashion supply chain more transparent in order to prevent future abuses, as in this film “The True Cost,”about the actual (high) costs of garments.

Fashion Revolution has also criticized the whole “fast fashion” segment of the industry, which has contributed to the doubling of garment production worldwide between 2000 and 2014. Fast fashion has produced prodigious amounts of waste. Some 40% of purchased clothes are rarely or never worn – the average garment is worn only 3.3 times over its lifetime – and about one-third of retail clothing is never sold, and is therefore burned or destroyed. The industry produces some 400 billion square meters of fabric waste each year.

“Sustainable fashion” was a term used by many speakers to point to clothing that is designed to cherished and last. Kristine Harper spoke about the “aesthetic sustainability” of clothing, probing the emotional attachments that we have with garments and how we might improve “sustainable design and durable aesthetics.” Orsola de Castro, a “recovering designer,” talked about how “loved clothes last.”

Another pioneer of sustainable fashion is Oskar Metsavaht, founder of the Brazilian Instituto-E and creative director of Osklen. He showed a short film describing his company’s aggressive efforts to find and develop new sorts of recyclable, sustainable materials for garments. Osklen has also created new sorts of supply chains and “conscious consumption.”

These sorts of ideas are seeping into fashion education these days thanks to people like Professor Pascale Gatzen, who developed an alternative fashion curriculum at the Parsons School of Design in New York City before moving on to teach at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands. Gatzen explained her philosophy toward fashion: “Choices are made because they yield the biggest profit margins, not because they are more beautiful or because they make us happier. How you dress is about how you position yourself in the world. How do we take fashion back into our own hands and make it a catalyst for social change?”

Gatzen is keen in restoring craft to garment making. “There is a clear distinction between designing and making clothes,” she said. “I encourage my students to design through making, because it is important to teach a process in which they negotiate the dynamic relationship between materials, ideas and the sensibility that emerges from their bodies and hands.” To extend this idea, Gatzen founded a weaving cooperative in the Hudson Valley called the Friends of Light to produce handwoven jackets.The wool is grown from sheep on a nearby farm, so all materials are local and the production process is careful and holistic – so much so that it takes as much as 160 hours to make each jacket.

The conundrum: the more labor-intensive and authentic a garment is, the more expensive it is likely to be. This plays into the whole high-fashion ethic and business model. Eco-responsible fashion should not be a “luxury.” Still, even if it costs more, it is worth attempting innovative production methods and recovering a sense of craft within garment design and production. It is also worth weaning people away from their addiction to low-price, low-quality “fast fashion.”

The real challenge for socially minded fashion, as I see it, is to develop a parallel economy that can somehow separate and insulate itself from the hyper-capital-driven marketplace that now prevails. That will be the only way to develop an alternative operating logic and ethic that can avoid the relentless co-optation of global fashion corporations and their relentless iconography of luxury. Unless such as scheme can be developed – at whatever rudimentary scale at first – social innovations will get locked into small niches as artisanal clothing or confined to the luxury market — and genuine social innovation will be commandeered for superficial marketing.

Can alternative fashion players develop their own vision, production methods, distribution apparatus, finance, and marketing, at a sufficient size? I’d love to see some serious, focused attention paid to this structural, systemic challenge. Piecemeal innovations can go only so far.

In my talk, I tried to imagine “fashion as an ecosystem of commons.” I introduced the basic idea of the commons and suggested a number of general strategies by which fashion could reconceive itself as a federation of commons. Alt-fashionistas might start by developing new ways to “beat the bounds” to protect their shared wealth and commoning – their collaborations, supply chains, and cultural vision. They should rely on practical experimentation, not ideology, and develop their own finance systems and distribution and marketing infrastructure. They should try to shed old vocabularies and learn the language of the commons. Here is a video of the keynote speakers at the conference. My remarks go from the timecode 20:43 to 41:14

Lead image: Fashion Colloquium

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I started a Youtube channel, and here is the first video I made: One more time on “What Is Open Source Circularity?”

It is my first video and I learned a bunch of things for future videos. But I think the quality is already good enough to make people understand Open Source Circularity and why we need it. If you prefer reading over watching you can download the script here. It is also on Facebook in case you like to share it there.

(Deutsch unten)

From the video:

Utopia

… Open Source Circularity – that sounds like world worth living in.

* It is a world that invites our creativity and intellect.

* A world that supplies us with what we need. Without having countries invading each other for resources. Because if we don’t burn resources or turn them into garbage there should be enough for all.

* It is a world that preserves nature and the biosphere. In such a world nature remains beautiful and rich everywhere.

* And it is a world that will provide us with a lot of free time! Because for a working circular economy we also need to consume much less! Therefore less production is needed. Which frees up or time. For other things.

* And it is a world where we are enabled to express our freedom and are not surveilled or controlled by large companies using the products around us.

An Open Source Circular Economy … well … that sounds like the best positive utopia I know.

SCRIPT DOWNLOAD: PDF Video Script.PDF1 (60.8 KB) | ODT Video Script.ODT (21.0 KB)

DE Ich eröffne einen Youtube-Kanal. Und hier ist das erste Video. Noch einmal zur Frage: Was ist Open Source Circularity – was ist Kreislaufwirtschaft und wieso brauchen wir sie und für sie Open Source? Wer lieber liest als schaut, kann sich das vollständige englische Skript herunterladen. Das Video ist auch auf Facebook, falls man es dort teilen möchte.

Aus dem Video:

Utopia

… Open Source Circularity? Das klingt nach einer Welt, in der man vielleicht gern lebt?

* Es ist eine Welt, die unseren Intellekt und unsere Kreativität einlädt durch die Produkte, die uns umgeben.

* Es ist eine Welt, die uns mit allem Notwendigen versorgt, ohne dass Länder kriegerisch ineinander einmarschieren müssen, um an knappe Ressourcen zu gelangen. Denn wenn wir die Ressourcen nicht wegwerfen oder verbrennen, sollte genug für uns da sein.

* Es ist eine Welt, die die Natur und unsere Biosphäre bewahrt. Denn für eine echte und funktionierende Circular Economy muss die Natur schön und reich sein, überall!

* Und es ist eine Welt, die uns sehr viel Freizeit schenkt. Denn für eine funktionierende Circular Economy müssen wir vor allem auch weniger produzieren. Weniger Fabriken. Weniger Arbeit. Mehr Zeit für andere Dinge!

* Und es ist eine Welt, in der wir frei bleiben dürfen und nicht überwacht werden durch die Produkte, die wir zum Leben brauchen.

Eine Open Source Circular Economy … das klingt nach einer ziemlich überzeugenden Utopie für mich …

Crossposted from OSCE Days

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Christian Villum: Giants such as Google and IBM have lately been followed by Canadian D-Wave, the leading developer of quantum computers, which opened up parts of their platform in January. But it’s not just the large, financially strong American technology companies who are painting the picture of open source as a global megatrend. Start-ups and small to medium-sized companies all over the world, and not just within the tech industry, are creating new and exciting open source-based physical products. 3D Robotics, Arduino and the British furniture company Open Desk, which is creating open design furniture in collaboration with 600 furniture creators all over the world, are just a few examples of how open source has become the foundation of some of the most innovative and interesting business models of our time.

Danish Design Centre has dived into this trend for the past year; a trend which is part of a large wave of technological disruption and digitization and which is currently top of mind for many companies. How do you get started with digitizing your business model, and how do you know if open source manufacturing is the future of your company? These questions aren’t easy to answer.

Growth programme for curious Danish production companies

This is why we, in collaboration with a range of partners, have initiated REMODEL, which is a growth programme for Danish manufacturing companies who wish to explore and develop new business models based on open-source principles, and which are tailor-made to fit their industry and their specific situation. REMODEL demystifies a complex concept and helps the company develop economically sustainable business models which can open op new markets and new economies.

We do this by using strategic design tools, which make up the foundation of the programme, and which are based on strong design virtues such as iterative experimentation, the development of rapid prototypes and most importantly, focusing on the needs of the end-user. On top of this, REMODEL also involves a global panel of experts, CEOs and researchers within the field of open source, which allows the programme to pull on expertise from some of the world’s most visionary innovators.

Timeline for the programme

REMODEL consists of a series of design-driven stages. Last year the programme was launched in a testing phase in which the Danish Design Centre collaborated with a handful of Danish manufacturing companies, including renowned hifi-manufacturing company Bang & Olufsen, who went through early modules of the programme over the course of the spring 2017. These modules were reiterated along the way based on the feedback from those tests.

The key learnings from these test as well as workshops with members of the expert panel then became the foundation for the official REMODEL programme, which launched on February 5, 2018, and where 10 pioneering companies are currently working their way through the programme, which has been set up as an 8 week design sprint. The outcome is for them to have gained a thorough strategic understand of the concept of open source hardware as it relates to their industry and furthermore a draft strategy to open one of the existing products in their portfolio.

Radical sharing of knowledge

Learnings, tools and methods from both the test runs and the main programme will be collected and shared in a REMODEL open source hardware business model toolkit, which will be freely available after the program.

On top of this we will be organising a REMODEL knowledge sharing summit in October 2018, where participating companies, the international expert panel, prominent speakers and anyone else who are interested are invited to Denmark to share their experiences and think about the next steps for open sourced-based business models and strategies for manufacture companies.

Discussing REMODEL internationally

In March 2018, Danish Design Centre is yet again participating in the world’s largest technology event, SXSW Interactive, in Austin, Texas. We have been invited to host a panel debate as part of the official schedule under the title ‘Open Source Innovation: The Internet on Your Team‘, where speakers from Bang & Olufsen, Thürmer Tools and Wikifactory will discuss the topic in general as well as tell stories from the REMODEL program.

Learn more

Curious to follow the REMODEL program in more depth? Read more here or sign up for the newsletter. Eager to discuss? Join the conversation on Twitter under the #remodelDK hashtag or contact Danish Design Centre Programme Director Christian Villum on [email protected]

Originally published in danskdesigncenter.dk

Lead image: Open Desk builds furniture as open design. (c) Rory Gardiner

Text image: CC-BY-NC Agnete Schlichtkrull

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