Gemma Copeland

Making a website

2019-09-01T00:00:00Z

Some thoughts about making this website, written jointly by me and Piper Haywood (italics).

This website started as a conversation between Piper and myself. I had just left my full-time job and PH suggested that we could work together on a new website for my practice. It was also a good excuse for us to collaborate and explore some of our ideas about website design and development together.

I was interested in working with Gemma on pretty much anything! More specifically though, I wanted to work on a site that was less of an unchanging behemoth and more of a playground for learning, a permanent sandbox and ideas container. This is how treat my site, but I hadn’t had the chance to create something similar for and with someone else before.

From the outset, we set the intention that the process should be conversation between the two of us. We’re both interested in seeing design and development as a collaborative and iterative process, where both parties learn from the other. (Although, admittedly, I have learnt much more from PH during this process!)

You say that, but I’ve definitely learned a ton from you! Especially about letting ambiguity thrive, balancing it against structure.

Light

We think that a website can be modern without being complicated. Better does not mean louder or more moving parts or reinventing the wheel. Goodness can come from working with existing tools and celebrating the building blocks.

Today’s web development world can seem incredibly intimidating for someone just starting out. There are so many different frameworks and languages to learn, it can feel like it’s better just not to start and use a template instead – something that Jake puts quite succinctly here.

I was fortunate to pick up web development at a time when you could get away with experimenting and tinkering using the open web as a tool for self-directed learning. I didn’t have to contend with enormous echo chambers like Twitter shaming me for not using a bundler, being unfamiliar with a language, or a million other things that were outside my consciousness early on. It makes me sad that enthusiastic beginners might feel like the web development world is beyond them.

Complexity makes websites more opaque and can make them less robust. The more a site depends on complex frameworks, the more potential points of failure it has, making it harder to maintain over time. Because of this, we’ve made decisions to keep this site small and light wherever possible. It is a static site built with Eleventy and hosted on Netlify.

The aim is to use enough tools so that creating and editing content isn’t a total slog, but not so many that it feels like you need to take a course to figure it all out. We want a site is *just* complex enough and has appropriate documentation for the bits that are a little more complicated.

Accessible

Considering as broad an audience as possible from the outset ultimately makes for a better site. It sets restrictions on some visual elements, but I think that working within restrictions in a clever and thoughtful way ultimately makes something more beautiful. And it can be *fun* to work with constraints!

As with designing for mobile first, designing for accessibility encourages you to consider the relative importance of each element.

My hope is that we can continue to explore accessibility on this site. We’ve just begun to scratch the surface.

Structured

All text is edited in Markdown, which we love because it is simple and human-readable yet also flexible and powerful. We’re specifically using the markdown-it parser which lets us automatically convert straight quotes to curly quotes and a few other nifty things. See the .eleventy.js file if you want to have a peek at the configuration.

Data is structured according to the vocabulary set out by schema.org.

Using these two syntaxes relates to our ideas around maintaining long-term archives. The front-end of a website is more ephemeral (like the outer layer of a tree), while the back-end should have more longevity. We added as much structure to the data as possible from the outset, even if it isn’t currently being utilised. This mindset is more about building an archive of data than a website. It’s about seeing archiving as a continuous process rather than a single event.

Fluid

Connected to this idea of continuous archiving is our choice to, wherever possible, hook into my existing workflows and tools. For example, the Thinking panel uses Arena’s API. I use Arena every day, and it has become a vital part of my thinking process. Any channel that I add to My Website channel will show up here. We wanted to make something that would amplify my existing workflows rather than create any extra work.

We’re also using this channel to host any images that I want to add to my blog, as a way of getting around adding another service for image hosting. Down the line, when it’s proven that another platform would be useful, we could use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or we might configure it with Netlify Large Media.

Open

We have documented both our code and our process on Github. The source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, and PH has created an in-depth README that also explains things like Git, the command line, static site generators, and other things code-related. Hopefully this is a good resource for others with similar levels of experience and interest. Unless otherwise stated, all content on the site is by me and subject to a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Protocols

2019-09-21T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently been working on a Membership Agreement for Evening Class. It’s an attempt to escape the tyranny of structurelessness, as well as to provide a guide for new members.

It’s been a rewarding exercise as it’s prompted us to think about and formalise some of the key principles that underpin everything we do, as well as making clear what forms of support we expect from each other. In some ways, these kinds of protocols can feel unnecessarily formal, but I feel like by having it all written down allows us to address how we treat each other more directly, forming the basis for a greater level of trust within the group.

This got me thinking about protocols more broadly, and what they mean for establishing and maintaining self-organised groups.

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown highlights the protocol set out by Asians 4 Black Lives, an intersectional ally group based in the Bay Area. There are so many aspects of this that feel important to me, but to draw out just a few:

It sets a framework for building trust, support and solidarity, both within the group and with a wider community. This comes across not only through the content but also in the tone of voice – it is calm and understanding, removing judgement and recognising that there is always an opportunity for growth, on both a personal and collective level.

It feels calm, slow and intentional, focused on long-term strategic change rather than short bursts of activity. It leaves space for plurality, highlighting that there is not one single answer or vision, but a multiplicity of different voices and attempts.

The conclusion particularly stands out to me:

We submit these principles and protocols with humility and openness. We don’t have it all figured out, but we are committed to taking a stand, and learning as we go. We will not wait to be perfect, because we believe the time is now and we would rather be held accountable for our mistakes than forgiven our inaction.

There is a clear sense of urgency and clarity here, but also the recognition of the inevitability of change. It demonstrates that a protocol is not a fixed set of rules, but something to be constantly questioned and renegotiated by its members.

This got me thinking about what Paul Soulellis has been writing about his idea of Urgentcraft. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing, but this particular section feels very important to me:

I love the contradiction here, that to better understand crisis, we may need to recognize the slowness of how conditions evolve, how power operates, the patience to build and fortify over time. Committing to maintenance as a form of urgency. And I think there’s something particularly queer about slowness these days, as a resistance to acceleration and the normative speeding up of things. Especially as it relates to network culture and our production and consumption of media.

I feel like a protocol is a group’s commitment to maintenance, to the practice of becoming. It is a collective attempt to sketch out the world we want to live in, to create the conditions in which we want to practice. It is an ongoing, slow process of resistance and negotiation, grounded in the insistence that another world is possible.

Finally, this brings me back to my favourite quote from Emergent Strategy:

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

A conversation with La Foresta

2019-10-31T00:00:00Z

I recently spent a few weeks in Rovereto, northern Italy, to do a residency at La Foresta.

While I was there I printed a mini-newsletter, as part of an ongoing project that Evening Class is doing for the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. The newsletter is a short conversation between Brave New Alps, one of the initiators of the La Foresta project, and two of us from Evening Class.

I’ve added the text of the full interview below.

Evening Class asks La Foresta:

Who are you?

We are an open network of associations, informal groups, social cooperatives and individuals that have come together to create a community academy at the train station of Rovereto, northern Italy. Foresta in Italian means both “forest” and “the foreign woman”: a woman from another place. In both meanings there is an element of mystery. Both fit well the way we want to collaborate and the composition of our network.

The project, as it is now, is the result of a two-year collaboration between us and the Municipality of Rovereto. Following an initial project proposal from our side, the municipality signed an nine-year lease with FS, the Italian railway company, to implement a social-cultural project inside a 150m2 indoor space of the train station, plus a 100m2 outdoor space/garden.
By the end of this year, the space will have been renovated and open its doors to the public. It will be divided into five areas: entrance & convivial waiting room, educational space with kitchen and kids area, event space, workshop, and garden.

At the moment there are about 25 people involved. We are quite diverse in terms of gender, age, expertise and areas of interest, which span from migrant support to cultural animation, collective gardening to hacking, digital literacy to practice-based research.

What was the motivation for starting La Foresta?

When the group began forming in August 2017, the common wish was to find a space as a shared resource (with floor space, infrastructure, machines, etc) to continue to develop individual activities but also to generate possibilities for encounter, making in common and forging new alliances.

Our location inside a train station has been steering our collective imaginary since the beginning. In Rovereto, the station is one of the few places where there is an atmosphere of internationality and diversity, with many social groups traversing the same spot as part of their everyday lives. It is a “portal” connecting Rovereto—which sometimes can feel quite provincial and bourgeois—to the world. This animates us and helps maintain a good level of energy.

We have been working from the as-yet-unrenovated space since October 2018. Although it is makeshift, being and working inside the building has helped strengthen the relations within the group and to bring in new people.

Some questions we formulated together at the beginning of this adventure are:

How might we make a community today?
What are the ingredients for building solidarity, resilience and openness?
How to respond to the multitude of today’s crises?
Where, how and with whom can we begin?
What tools do we need?

One of our main impressions from spending time here is the sense of abundance—people are so generous with their time, attention and resources. What role do you think generosity plays in creating a space like this?

There is a saying in synergic gardening that ci concimiamo a vicenda—“we fertilise each other”. The social relations between us are the most important thing we have, and need to be cultivated and safeguarded, while material resources come and go. We want to build up an environment in which everyone feels free to contribute to the Forest according to their own resources and will, without feeling guilty for giving too much or too little.
Our approach is that whoever proposes a new activity, tool or method also takes responsibility for it, while feeling supported by others and welcome to try out new things. In the Forest everything is in a permanent state of experimentation and evaluation.

Can you draw a map of your interdependent network?

La Foresta asks Evening Class

Who are you?

An experiment in self-organised learning. An unwieldy collective effort. 14 members right now. Over 40 members since we started in 2016. A support structure. A common pool of resources. After hours. Cultivating common interests. Open for anyone to join. Flexible and resilient. A group of designers, artists and teachers. Prototyping new methods for living, working and learning together. Based in London. An interdependent network. A space for learning and investigating. A space for empathy. A collection of many voices. Self-supporting. Not-for-profit. In, between, with, around and against the academy and industry. Learning from each other. Working it out as we go.

How do you deal with the fact that some people are more passionate about Evening Class and therefore make more time for it?

It’s hard to get the balance right between individual autonomy and mutual support. It’s important for us to allow everyone to define their own level of commitment. We need to take into account that some people are more interested, motivated or simply have more time than others.

On the other hand, we also need to make sure that we’re supporting each other, and that the same people don’t end up doing all the work while others benefit from it. We try to always be aware of, and actively redistribute, the reproductive labour that underpins all of our activities. We collectively write protocols, like our Working Agreement and Membership Agreement, in order to define structures and our expectations of one another.

This is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of our collaboration to work out, as it also changes over time. We don’t have an answer yet.

What makes you feel most alive from all the things you do with Evening Class?

The friendship we have made together within the group. It sometimes feels like this is what holds things together and keeps us turning up, more than any other structure we articulate around it. It’s an unexpectedly collegiate peership, even (especially?) without academics above us setting the agenda.

Being in the same space, making something together. Having a space where we’re free to experiment and improvise, and a reliable network that can contribute to and feedback on our projects.

The connections we have made to other people, projects and movements in different locations around the world. When we speak to these people and realise (through their reaction) that we are actually creating something valuable and interesting.
The feeling of being part of a collective, something bigger than yourself.

Can you make a drawing of your organisational form?

What kind of Internet do you want to live in?

2019-11-01T00:00:00Z

Last weekend was MozFest, which is easily my favourite tech event. This is the second year I’ve attended, and although it was different from last year’s experience it was just as exciting. At the end of the festival I always feel so energised and inspired.

As with last year, the most exciting part was the people I met and the conversations I had. As Lai Yi mentions, it is so incredible to go to a conference about the Internet and speak to so many women. The direction that the Internet is heading these days can feel pretty bleak, so it is wonderful to spend a weekend with so many people who are trying their hardest to change its trajectory.

I’ve written up some more thoughts as Common Knowledge on our blog.

Mushrooms from Epping Forest

2019-11-17T00:00:00Z

Some of the mushrooms KG and I found in Epping Forest. We managed to find loads of field blewits, which are edible (and delicious)!

Design & agency

2019-11-27T00:00:00Z

I recently did a remote lecture for the Transformation Design course at HBK Braunschweig.

The students are currently doing a subject on operating systems, looking at the frameworks and structures that surround design: established and experimental ways of working, cooperation, organisation and solidarity.

It made me so happy that this course exists! I spoke about my own practice as a digital designer, the different studios I’ve worked for, collectives I’m part of and the different tools, structures and processes that I’ve learnt about and found useful in my work.

I also went on for quite a while about how great I think worker cooperatives are — planning to write this bit up in more detail soon.

View the presentation

Resurgence

2019-12-21T00:00:00Z

I don’t have anything much to add to the post-election cacophony. I know how important reflection is after a result like this, but in the week that has passed since I’ve found that I can’t bear to spend too much time thinking about what has happened, and what it’s going to mean for the next five years, for a country already tearing itself apart, for those who are already suffering and for the vague glimmer of hope I was holding out for decisive climate action.

I do want to record what I’ve found to be useful in dealing with the despair, mainly so I can refer back to it when I inevitably feel like this again in the future. Perhaps it will be of some use to others as well.

I found out the results about an hour before landing in my hometown – 16,516 km and 28 hours of solitude and mild discomfort and sleep deprivation away from my adopted home. Regardless of how long that flight is, I never think it’s enough. I don’t think that humans should be able to travel that far, that quickly. I always have about a week of spiritual jetlag, where I can’t quite believe the difference in weather, culture or people. Everything just feels vaguely unreal and I feel disconnected from everything, in two places at once.

The lead-up to the election was manic and completely exhausting, but I was buoyed up by the people I was working with, most of whom I’d never met before: a deep sense of shared purpose and vision of a better future. Finding out suddenly just how badly we’d lost this particular fight, I just felt completely adrift. An abrupt, seismic shift from feeling like I had agency, was part of something bigger than myself, to feeling powerless and completely alone.

This week I started reading Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway as a way of distracting myself from the political spectacle. Literally the first page of the introduction begins with exactly what I needed to hear:

Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-century French verb meaning “to stir up”, to make cloudy, to disturb. We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response.

Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. Our task to is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle trouble waters and rebuild quiet places.

In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, or stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations.

Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.

This staying present (mindfulness 101, I know) has also been the main thing keeping me together on a personal level as well. I usually deal with anxiety by just working more, but haven’t been able to as I just feel too tired and too sad. I start to feel okay again when I just focus everything on exactly what I’m feeling at that moment, focusing on my gratitude for abundant Australian sunshine or how it feels to swim in the ocean.

RB pointed out that this theme of resurgence can be found throughout The Mushroom at the End of the World as well:

One of the most miraculous things about forests is that they sometimes grow back after they have been destroyed. We might think of this as resilience, or as ecological remediation, and I find these concepts useful. But what if we pushed even further by thinking through resurgence? Resurgence is the force of the life of the forest, its ability to spread its seeds and roots and runners to reclaim places that have been deforested.

I like that resurgence inherently requires a period of dormancy. As badly-timed as this election was, at least it has coincided with a time of the year that some of us (in the West) have collectively decided is a time of dormancy. Although it’s incredible to see people immediately respond to this result by looking for ways to directly organise together and support each other, I also think that there is a lot of value to be had in being quiet, shrinking back, contracting, hiding, at least for a little while.

The other thing that has kept me going is talking directly to people in my network, both in the UK and Australia. I’m so grateful for the love and support and solidarity across all of these interconnected webs. I’m reminded of a chapter in Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, where she’s talking to Monique Tula, who says:

There’s an exclusive, until recently, men-only club near Sonoma, California, called the Bohemian Club. Their motto used to be “spiders, weave not thy web here.” The spiders they’re referring to are women. Members of this club include politicians, university presidents, oil tycoons—basically rich white men who believe they own the world.

I envision a world full of spiders, weaving interconnected webs that resist patriarchal forms of supremacy that work so well at keeping us distraught, distracted, and divided.

I’m exhausted but looking forward to 2020, to resurgence and a world full of spiders.

Dissenting Ephemera

2019-12-22T00:00:00Z

Some of my notes from the Dissenting Ephemera workshop at MayDay Rooms a few weeks ago:

leftove.rs is an online archive of radical political ephemera, built in collaboration between MayDay Rooms and 0x2620 Berlin.

They’ve spent the last year digitising the MayDay Rooms archive and scraping other archives and now have a substantial body of material to work with. They’ve been experimenting with different ways of structuring, distributing and expanding upon this archive. For this workshop, they invited a range of people working in similar areas to share their experiences and contribute to the development of the platform.

I was super impressed with the archive — it’s running on Pandora, an open source media archive platform which they’ve customised. You can even do a full text search on both PDFs and images. They mentioned that at this stage, the technology behind it is the least of their problems. The challenge now is involving people to structure, use and develop the platform.

Context

Rosemary mentioned in her introduction that all political ephemera requires context — you can’t show it in isolation, it must be positioned within a wider historical context and in relation to other social, cultural and political movements.

We discussed different ways of browsing content: not just by time and location but by historical events, social movements, groups, tactics and issues. Of course, a historical event could be anything from one day to a decade, which is an interesting challenge.

We also discussed enabling users to make their own collections, providing context in a more freeform and subjective way.

Interoperability

Another recurrent question was around distribution and openness.

How do you open up the collections of different institutions? How do you enable interactions and entanglements between different collections? What is the connection between online and offline? How do we find a common syntax so that different archives can talk to each other?

Ephemerality

How do you document and archive radical content that is even more ephemeral and fragmented than printed matter, like social spaces or streets? Nick Thoburn gave the example of Inventory Magazine, which documented, recorded and reproduced found texts created by London’s homeless population.

The other example he gave was a book documenting the 2015 Baltimore Uprising, which consists only of screengrabs from Twitter. The book presents the tweets without introduction or context, insisting that you engage with the tweets themselves. The purpose is not to explain or document the uprising, but to prolong it.

Maintenance

A theme that came up through everyone’s talks was that of care and maintenance. A library isn’t a self-organising system — they often survive due to the hard work of a small handful of people. It takes a long time and a lot of diligent labour. How do you sustain these people and these kinds of projects? How do you make something that works for people, and make it desirable for them to actually use and maintain it?

Layers

Karen Di Franco from Bookworks spoke about layers of description and subjectivity. She used the example of a photocopied piece of ephemera with handwritten notation on top — how do you document this secondary layer? Does it belong to a different category than an unannotated version of the same thing? How do you describe an iteration on the same object?

The act of archiving isn’t an objective process but highly subjective and open to interpretation. The archivist must decide how to describe and categorise something, what information is included and what should be left out.

Activation

Another recurrent theme was around the activation of archives. It’s not enough to just create archives and hope that people will educate themselves — you need to find ways to provide entrypoints and pathways through the content.

Tomislav Medak from Memory of the World asked: what’s the political use of what we do? How do you activate these collections and enable radical education? How do you make an archive accessible to a broad range of people? Translation is an important element of this, but there are others aspects to literacy as well. A syllabus can’t just be a reading list.

Some of the people and groups that were there were Banner Repeater, Nick Thoburn, Memory of the World, Bookworks, Mute Magazine, MAZI and Pirate Care. It was exciting to have all of this experience together in one room, and interesting to see how the same puzzles and themes turn up again and again, in different contexts and across decades.

Seeing all these different attempts at peer-to-peer distribution and radical archiving made me feel more strongly than ever that we need to share these tools and resources, rather than having new projects start up and then burn out.

I’m collecting any related links and text in this Arena channel.

Update, 22.02.2020

I’ve written up what I spoke about in this post.

Minjerribah textures

2020-01-03T00:00:00Z

Minjerribah textures, feat. cute blob, scribbly gum and interspecies crossroads:

On worker cooperatives

2020-02-02T00:00:00Z

One of my favourite quotes from Bianca Elzenbaumer of Brave New Alps comes from her 2014 thesis, Designing Economic Cultures:

Aiming to produce critically-engaged content whilst practicing in conventional ways underestimates the substantial potential designers have to contribute to social change not only through the content of their work, but also through their ways of doing and being.

The origin of the word radical is from the root: fundamental, structural. The way that we practice, support ourselves and collaborate with each other hugely impacts the work that we make. If we want to enable radical change, we need to begin by questioning the entire structure of our work.

I think that forming a worker cooperative is one way of prefiguring an alternative vision of the future of work. It recognises that we exist within capitalism, that we need to sustain ourselves within this system, but it also offers an alternative model of working: one based on solidarity, interdependence, self-determination and sustainability, rather than profit, growth and individual success.

What is a worker cooperative?

Radical Routes have created an incredible handbook called How to set up a workers’ co-op. In it, they define a workers’ co-op as:

A group of people that organise together, as equals, to help everyone in the group. A worker co-op could be defined as a business owned and managed collectively by its workers for their mutual benefit. It’s organised democratically and fairly by (and only by) its members.

All workers’ co-ops follow the seven cooperative principles, which are:

Open and Voluntary Membership
Democratic Member Control
Members’ Economic Participation
Autonomy and Independence
Education, Training, and Information
Cooperation Among Cooperatives
Concern for Community

Traditional design studio structures

I really enjoyed all the design studios I’ve worked in, and have had highly collaborative working relationships with many of my previous coworkers. But, at the end of the day, collaboration ends with the creative work.

Practical details around how the business is run, how much money is actually being made, how much everyone is being paid – these are all intentionally hidden from view. No matter how successful you are, or how fun your work is, you still have a boss. If things go badly, there’s no guarantee that your job will be safe. The result is that individual workers are ultimately in competition with each other, atomised, and stripped of their collective bargaining power.

We’re taught an individualistic mindset from the moment we start studying design. We’re shown examples of successful (white/straight/cis/male) designers and taught to admire their individual genius rather than recognise the privilege that enabled their success, or the unnamed junior staff who support them.

Being part of a worker co-op

In my experience, being part of a cooperative has been a revelation on many levels. For one, there’s no hierarchy within the group. I love being in complete control over my own time – I can decide how and when I want to work. I also love not being restricted to one role, or being defined as only a “designer”. I can try out whatever interests me and learn more through the process. This feels much more fitting to what it actually means to be a person.

There’s also such a sense of genuine solidarity within the co-op. I think part of this comes from Sociocratic practices like daily check-ins, which enable us to provide emotional and practical support to each other. We can also protect each other from precarity, openly discuss money and collectively decide to distribute finances to whoever needs it most.

Our goal at Common Knowledge is to establish a sustainable business model. However, we’re not looking to generate profit – the political, social and educational aspects of our work come first. We collectively decide how to allocate any surplus we create: towards our solidarity work, maintaining our collective or the wider community.

Lizzie O’Shea (one of Common Knowledge’s advisory board members) discusses the benefits of worker co-op’s in her book Future Histories:

Structuring organisations in this way creates the strongest incentive among workers to be creative, take responsibility, avoid unnecessary conflict, and monitor and improve performance. In other words, to educate themselves and each other on how best to work with technology. Worker cooperatives are places where workers can play with new skills. They can learn, practice and experiment with new ways of doing things. They can share knowledge and feedback, confident that they will also share in the benefits of any higher productivity that may come about as a result.

Cooperation among cooperatives

We work from Space4, a co-working space that supports a lot of different co-ops, and we’re part of CoTech, a national network of tech co-ops. It’s so genuinely enjoyable and productive to be a node in both of these networks. We share knowledge and work within the network on a daily basis. I like the fractal nature of all of this – it reminds me of Emergent Strategy (again):

When we speak of systemic change, we need to be fractal. Fractals—a way to speak of the patterns we see—move from the macro to the micro level. We must create patterns that cycle upwards.

Hyperlinks

There’s loads of #bigdata on how workers’ co-ops are actually more productive than traditional businesses on Wikipedia
Stir To Action run courses on how to set up a co-op
Evening Class has an Arena channel, specifically focusing on creative workers’ co-ops

Thinking about archives

2020-02-22T00:00:00Z

This is a rough summary of what I remember talking about at the Dissenting Ephemera event last December.

I put my talk together somewhat last minute. As I was digging through old folders looking for what I wanted to present, I came across an illustration by Richard Giblett, which I’d collected at some point while researching for the Pages Magazine website back in 2014.

I realised it was the same image that printed while playing around with the riso printer at La Foresta in Rovereto in late 2019. It must have come up while I was searching Are.na for images of rhizomes, and I didn’t realise at the time that I’d seen it before.

This is what I love about archiving as a process: I’m continuously collecting, grouping and making connections between things, but most of the time it’s intuitive rather than conscious. Over time, the rhizomatic archive grows in unexpected ways and patterns start to emerge. I like that this growth is a collective endeavour: the archive constantly being reshaped and revisited by its users.

For this talk, I spoke about a couple of digital archive projects I’ve worked on over the years, looking for the threads that begin to emerge between them.

A permeable archive

I started working on Pages Magazine when I was at LUST in 2014. Pages is a magazine published in Farsi and English, covering topics like art, culture, architecture and new media.

We worked in collaboration with Pages’ editors to explore the idea of a permeable archive: one that is in constant flux, shaped by its contributors, shifting contexts and current events.

We wanted to apply a digital mindset to their publishing efforts, approaching it as a permanently unfinished, always evolving process, and collapsing the time and distance between author, editor, publisher and reader. Digital media allows us to separate content from form: content can be kept liquid and open for as long as possible, with form applied only as needed to distribute the content on different platforms. Approached in this way, publishing becomes an open network that invites collaboration and conversation.

We thought about what publishing means in an Iranian context, looking for ways that we could leverage digital and peer-to-peer networks to circumvent some of the issues they had with distribution. We came up with the idea of an automated publishing system where authors could contribute and revise articles directly via email. Past versions of each article remain available online, while users could collect single articles into their own custom publications, and download them as PDFs.

An active archive

The second project, which I also worked on at LUST, was for the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.

We approached this project thinking about the Sandberg as an archive that is constantly being shaped by its participants. We wanted to apply this concept to the smallest possible element: a typeface. We worked with Atelier Carvalho Bernau on a parametric typeface skeleton and built a generator that allowed students and staff to generate custom iterations of the Sandberg typeface.

The homepage shows a continuously updating stream of every word and every image in the archive, linked back to its original page.

Visitors can add any element of the site – paragraph, image or page – into a custom collection, which can either be viewed as a presentation or exported to PDF.

A local archive

The final archive was a project I worked on last summer, as part of a residency with La Foresta in northern Italy.

La Foresta is located inside the local train station, one of the main places in Rovereto where there is an atmosphere of internationality and diversity, with many different social groups traversing the space as part of their everyday lives. It’s a transitory space, a portal connecting Rovereto and the wider world.

I wanted to create a digital equivalent of this physical space – an archive of common resources and a platform for community interaction and collaboration. I was interested in setting up a platform for community collaboration that wasn’t dependent upon or tracked by commercial platforms, and finding out how a small-scale, private network might influence how people interact with each other.

I set up a local network using the excellent Mazi project as a starting point. Anyone within the vicinity can connect to the network via WiFi, and use it to securely add messages, share files, edit documents and chat to others nearby. The network is local and offline-first, meaning it’s only accessible when you’re in the train station itself.

I hoped that using something as well-documented and user-friendly as Mazi (with some extra La Foresta-specific documentation added by me) would also make it easy for anyone to contribute and, with a sufficient amount of interest, also to be able to add or modify the network themselves.

Time during quarantine

2020-05-27T00:00:00Z

I’ve just finished reading Mrs Dalloway, which has me thinking a lot about time. (It was originally called The Hours, after all.) It’s such a wonderful book: Woolf effortlessly changes tempo, switches between the inner dialogue of different characters, moves from describing a fleeting present moment in great detail to remembering events long since passed.

It was particularly interesting to read this in our current context of lockdown. There seems to be a general consensus that time is very weird right now. March was endless while April and May have passed by incredibly quickly. There are ongoing jokes on Twitter about people struggling to remember what day it is, and questioning why we have days of the week at all.

There are a number of different explanations for this: our rhythms and routines are messed up, our days are more monotonous, we aren’t going to the events or spaces that we usually use to demarcate our time. At the same time, we’re incredibly anxious, seismic shifts are happening on a global level, and there’s no end in sight.

I’m curious how people in different types of jobs are experiencing this time period, from key workers, who are still working and who even before the crisis were more likely to be working irregular shifts, to those who have been furloughed.

In Mrs Dalloway, time is both linear and circular: the day progresses steadily, yet the present, past and future are happening all at once. Clocks are an ever-present motif throughout the novel:

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced… that it was half-past one.

Without these clocks, which serve to bring the characters back to the present moment and also reminding them of their mortality, time is completely personal, subjective, irregular.

As we struggle to keep track and make sense of quarantine, it’s not clocks that are reminding us of “objective” time but political events instead. In the essay Plot Economics, Venkatesh Rao suggests that during a global narrative collapse like these, we collectively revert to log level time:

Temporality (your constructed sense of subjective time) collapses to what I call the log level. As in, you’re down to monitoring the equivalent of computer event logs; the tick-tock stream of raw events being recorded, prior to being evaluated and filtered for significance.

This pandemic has highlighted that while our perception of time is subjective and personal, we also have a shared understanding of time that is cultural and political:

Whatever time is, calendars and clocks measure, control, and constitute it. […] These logistical media—so fundamental that they sometimes are not seen as media at all—negotiate heaven and earth, nature and culture, cosmic and social organisation, and define our basic orientation to time and also to space. In doing so, they also relieve us of the burden of thinking about what time is and does.
— from The Marvellous Clouds by John Durham Peters

Time during Quarantine channel

From pages to performances

2020-07-01T00:00:00Z

This is one of the posts I wrote for the Core Languages blog last semester, as part of a course at Central Saint Martens that introduced graphic design students to the digital design mindset.

What is unique about digital design as a medium? How can we approach design for screens in a way that is natively digital, rather than an appropriation of print design?

In this essay, Cory Arcangel suggests that the term “web performance” is more appropriate for describing the digital medium than “web page”:

The term that really drives me up the wall, though, is web page. Page connotes something stable, unchanging, and definite. A book page exists. A book page is. A web page, on the other hand, is a vastly more complicated structure. It is a set of instructions blasted from a server farm across the globe through fiber-optic cables, then interpreted by a computer’s hypertext transfer protocol browser and displayed by a light-emitting-diode screen. All this, by the way, is happening in real time—reconstituted at each millisecond through a unique and contingent tangle of systems—and is supported by the constant churn of the power grid, itself (incredibly) still commonly powered by burning coal. So instead of web page, I’d prefer the term web performance, which would remind us that this information is both immediate and ephemeral. In a sense, it is thousands of coal-powered virtual Rube Goldberg machines — lined up from end to end — that power our Facebook Paper apps on our iPhones.

A Dao of Web Design by John Allsopp is a great starting point for graphic designers learning about the digital design mindset. It was published in 2000 but it’s still very relevant today.

When a new medium borrows from an existing one, some of what it borrows makes sense, but much of the borrowing is thoughtless, “ritual,” and often constrains the new medium. Over time, the new medium develops its own conventions, throwing off existing conventions that don’t make sense.

He speaks about how designing for the web is all about moving away from the conventions of print design, letting go of control and embracing a more flexible, adaptable and systems-based approach.

Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it “work.”

He argues that the unpredictability and mutability of the web is a feature, not a bug. Adaptable websites are also more accessible to a wide range of users – people can change the website to suit their own particular needs. A great example of this is the Poetic Computation Reader by Taeyoon Choi.

Process-driven design

In this interview for Creative Independent, Luna Maurer of Moniker describes their process-driven approach to design and technology:

We focus on the process rather than on the end product. Or you could say the final product is evolving. In fact, the process and the end product is ideally the same thing: a changing and evolving work. It correlates to the time in which we live and to the media that we use. Technology allows us to go beyond the approach of traditional media, where you print a flyer or sheet of paper. We try to make use of technology and especially react to the technology that surrounds us. It’s exciting to us to include the audience, or the visitors to the site, in order to create something that’s not standing still. It’s a truer way to react to the time that we live in.

Many of Moniker’s projects would be better characterised as performances than websites. The web just happens to be the most appropriate frame for documenting and sharing these performances. In fact, many of their projects, particularly the Conditional Design ones, aren’t necessarily computer-based at all — they’re just a set of rules or processes in need of an audience (or participants).

Designing for flux

Linked By Air are another studio that really embraces designing for flux. In this essay Change Over Time, they explain how their interest in change influences their working processes and outputs.

When we design a website or an exhibition, we want it to go places we didn’t imagine after we “release” it, and this, more than the supposed wisdom of crowds, is the reason for our interest in distributed authorship. Even though change is the most natural and ubiquitous condition in the universe, we’re fascinated by it, and we try to embed an acknowledgement of this condition into our working process, and into the software and designs we develop.

Emergence

In Designing in Liquid Times: Generative Graphic Design in an Age of Uncertainty, Marlies Peeters gives an overview of different artists and designers that take a more open and fluid approach to their work (sometimes termed generative, relational or process-driven design).

What ties all these examples together is the concept of emergence: the idea that the system efficiently achieves what could not have been achieved by any of its individual agents alone.

Designing for screens instead of printed material might seem daunting or frustrating at first. It’s important stop trying to apply to same principles as print design, and instead explore the idiosyncracies and strengths of digital digital as an inherently fluid and participatory medium. The exciting thing about digital design is that you can introduce a range of different inputs that will lead you to unexpected places. The most powerful example of this is participatory design, where the audience plays a direct part in creating the end result.

Brian Eno talks about this approach in his essay Composers as Gardeners:

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.

This stands as a sketch for the future

2020-07-25T00:00:00Z

We’ve just launched a website for Claim The Future, a project led by John McDonnell. The full text of his speech at the launch on Wednesday gives a good overview of the project:

We must claim the future. We have to ask and answer the questions about what lives we want to live, what communities we want to live in and what future there should be for our planet. If we don’t others will. And it will be the establishment politicians and their corporate controllers that will answer these questions for us.

Both the identity and website were a joy to work on, so I thought I should document a little bit of the process before I forget about it.

Claim the Future aims to respond to the economic and political upheaval caused by the pandemic by uniting the left behind a radical and optimistic vision of the future.

The team have drafted a series of position papers that address a wide range of different areas, from healthcare to migrants’ rights. These position papers will form the basis on which to initiate a series of actions and campaigns.

What I like about the project is that it’s not just about theory, but practice as well. There’s a strong focus on building a movement and encouraging people to take action.

Like Progressive International, Claim the Future also aims to strengthen and amplify existing initiatives. It’s about uniting the left and taking a step forward, moving past defeat and critical reflection.

Background

The brief I was given for the identity design was super exciting in its ambition. They wanted something that felt determined, optimistic without being naively utopian, and communicated a clear break from the past.

RB and I had many discussions about the aesthetic of the radical left when designing the identity for Progressive International, and this project felt like a great opportunity to continue this inquiry further.

Given this was such an visually-led project, we got Michael Oswell involved as well. (Only the best!) I much prefer working with other designers than working alone – I always feel like the end product is better when there are a few different voices involved.

The visual references that John gave were Kandinsky and Social Realism – amusingly disparate ends of a spectrum. We needed to establish a visual language that communicated an optimistic vision of the future and inspired people to take action, without ignoring the harsh reality of the crisis.

I thought that Grapus was a really good reference for this project. Their work addresses political realities and sketches alternative visions of the future, in way that is visually appealing and accessible.

(Sidenote: I highly recommend What, You Don’t Know Grapus?. It gives a lot of insight into their process, the realities of being part a collective, and how different people can experience the same thing in entirely different ways.)

Developing the aesthetic

From the beginning, I really wanted to create something that began as an abstract sketch and gradually came to life with loads of colour.

I commissioned our friend Ilyanna Kerr to create a series of illustrations for each of the policy areas. We wanted to keep these quite abstract and gestural, a means of visually categorising different papers and actions. This leaves room for people to imagine their own futures, rather than being too prescriptive.

I kept thinking about this quote from Muriel Cooper:

This stands as a sketch for the future.

Mikey had the idea to use a stellar corona as part of the identity. There’s something that I really love about this image in this context… it gives a sense of blank space, ellipsis or a pause, something to be filled.

This got me looking at images of the earth from space, and aerial photos of empty cities during lockdown. I thought about Stuart Brand’s “Why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole earth yet?” campaign, and its impact on global consciousness and the environmental movement. I also read this essay from Ingrid Burrington around the same time, which offered an interesting counterpoint to this Californian idealism.

Meanwhile, older and slower-burn crises collide with these new ones. The so-called lungs of the planet continue to asphyxiate, carbon dioxide overwhelms oceans, and regulations on polluting technologies are relaxed more and more in the name of a free market. Capitalism’s invisible hand has terraformed the planet to better serve corporate personhood than actual life. There’s anxiety over not just access to fossil fuels, but access to the minerals needed for technologies that might help the world transition away from fossil fuels. We trade oil fields for lithium fields, for fantasies of moon mining. People fight even over the name and date of this era of crisis (Anthropocene or Capitalocene or Chthulucene), trying to turn planetary trauma into a fixed point in rock.

I thought it this was a useful tension in this, and that the macro view that aerial photos provide matched the scale and ambition of the project.

We didn’t really want to create a logo as such, and felt that the identity was much more powerful when Claim was replaced with different verbs as well.

The dotted grid emerged as a consistent element tying lots of different pieces together, and alluded to architectural plans or pegboards. We played around with combining all these elements in layouts that gave a sense of breaking from the past or turning a page.

I’m pretty happy with the end result. It’s quite open and there are so many different elements to play with. We’ll hopefully be continuing this project in the future, so I’ll have a chance to develop it even further.

Join!

There are going to be loads of ways to get involved with this project over the next few months. I think it’s going to be really exciting.

You can join as an individual or organisation via the website.

All lichen, all coral

2020-08-05T00:00:00Z

I’m currently in northern Wales, doing a lot of walking and also reading Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.

It’s a collection of essays about geology and biology, shared histories and unstable futures, nature and the Anthropocene, featuring many of my favourite writers: Anna Tsing, Donna Harraway, Ursula K Le Guin. It’s split in two halves – Ghosts and Monsters:

Ghosts and monsters are two points of departure for characters, agencies and stories that challenge the double conceit of modern Man. Against the fable of Progress, ghosts guide us through haunted lives and landscapes. Against the conceit of the Individual, monsters highlight symbiosis, the enfolding of bodies within bodies in evolution and in every ecological niche. In dialectical fashion, ghosts and monsters unsettle anthropos from its presumed centre stage in the Anthoropocene by highlighting the webs and histories from which all life emerges.

Cooperative evolution

One of the key thinkers who is mentioned in the book is Lynn Margulis, who “opposed competition-oriented views of evolution, stressing the importance of symbiotic or cooperative relationships between species”. (She also developed the Gaia Theory with James Lovelock.)

Her theories on cooperative evolution, now widely accepted in the scientific community, challenge common ideas about nature and individualism. Yet the dominant cultural narrative of the Anthropocene is still one of competition, human exceptionalism and linear progress.

Many of the essays describe multispecies entanglements and symbiotic relationships across every scale, from cells to landscapes. The book is all about thinking about complex meshes and entanglements rather than simplified, linear, one-way hierarchies.

By highlighting examples of symbosis and collaborative survival in nature, and pointing to the fallacy of seeing humans as apart from nature, it points towards new ways of thinking about how we might live together.

Diversity and complexity

I particularly loved the essay Shimmer by Deborah Bird Rose, an anthropologist whose work focuses on multispecies communities living through climate change, based on decades of fieldwork with Indigenous Australians.

She introduces the Aboriginal concept of bir’yun – which translates to “brilliance” or “shimmering”, the ancestral power of life. It is a concept that seeps into all aspects of life, and doesn’t distinguish between nature or culture. One example she uses to describe it is the overlaying different temporal patterns in music and dance; another is in the pulse between wet and dry seasons, as the landscape moves from dullness to brilliance and back again.

Bir’yun shows us that the world is not composed of gears and cogs but of multifaceted, multispecies relations and pulses. To act as if the world beyond humans is composed of “things” for human use is a catastrophic assault on the diversity, complexity, abundance and beauty of life.

Collaborative survival

I’m reminded of much of Le Guin’s writing, especially The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and how we need to write new stories of collaborative survival, against the fable of Progress and the conceit of the Individual.

A major challenge is how to think geological, biological, chemical and cultural activity together, as a network of interactions with shared histories and unstable futures. There is something mythlike in this task: we consider anew the living and the dead; the ability to speak with invisible and cosmic beings; and the possibility of the end of the world.

Strike!

2020-08-07T00:00:00Z

At the start of the year, University of the Arts London (UAL) joined the ongoing University and College Union (UCU) strikes, which were centred on the “four fights”:

falling pay
the gender and ethnic pay gap
precarious employment practices
unsafe workloads

I had only just begun working as an Associate Lecturer, but went on strike out of solidarity. It was eye-opening to learn about the worsening conditions for teaching staff, both through statistics and personal stories. Why UK Art Schools Are On Strike from Frieze provides a good overview, specifically from an art school perspective.

Designers + Cultural Workers (UVW-DCW) helped out by designing The University Worker, a rank and file strike bulletin published by Notes from Below.

Teach-outs

We also contributed to a couple of teach-outs: a conversation recorded for Strike Radio about why designers need to unionise, and Unions for Everything at CSM, alongside some of our UVW sister branches (representing Architects and Sex Workers), London Renters Union and Cooperation Town.

Each group spoke about why they exist, what they do, and why we need unions, grassroots organising and mutual aid in all aspects of our lives. We also read through 101 Notes on the LA Tenants Union.

What’s next?

Unfortunately towards the end of the strikes, coronavirus started to dominate the headlines, and London went into lockdown shortly after. The optimism that I felt during the strikes feels very naive now.

The ongoing crisis is only going to worsen working conditions within universities and institutions, while social distancing makes it harder for workers to strike. It’s extremely concerning to watch how cultural institutions are responding to the crisis, as they begin to reopen their doors.

It is encouraging, however, to see union membership surge as a result of this crisis, as this is our best hope for protecting each other and reshaping the industry from below. I’m really proud of the statement UVW-DCW wrote back in March:

We must use this crisis as an opportunity to reframe our industry. Our sector has committed to the prevailing logic of individualisation and competitiveness, to the detriment of its workforce. The status of creative work is increasingly casualised, in the interest of distributing profits unevenly to those at the top. A moment of disruption creates a chance for our industry to be re-assembled in the interests of its workers, with solidarity, community, equality, self-education and care at the centre of all future cultural production.

Delete your account

2020-08-10T00:00:00Z

Feel a bit guilty for not having done this earlier, but I’ve finally cancelled my Spotify subscription. This was prompted in part by this recent interview with Spotify’s CEO, which paints a pretty bleak picture about how they see the future of the music industry. It feels important to find ways to directly support artists, given that they’re some of those hardest hit by lockdown (and that music is one of the things that keeps me sane).

I wasn’t using Spotify that much anymore, so I doubt I’ll miss it. I usually just listen to NTS, which recently launched a Supporters network.

Listen to these

Some of my favourite NTS shows are:

Aside from that, I’m going to keep building my Bandcamp library, and maybe also try Resonate, a music streaming service and platform co-op that values fairness and control.

Hyperlinks

Listen to This, an Arena channel of my favourite songs and mixes
Mat Dryhurst often discusses alternatives to major labels and streaming platforms, on Twitter as well as on Interdependence, the podcast he co-hosts with Holly Herndon.

Teaching digital

2020-08-10T00:00:00Z

Last semester I started teaching Digital as part of BA Graphic Communication Design at Central Saint Martins.

My class was part of the Core Languages course, which included other classes like Typography, Print and Production, and Photography. The idea behind this was to introduce second year students to foundational concepts and skills that could then feed into their wider graphic design practice and the longer term, research-based projects from their other classes.

The somewhat unusual thing about these classes was that they were more like drop-in sessions: each week the students could choose a different Core Language class to attend. They could also choose to attend every class from one Core Language over the semester. This meant that each class needed to be self-contained, so newcomers could understand it, while also remaining interesting for those who had been to previous classes.

It was also quite a strange time to start teaching: from February there were four weeks of strike action, and then from the beginning of March we started to see the impacts of coronavirus.

What I taught

My class was all about introducing students to the mindset and fundamental principles, process and technologies used in digital design.

As I’m deeply interested in politics as well as digital design, I wanted to make sure that we examined digital design and development in a critical and expansive way, rather than just “learning to code”. My aim was to contextualise these principles within the wider social, political and historical contexts of digital media, and reflect upon how these developments have changed how we think, communicate and design.

Why does it matter? Because we live in media, as fish live in water. We can and must design the media, design the molecules of our new water, and I believe the details of this design matter very deeply.
— Ted Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines

Each week, I would do a short lecture followed by a couple of hours of workshop time. Halfway through, I’d usually do another mini-lecture and introduce more complexity to the task they were working on.

I am completely indebted to the designers and teachers that have generously put their syllabi online, including Minkyoung Kim, Mindy Seu, Laurel Schwulst and Sasha Portis. Learning to teach and developing a new course at the same time is really difficult, and I think I would be completely lost if I didn’t have their work to build upon.

I’m also grateful for Jaap De Maat being such a friendly and supportive course leader.

Workshops

Week 1: What is the Internet?

I gave a rundown of the history of the internet and the web, how they have developed over time, and how the language and metaphors we use fundamentally shape how we understand complex technologies.

I wanted to begin the course without any computers involved, so that we could discuss the medium in a purely conceptual way. We did a workshop where students shared their earliest memories of the internet and drew how they visualised its past, present and future.

Week 2: Digital Publishing

We began by discussing the unique characteristics of digital publishing, and how different platforms shape and contextualise meaning.

The workshop was a condensed version of Republish a Text, originally developed by Clement Valla. Students selected an existing text and then republished it on a new platform, paying attention to how they could edit and add new meaning through this process.

Week 3: The ABC of WWW

This week was an overview of how a website is actually made. I explained the basics of setting up hosting and domains, what tools you need to create and publish websites, and where to learn more.

I also introduced the basics of HTML, and showed them how they could get something online super quickly and for free using GitHub Pages. I thought this would be pretty simple but there were all sorts of unexpected problems – in the future, I’d definitely try to squeeze less into one workshop and allow more time for troubleshooting.

Week 4: HTML and CSS Basics

I gave a lecture on designing for screens and the different things that designers need to consider, including interactivity, user participation and variability.

Then I gave another rundown on HTML and got them to markup one of their essays with basic HTML. After the break, I gave an introduction to CSS so that they could apply basic styling to the same text.

In these classes, it was really hard to find a balance between those who either got it immediately or had done it before, and those who required a lot more guidance. I’m still not sure what the best way to approach a class like this is. I think that perhaps I should prepare HTML and CSS files beforehand so students can begin tinkering with these, and then move on to marking up their own text.

Out of all the things I shared, Web Design in 4 Minutes seemed to be the most successful in explaining HTML and CSS.

One thing that I ended up explaining many times was that the HTML and CSS files need to be able to talk to each other. A friend suggested that I compare it to how images break in InDesign if you move the Links folder – I need to try this next time.

Week 5: CSS Compositions

In this class, I introduced the box model, layout and positioning in CSS, then had them recreate abstract compositions using just CSS.

This was one of the classes where it was quite hard to cater to different experience levels. I ended up revisiting the past few weeks of tutorials with the half of the class that hadn’t been there previously.

Writing

The second half of the semester was taught entirely online, due to coronavirus. Rather than record lectures or try to deliver workshops over a video conferencing platform, we were asked to spend a few hours a week researching and writing posts for the Core Languages blog.

I began by writing about digital tools and spaces that allow for creativity, expression and social closeness online, given that everyone was having to suddenly adapting to social distancing, lockdown and living their entire lives online. Examples included Place, one of my favourite examples of Internet culture, creative online collaboration and emergence in both digital aesthetics and social structures. I also wrote about spatial interfaces, collaborative world-building and digital-first art experiences.

I also wrote about how digital design is about embracing flux, what makes a good website, my web design process, user experience basics, accessibility and web typography.

What I learned

This was my first time teaching over a longer period of time, rather than workshops, so it was quite a steep learning curve for me. I found the “drop-in” nature of the course particularly challenging, as it made it harder to progress to more complex ideas over the semester. It was very hard to find the right amount of complexity, without boring some students or overwhelming others.

I think it would have been useful to have a better understanding of how much students knew already and what they wanted to learn. PH sent around a survey to this effect before starting her workshops at LCC, which I thought was a great idea. I did a bit of this in an ad hoc way by asking students at the end of each class what they thought and what they wanted to learn more about. Generally the response was Processing (generative design) or how to make a folio website.

I have strong doubts about how useful it is to just teach someone a toolset rather than a way of thinking. For that reason, I tried to make sure that the course was primarily about understanding digital media as a landscape and medium. The hope was that those who found this interesting would be able to research and learn more in their own time.

In reality, I feel that this was sometimes too abstract and disconnected from what we did in the workshops. I’d like to get better at making a more direct link between theory and practice.

If I were to do it again, I’m not sure if I would jump straight into HTML and CSS like I did this time. I feel like it would have been more successful to focus more heavily on the design side, while pointing students towards where they could learn more about web development.

I also realised after a few classes that I’m very susceptible to exhausting myself by over-teaching – I need to relax a bit, try not to fit too much into each class, and not expect myself to know everything.

Llyn Cau

2020-08-16T00:00:00Z

A very misty Llyn Cau, halfway up Cadair Idris in Wales.

We hiked most of this trail through low clouds. We noticed it getting warmer as we got closer to the peak, and then suddenly we were above the clouds and in brilliant sunshine.

Making writing a habit

2020-09-19T00:00:00Z

I really want to make writing more of a habit.

Alex linked us to Matt Webb’s 15 rules for blogging the other day. Matt suggests that the way to publish often is to not be precious about what you’re writing, and to focus on one thing at a time:

One idea per post. If I find myself launching into another section, cut and paste the extra into a separate draft post, and tie off the original one with the word “Anyway.” Then publish.

Hyperfocus

2020-09-19T00:00:00Z

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying to apply the principles of Hyperfocus to my work. Productivity books aren’t the kind of thing I’d usually read, but this one has actually been quite useful.

A lot of it just seems like common sense, like recognising that you have a finite amount of attention you can spend in every moment. It’s basically about applying meditation techniques to daily life to make the most of your attention. It starts with being more aware of the kinds of work you’re doing, which parts are purposeful and which parts are unnecessary busy-work.

Setting intentions

It’s a lot about intention-setting: intentions for the hyperfocus session (an hour or less), for the day and for the week as well.

He summarises the core idea of hyperfocus as:

Keep one important, complex object of attention in your awareness as you work.

You decide what this object of attention should be, set a timer for how long you want to focus on it, eliminate any distractions and give it your full attention.

As with meditation, if you catch your mind wandering, you gently draw it back to the task at hand.

Scatterfocus and recharging

The counterpoint to hyperfocus is scatterfocus, where you just let your mind wander and observe where it goes. This is where the more creative thinking comes in, associations between otherwise unrelated ideas.

There are a number of other techniques in it that I’ve found really useful, like writing down “open loops” that are distracting or worrying you, and scheduling specific blocks of time to check email each day.

I liked the book because it’s ultimately about working less and making sure you allow yourself to recharge. I am definitely someone who tends to work too much, and tends towards anxiety as well. It was so useful for me to read this because it reminded me that overworking and multitasking doesn’t lead to better results.

Clouds

2020-10-20T00:00:00Z

We made a last minute decision to spend a month on La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. After six months of rarely travelling outside north London, it feels surreal to be in such a different environment*.

The island is small, roughly circular and very mountainous. This weekend we went for a hike in Garajonay National Park, which was such a contrast to the valley where we’re staying.

The mountains catch the clouds blown in by the trade winds, which means the centre is covered in subtropical forest, called laurisilva. This is the largest remnant of the type of forest that once covered much of Europe and North Africa. It’s quite amazing to wander through… the trees are dripping with lichen and water droplets.

*This is also the closest you can get to the antipodes of Queensland, so I feel right at home.

Kindle to Arena

2020-10-23T00:00:00Z

I just tried out this great tool made by Javier Arce. It allows you to send your Kindle highlights directly to an Arena channel (something I used to painstakingly do by hand, block by block).

It recognises which highlights are from different books, and you can select which highlights to add or edit.

✶✶

Design Justice

2020-10-26T00:00:00Z

I’ve just finished reading Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock. This book really should be required reading for any designer working today.

It builds upon the work and principles of the Design Justice Network, defined as:

Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.

Intersectionality in design

The first part is really about exploring design’s relationship to power and privilege. They use the concept of the matrix of domination, an intersectional analysis of oppression. They use this to explain how design decisions can privilege certain people over others, regardless of whether this was the designer’s intention.

Some of this is uncomfortable to read, but necessary and useful. They analyse and critique a number of different design approaches, including human-centred design and universal design. These processes tend towards homogenising or erasing difference. Design justice, on the other hand, recognises that it might not be possible to reduce the cognitive load for all users, but that decisions of who to privilege need to be considered and made explicit.

Privilege and power never go away, but a design justice studio can become a place where they are explicitly recognized, acknowledged, and discussed.

Structure

The book looks at design from five angles:

Design values: the distribution of affordances and disaffordances that we encode into technologies
Design practices: who gets paid to do design work and who controls design processes
Design narratives: the stories that we choose to tell about design
Design sites: the inclusion and exclusion of various kinds of people from privileged design locations
Design pedagogies: the methods we use to teach and learn about design

I really love how they weave narrative and personal experience throughout. The whole book is grounded in their lived experience of listening, organising and designing.

Practices

If I’m honest, I found the first half of the book quite hard to read at times as I felt like I was just part of the problem. I felt like I could definitely work harder to be aware of my own privilege and centre other people’s voices and experiences.

The second half of the book focuses more on building a design justice practice. They described the work that the MIT Codesign Studio has done, but also described the common challenges that come with collaborative design processes and non-hierarchical group structures. All of this completely resonated with me.

There’s a strong focus on listening, dialogue and maintenance throughout. This is something we really focus on at Common Knowledge: listening to people’s needs, building upon and maintaining existing technology, and making interventions that are responsive to wider social and political contexts.

Pragmatism

I found their focus on pragmatism towards the end of the book really useful. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. In some projects it might make sense to have community members directly involved in the design process. In others, the traditional designer-client relationship might be the best way to work with limited resources and still create something concrete that will make a difference to people’s lives.

They also recognise that design isn’t a solution in itself when it comes to addressing long-term structural inequality. I really like their suggestion that the outcome of a design project could be both a utopian vision of the future and a tangible product or system that can be used and iterated upon.

The design process itself then becomes an exercise in radical visioning: the design team, led by people from the most directly affected community, explores the root of the problem and develops ideas for systems change, in addition to ideas for products or services that can be implemented within the resource limitations of the project.

Designing the future

I really enjoyed their analysis of design’s relationship to the future. This was something I was thinking about a lot when preparing my talk for Designing the Future, but they put it much more eloquently!

Design is thus also speculative: it is about envisioning, as well as manipulating, the future. Designers imagine images, objects, buildings, and systems that do not yet exist. We propose, predict, and advocate for (or, in certain kinds of design, warn against) visions of the future.

In Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown says that:

All organising is science fiction.

For me, there’s a strong link between design, organising and science fiction. It’s all about imagining where we might go and making an attempt to get there.

In Design Justice, Costanza-Chock suggests that:

Design can be seen as a permanent striving toward, an ongoing process of ideation, iteration, and revision toward the ideal.

Which reminded me of a quote from Lisa Nyberg that I think about a lot:

Utopia cannot be defined as a static, perfect place; it is the ongoing attempts, the fiction, the theory and the striving for the perfect existence.

Reading list

Some related books I want to read next:

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere
Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar – this book has now come up in loads of others books, podcasts and on Twitter
+KAOS: Ten Years of Hacking and Media Activism

Bells

2020-11-05T00:00:00Z

There is a church on the opposite side of the valley where we’re staying. I’ve really been enjoying hearing the bells, which chime every half hour. Half the time they remind me to stay present and the other half that I need to “jump on a Zoom call”.

2020 in review

2021-01-02T00:00:00Z

I read Jay Springett’s 2020 retrospective and thought I might have a go at writing one too.

It goes without saying: this year has been awful for most and tragic for some. All things considered, I’ve had an alright year despite everything – something which I’m endlessly grateful for. I did quite a bit of travel in 2019, so I didn’t really have many plans for 2020, aside from spending time in London and focusing my energy on Common Knowledge – I certainly got to do that!

I started the year in the Yarra Ranges with some close friends. Where we were staying was beautiful, in the middle of a lush forest full of ferns and Mountain Ash trees, but the trip was tinged with sadness because of the bushfires raging in other parts of Victoria and New South wales at the same time. I guess it was an appropriate beginning to a year characterised by a background siren of existential dread.

I came back to London at the start of January. The first few months of the year feel impossibly full. We were working from Space4 in Finsbury Park and I felt so happy going there every day: working with the co-op, getting to know the rest of the community, going to the shared lunches. I had felt a little unsure of what life would be like after leaving stable full-time employment in 2019, so my enjoyment of working in Space4 just felt like a resounding YES! to that decision.

In January I started teaching Digital Design at Central St Martin’s, which was a great experience and quite a learning curve for me. I wrote a bit more about that here. I also did a workshop centred around Mozilla’s Internet Health Report for LCC’s User Experience Design course in March, and then in September started as an Associate Lecture there.

I spent quite a bit of time helping establish and organise the Designers + Cultural Workers branch of UVW, although my involvement waned towards the end of the year due to exhaustion and Zoom fatigue. I’m so proud of what our branch has achieved this year – we wrote open letters, ran online events and meetings, contributed to festivals, helped people with their issues at work, created a membership handbook and onboarded a load of new members.

It was great to see union membership surge in response to the pandemic. It feels like there’s a shift in understanding, that we need collective action if we want any hope of responding to this crisis. Events like the How to Work festival from HFBK Hamburg and the Arts and Culture for the Many stream of The World Transformed demonstrated that there are a lot of cultural workers thinking along the same lines at the moment.

On a personal level, I met How for the first time in March. Two weeks later, they announced the lockdown. We had only been on three dates (albeit very long ones), but we decided that he should just move to my house, at least for a few weeks. It was a bit of a gamble, but luckily it worked and we haven’t spent a day apart since. I’m so happy we met when we did – a week or so later and probably none of this would have happened. I can’t imagine what this year would have been like without him.

We spent the first three months of lockdown with my housemate James. My two other housemates had left London to live with their respective parents, so we had enough space in the apartment for the three of us to work fairly comfortably. Our kitchen has south-facing windows, making it by far the sunniest room of the house. At the height of our confinement and boredom, we moved the couch into the kitchen, where we could soak up the unseasonable April sunshine and stare down at our neighbour’s garden with envy.

We got into all those lockdown clichés like baking sourdough bread, we walked every possible route available from our front door, we tried various video call platforms, we played Animal Crossing, we cut each other’s hair, we got really bored but managed to stay sane and healthy. I’m thankful for this mundanity – I know so many people had it much, much worse. The highlights of this time included: going on long cycles, through the deserted centre of London and south of the river; occasional trips to the Big Sainsbury’s, for a bit of variety; taking mushrooms and lying in the kitchen sunshine listening to this mix by Nite Jewel, featuring excerpts from an interview with bell hooks.

After over a decade of being vegetarian, I went fully vegan this year. (Mainly because I said I was the first time I met How and then had to follow through with it.) It’s been surprisingly easy, I guess because we’re mainly cooking at home now. Plus, most supermarkets are stocking some excellent vegan ingredients these days. My friend Mikey recently published this riso-printed non-authoritative vegan cookbook, Collective Hunger, which is very cute indeed.

As the lockdown began to ease, my housemates started planning their return, so we decided to move in with another friend. The new house featured a garden and a cat. Summer, in retrospect, felt incredibly free. We could see friends in the park, go wild swimming, eat and drink outside. We went to Wales for a few week’s holiday, where we went hiking and swimming almost every day. We fostered a cat (Sebastian) from a cat rescue charity for a few months, which I cannot recommend enough. It was so lovely to have another creature share our house (but devastating when he got adopted).

We made a fairly impulsive decision to go to the Canary Islands for a month in October, which was probably one of the best we made all year. La Gomera is incredibly beautiful. We worked during the week and then spent our weekends exploring the island: hiking up steep cliffs and through cloud forests, swimming in the ocean. It felt so free and made us realise that we didn’t particularly want to live in London anymore.

When we got back, we gave our notice to move out and spent six weeks selling almost all of our stuff, including my beloved houseplants. We left on the winter solstice, exactly four years since I moved there. For now, we’re living in Wales… probably until spring, whenever borders start opening again and it’s possible to move around. Hopefully we’ll be able to move to Berlin, but let’s see. 2020 has demonstrated that being flexible and adaptable is a necessity.

Work

I’m incredibly proud of what Common Knowledge achieved this year and am very excited to see what’s in store for 2021. We’ve pretty much given up on writing week notes, but we do publish updates sporadically over on our website.

We managed to squeeze in a few real life meetings before the lockdown: with our collaborators from Progressive International in January and then a trip to Malmo to meet with Zetkin Foundation in February.

We (obviously) started working remotely in March. This took a bit of getting used to, but we had quite a good culture of documentation and asynchronous communication already, so I feel like we handled this transition pretty well. We’re going to continue as a remote-first co-op indefinitely, now that one of our members has now moved to Glasgow.

April was quite intense: trying to come to terms with the pandemic while trying to juggle paid projects and helping the Mutual Aid UK group. It felt like our work accelerated then and hasn’t slowed down since. In May, we launched four websites in a week: Progressive International, Vent Your Rent, Nurses United and Can’t Pay Won’t Pay. At the time, this was very stressful – terrible planning on our own part, a lesson learned the hard way – but in retrospect I just feel really proud of what we managed to achieve with such a small team.

Some other highlights included working on Claim the Future, a project initiated by John McDonnell, and the Airsift platform for Citizen Sense, which investigates the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. We were also very happy to receive some grant funding, which enabled us to do solidarity work for organisations like UVW, and pursue some of our own self-initiated projects.

We’ve done loads more exciting project since then that I can’t wait to document and share. We’ve established an incredible network of collaborators who are doing really important work. We learned a lot about how to work together; how to run a non-hierarchical, democratic organisation; how to write proposals and win work; how to build relationships; how to run remote workshops… There’s so much more, but it’s hard to even remember it all. It was definitely a year of rapid growth and continuous learning for all of us, I think.

I’m looking forward to continuing this work in 2021. My main focus is going to be on achieving more balance – not working so hard that I burn out, taking things a bit more slowly, allowing time for rest and reflection. I’m pretty sure I say this at the start of every year… but I’d hate to see what happened if I didn’t set this intention!

Media

I read more than average this year, thanks to the lockdown. Reading became a great place to escape, although it seems I have the tendency to choose books about the end of the world.

Outline by Rachel Cusk, Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood and Weather by Jenny Offill were probably my favourite novels this year, although Weather made my climate anxiety so bad that I started having nightmares. I read Virginia Woolf for the first time (Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own) and was in awe of her talent and bravery. Design Justice by Sasha Constanza-Chock was the most important non-fiction book I read. More on that here.

I highly recommend the Small Axe film anthology by Steve McQueen: a five part series exploring the lives of West Indian immigrants in London during the 1960s and 1970s. I’m very excited to be working on the redesign of the George Padmore Institute website (in collaboration with InFact Co-op) early this year – their archive includes lots of material documenting Black British history over the same period, and was apparently used extensively during the development of the series.

I listened to a lot of Interdependence, a podcast created by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst. It’s incredibly well curated – a mix of music, sci-fi, futurism, technology criticism, ethics.

In photos

Walking in the Yarra Ranges national park in Victoria, New Years Day 2020

A walk with people from Evening Class, somewhere on the outskirts of London, February

A teach-out at the LCC picket line, March

Working from the sunny kitchen table feat. Alan the cat, April

One of many video calls with friends, May

Brockwell Park in full bloom, June

Our new garden with the welcome dinner we made for our housemate, July

View from the path descending Cadair Idris in Wales, August

Wild swimming, September

The village that we stayed in La Gomera, October

Sebastian’s favourite sleeping spot, November

Snow and sunshine in Wales, December

Community is a Garden

2021-01-23T00:00:00Z

I came across this toolkit when searching for examples of community-led design practices for a workshop that Sonia and I are currently running (more on that soon).

It explores how artists and communities can work together towards climate justice. It has a few interviews and case studies, accompanied by a few prompts and reflective exercises centred around building collaborative relationships and spaces for dialogue.

I really liked the list of practices at the end, particularly Ambiguity:

Moments of disorientation create space for unpredictable discovery. How can you challenge existing narratives, leave questions unanswered, and introduce new lines of inquiry? Through open-ended practice, how can you create conditions that scaffold communal discovery? How can you begin with questions rather than answers?

It references a few of my favourite writers, adrienne maree brown and Donna Haraway, and has prompted me to finally read Braiding Sweetgrass, which I’ve wanted to do for a while.

I’m collecting more examples of Community-Led Design Practices on Arena.

Avatar

2021-01-24T00:00:00Z

How made me a new avatar using his Supercollager tool, featuring a couple of my previous avatars and one of his.

Feeling fresh 💅🏻

General Intellect Unit

2021-01-24T00:00:00Z

Alex and I recently spoke to Shane and Kyle from the General Intellect Unit podcast.

We spoke about our work, grassroots organising, and practical details around how to start and run a worker co-op.

(I haven’t actually been able to listen to it yet as listening to my own voice makes me cringe.)

Polyphonic futures

2021-03-07T00:00:00Z

As of this week, I’m living in Vilnius for a few months while HM does the Rupert residency. Feeling very lucky and inspired.

I’ve been drawing lots of Major Arcana cards, which indicates deep shifts and changes. Feels apt.

I’m simultaneously reading a few books that feel interconnected:

The Ministry for the Future

I really enjoyed Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing style in Red Mars, but felt a bit conflicted reading it because I hate the frontier mentality and techno-solutionism that usually comes along with the idea of colonising Mars.

This book is a near future science fiction novel focused back here on Earth. The eponymous ministry was set up to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation’s. Similar to the seventh generation principle of many indigenous cultures.

As Prem Krishnamurthy summarises in his latest newsletter:

It uses the space of fiction to produce a polyphonic, multi-scalar, politically-essential, and thoroughly engaging thought-experiment: a playbook of prototypes for concrete steps to work against climate catastrophe now.

I haven’t finished it yet but I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Particularly how Robinson weaves together scientific and economic ideas for mitigation and adaptation with compelling human stories.

Parable of the Talents

I just finished Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler. I guess you could say I read a lot about climate change and societal collapse. It’s the sequel to Parable of the Sower, which I read about a year ago and loved, but needed a bit of a break before continuing in that world. Butler’s dystopia is so gut-wrenching and horrifyingly prescient.

I saw that adrienne maree brown and Toshi Reagon have a podcast solely focused on the two books, but haven’t listened yet.

Pharmako-AI

An exchange between K Allado-McDowell and GPT-3. Together they muse upon climate change and cybernetics. Some passages are really eerie, and of course the whole time you’re wondering about what consciousness or intelligence (or even authorship) actually means.

When I look at an animal, that’s what I see: intelligence about a biome, compressed and extracted by evolution into a living form. It takes millions of years for life to coalesce in this way, which is why it’s so tragic when species are lost, that the latent space of ecological knowledge is degraded in this way.

We need to save those aspects, those smarts, the way we do when we save books, before they are lost forever. We need to save them in some kind of ‘intelligence library’ somewhere, along with the ocean’s memory of its place in a stable equilibrium with all other life on this planet. And from that place we can construct a new kind of science, one that is closer to the lessons that living things teach us about themselves, and about life on the planet , Gaia, than we have ever gotten before.

I was originally interested in this after reading The DOOM! Report from Nemesis, which is written in the same way and gives a taste of what this book is like. I find Pharmako-AI much more readable and poetic than that essay, though.

I’m also dipping in and out of the Atlas of Anomalous AI, also published by Ignota and edited by Ben Vickers and K Allado-McDowell. I love anything that references the Mnemosyne Atlas.

Interdependence 40 with Audrey Tang (digital minister of Taiwan)

I was so excited when I saw that the latest Interdependence was with Audrey Tang. This is one of their best episodes so far, imho.

I’ve been so interested in Audrey’s work since reading this article last year. She’s an organiser, coder, politician and poet. Every conversation she has is recorded and published into the public domain. Her approach to politics and what she’s achieved so far is astounding. This episode also really made me want to visit Taiwan.

Some interesting thoughts about how to give non-human entities a say in politics, which reminded me of some of the ideas in Ministry for the Future and also Regen Network.

She mentioned so many interesting things, it was hard to keep up. Including this report from the UN: The Age of Digital Interdependence. I hate reading PDFs on screen but this one looks pretty interesting, if a bit too human-centric.

Going Horizontal

A book about creating non-hierarchal organisations, which we’re reading as part of the inaugural Common Knowledge book club!

Entangled Life

Because I love thinking with mushrooms! They never cease to amaze me. So far, it’s an enjoyable and fascinating book.

10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki

A documentary about Miyazaki’s creative process. It’s interesting to see that his talent seems both innate and a lot of hard work. He can capture the energy of an entire story or character in just one sketch, but also has days or weeks where he hates everything that he makes, continuously throws everything out and begins again, or just avoids working all together.

Writing alt text

2021-04-02T00:00:00Z

I really enjoy writing alt-text, mainly thanks to the wonderful Alt-Text as Poetry project by Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan.

On their website they list “three ideas from the world of poetry that we have found to be particularly helpful when writing alt-text”:

1. Attention to Language

Simply by writing alt-text with thought and care, we shift the process. What words are we using? What are their connotations? What is the tone of our writing (the way in which we’re doing the writing)? What is the voice (who the reader hears)? How do these align with, or contrast, the tone and perspective of the image?

2. Word Economy

People who are new to description have a tendency to over-describe images. While there are times for long and lavish descriptions, alt-text usually aims for brevity. For most images, one to two sentences will do. Poetry has a lot to teach us about paring down language to create something that is expressive, yet concise.

3. Experimental Spirit

We have so much to learn from poetry about being more playful and exploratory in how we write alt-text. We are not interested in experimentation for experimentation’s sake — we want a kind of experimentation that moves towards better and more nuanced accessibility for alt-text users. There are lots of complex and interesting questions that come up when translating visual information into text. We need to try out different ways of doing this, learning from each other’s strategies and techniques.

Film photos from 2020

2021-04-02T00:00:00Z

We got some film from last year developed and I love the photos so much. Friendship ended with iPhone camera!

Most of these are probably taken by HM.

Lichen collages

2021-04-06T00:00:00Z

Making collages out of public domain images of lichen, textiles and others bits.

Beyond precarity

2021-04-09T00:00:00Z

Just read Brave New Alps’ contribution to Design Struggles. The book is available online in full. Their chapter, Design(ers) Beyond Precarity: proposals for everyday action, explores how to create the social and material conditions that make critical, transformative design practice possible.

I’ve done a handful of talks about my work with Common Knowledge and UVW Designers + Cultural Workers, and this is (unsurprisingly) the question that comes up the most from students. It’s one thing to point out all the problems in the industry and outline alternative ways of working, but how does a new graduate with very little experience carve out a critical practice? Where do you even begin?

Some of Brave New Alps’ suggestions include:

Starting by recognising our own interdependence and looking for ways to address not just our own precarity but also others
Examining our upbringing, context and privilege; working out how to extend these privileges to others
Understanding the relational patterns of exchange and support underpinning all economies (e.g. J. K. Gibson-Graham’s economic iceberg model)
Getting over one’s entitlement to unsustainable and destructive ways of living
Redefining what success means
Resisting capital’s demand for constant movement (towards city centres)
Opting for a voluntarily frugal lifestyle (and fighting for a universal basic income)
Exploring cooperative housing and other forms of common infrastructure
Combining these experiments in creating social and material support structures with social movement activism

But clearly common infrastructure is not just about housing. To start small and immediately with caring for more collective infrastructures, you can investigate through practice how others can be empowered through the social, intellectual, and/or material wealth you have. How can it be channeled into more collective and collaborative efforts to work ourselves away from precarious living and working conditions towards an ecologically and socially just society? Small experiments in opening up to others what you have can bring up desires and ideas for more extensive action. The frame here is about creating ecologies of support where the myth of the heroic designer as genius is undone in favor of gentle, solidary, and effective modes of cooperation that enable transformative infrastructures to emerge.

Weaving webs of reciprocity

2021-04-25T00:00:00Z

This week I’m thinking a lot about Braiding Sweetgrass, because the forest floor is now covered in purple and yellow flowers (ground ivy and yellow anenome, I think).

That September pairing of purple and gold is lived reciprocity; its wisdom is that the beauty of one is illuminated by the radiance of the other. Science and art, matter and spirit, indigenous knowledge and Western science—can they be goldenrod and asters for each other? When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.

I really liked the book’s focus on reciprocity as a core principle of nature and means of collaborative survival and much else besides.

How do we refill the empty bowl? Is gratitude alone enough? Berries teach us otherwise. […] They remind us that all flourishing is mutual. We need the berries and the berries need us. Their gifts multiply by our care for them, and dwindle from our neglect. We are bound in a covenant of reciprocity, a pact of mutual responsibility to sustain those who sustain us.

Hope in work & joy in leisure

2021-05-01T00:00:00Z

Happy May Day!

It’s pretty wild to read about the origins of May Day. Workers had to fight so hard just to get an eight-hour day, which we now all take as given. Happy to see that it was Australian stonemasons who were the first to strike as part of the eight-hour day movement.

Eighteen Black Cats

Last week How had an exhibition here at Rupert, to show three of the works he’s been developing over the last few months. My favourite was the piece called Wool-gather:

Raising questions about machine consciousness and non-human creativity, Wool-gather brings together aeromancy, day-dreaming and cloud watching through machine learning and image processing. Pointing an object detection algorithm at the sky above Vilnius, the work uses the shapes of the clouds to generate meandering anecdotes and make whimsical predictions about the future.

It was really meditative to watch, very easy to just lie there and have the stories wash over you.

Listening and reading and watching

I watched Crip Camp the other evening, which I found really moving. The amount of fighting that disability activists did (and still have to do) to win the most basic rights is inspiring but also infuriating.

Related: Sonia recommended the Understanding Disability series by Nim Ralph, which unpacks the different models we use to understand disability, how these have developed over time and the impact this has on the lives of disabled people. Highly recommended.

Also thanks to Sonia (who is my main source of reading material these days) is this super interesting reflection on remote work. They argue that working remotely (or, working in distributed teams) removes work as the centre of meaning and fulfilment, allows us to build stronger communities where we live and, ultimately, live fuller lives.

Where and how to live has come up in a lot of conversations lately. Tom has told us about this collective in Sicily that is currently building a community and artist residency, and Anna keeps talking about tiny houses. I guess it’s a combination of the pandemic, being around our early 30’s and not wanting to move around or rent or sublet anymore. How and I still haven’t decided where to move now that we’ve left London, as the second wave has been worse and visas harder to come by than we expected. I really want to find somewhere (in Europe) that is pretty warm, close to nature but well-connected by train to a city… does this place exist?!

▲ Screenshot from the Arkadia Zoomquilt

I’ve started listening to a lot of super interesting podcasts lately, all circling the same kinds of themes:

New Constellations

Each episode focuses on one person, who talks about their practice, shares their visions for the future, tells stories about their own experiences and approach to life. It’s really well produced and quite relaxing to listen to, because it’s strongly focused on hope and imagination and mutual flourishing.

For All I Care

A series focused on care and healing, presented by Nwando Ebizie. Each episode features a really interesting mix of guests: artists, activists, scientists and care-workers.

Thank you Linsey for the recommendation 🌸

Serpentine

I discovered that the Serpentine gallery has a really good podcast, particularly the episodes created in collaboration with Future Ecologies. Lots of episodes featuring artists and activists who are responding to the climate crisis.

Anything with adrienne maree brown…

I really enjoy listening to her, so I’ve been following How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and the Emergent Strategy podcast.

Exploring maps

2021-05-30T00:00:00Z

Maps seem to be the most consistent thing that people ask us to do at Common Knowledge. We don’t know entirely what it is, but people love maps. Not only do organisations love them, they seem to test really well when we do usability testing as well.

We have a couple of particularly interesting mapping projects on at the moment, so while I’ve been ambiently researching interesting maps on Arena for a while, I’ve recently started doing more reading about cartography as well.

Shannon Mattern’s wonderful article How to Map Nothing seeks out the gaps in the map: cartographies of erasure, absence, refusal and exclusion. For something about nothing, it is overflowing with references, projects and ideas. Lots to explore!

We have plenty of maps and data visualizations that trace the macro-scale public health and political-economic forces that precipitated the “Great Pause”; but we have relatively few that show all those under-appreciated agents that are making it possible — all the something anchoring and abetting that nothing, all the pulsing activity powering the pause. So it’s worth exploring the ways in which maps and other forms of indexical spatial data are registering the ambiguities, contradictions, and inequalities inherent in this geography of suspension — an ostensible pause that instead merely extends, and in many ways exacerbates, the injustices of our society and the inadequacies of our ways of conceptualizing and modeling city life.

Mapping’s Intelligent Agents is another great essay, this time focusing on Other approaches to cartography:

Ideally, we should balance or juxtapose different modes of knowledge and production: Western scientific and indigenous epistemologies, human and other-species ontologies, mechanical and organic means of experiencing and representing place, cartographic rationalism and empiricism, projection and retrospection. No single über-map can encompass all such subjectivities and sensibilities. Instead, we can aim for an atlas, a prismatic collection of mappings, that invites comparison and appreciation of the ways in which our world is both known and unknown.

Mattern is currently teaching a class called Mapping the Field, which I wish I could take. Luckily, she’s put the entire syllabus, presentations and reading list online.

In Here Be Dragons, Lois Parshley explores the unknown places that we’re still trying to map: the Arctic, black holes, the ocean floor. She also considers how mapping intersects with health, deprivation and natural disasters. She references Missing Maps, an open, collaborative project where anyone can volunteer to help map areas that are at risk of disaster or crisis.

I also found this offline-first, open-source tool called Mapeo. It allows communities to document, monitor and map data, and was co-designed with indigenous partners in the Amazon.

For a completely different viewpoint, I really enjoyed reading about literary maps and the design of open world video games.

Next, I think I’m going to read Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while.

Hello Storygraph

2021-08-30T00:00:00Z

I’ve recently started using Storygraph (thanks Sonia) to track the books I’m reading. It’s a not-Amazon alternative to Goodreads.

When you sign up, you’re asked you a series of questions about the kinds of books you like. It also analyses the mood, pace and genre of the books you read, and then recommends more books based on this. I never actually used Goodreads (I had some low-fi Arena channels for tracking books instead), so I’m really enjoying these kind of features. Apparently I mainly read “slow-paced fiction books that are reflective, informative, and adventurous”.

It seems quite hard to find people you know on the platform, so follow me if you have it (@gemcopeland)!

Unravel from toxic individualism

2021-08-30T00:00:00Z

A few months ago I spoke at a panel discussion for CSM students. It was a partnership with Thames & Hudson and Design Observer to accompany their new edition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay, Self-reliance. The event aimed to explore what it means to graduate during a crisis after 1+ years of disrupted education.

While I totally agreed with this premise and wanted to contribute, the essay itself and the choice to republish it really grated on me. Of course, it was written in the 19th century, so I can’t really blame Emerson for being a few centuries behind the intersectional feminist, post-colonial and post-humanist thinking. Still, it feels strange to me that the publishers are pointing to the power of individualism as a way to deal with social, political, economical and environmental upheaval. This idea that we’re all individuals and that there’s no such thing as society has been one of neoliberalism’s greatest triumphs.

I wrote a somewhat ranty post about the essay to sort through why I had such a problem with it. I didn’t publish it at the time, but I find myself still thinking about this question of individualism a few months later, so figured I may as well.

Emerson suggests that the self-made man should turn his back on society and focus instead on himself and his own individual genius. “Society never advances”, he says, so why bother? I feel like this is the exact opposite of what we should be telling students, or anyone, for that matter.

Individually, we are basically powerless to influence social and political structures. However, if we organise and work collectively, we can address systemic problems and work together to build alternatives that work for everyone. Take unions, for example: a single worker who has an issue with their boss is powerless, but a group of workers who are organised can go on strike and make demands and support each other.

At the moment, precarity is the nature of the system. If we just focus on individual success, on working hard and being nice to people, and we don’t try to address problems on a structural level, whether that’s capitalism or just the design industry, we’ll continue to have an industry dominated by white, middle class, cis-gendered men, perhaps with a white woman or two for diversity.

It’s easy to think that “the world exists for you” and that “all doors are flung wide” if you’re white and male. In celebrating individual, heroic genius, Emerson erases all the human and more-than-human beings that support these great men and himself: the reproductive labour of women who no doubt sustain them, the ecologies upon which their lives depend, the perspectives of the Indigenous people and lifeworlds that existed long before “Columbus found the New World in an undecked boat”.

As Jenny Odell puts it in her response to Emerson’s essay, The Myth of Self-Reliance:

Indeed, “Self Reliance” was written five years before the term “manifest destiny” was coined, an era that celebrated the lone, able explorer setting out to tame a (supposed) wilderness. The contemplative tradition has often been supported from the outside, a hallmark of the affordances of leisure—the way that philosophy in ancient Greece was dependent on a servant class. The concept of self-reliance has always relied on something else.

I also find the idea that anyone could declare themselves to be self-reliant is questionable. How many of us could survive more than a few days without the shelter or food that society provides for us? It’s the same mindset that apocalypse preppers take, the idea that somehow you could survive climate chaos by saving just yourself and your family and hiding in the woods somewhere. We all survive or none of us do.

In fact, the idea that there are individuals at all is inherently flawed. He even frames nature as “self-sufficing and therefore self-relying”. To be fair to Emerson, the term symbiosis was first used in 1877 and was a subject of intense debate for centuries, precisely because it requires us to question the notion of the individual. As it turns out, humans are actually microbiomes with as many non-human cells as human ones:

Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely cooperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies.

— Kim Stanley Robinson, The Coronavirus is Rewriting our Imaginations

Like everything in nature, symbiosis is not binary: it shifts between mutualism, commensalism and parasitism. Ecologies are interconnected systems, relationships of cooperation and competition. We are all intertwined and interdependent.

Once we uncover the myth of the individual on a biological level, we can also uncover the myth of the individual idea. I am a product of my environment, my upbringing, my privilege; my family, friends, partner, co-workers, teachers; the books I read, the people I meet, the projects I work on, the places I travel, the food I eat, the films I watch, the conversations I have. All of these interactions and inputs mix together and cross-pollinate in interesting ways, and maybe sometimes this mix of ideas might be somewhat unexpected, but any ideas I might have are by no means a manifestation of individual genius.

Unravel from toxic individualism. You do nothing by yourself. Your whole life is a collaboration.

— The Nap Ministry

When we think of ideas as a result of individual genius, we create artificial scarcity and enclose something that should be a commons. As ever, I think that fungi offer a useful rebuttal to the idea of an individual genius. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing writes:

Consider again matsutake as a commodity, ready to be sent from Yunnan to Japan. What we have is mushrooms, that is, fruiting bodies of underground fungi. The fungi require the traffic of the commons to flourish; no mushrooms emerge without forest disturbance. The privately owned mushroom is an offshoot from a communally living underground body, a body forged through the possibilities of latent commons, human and not human. That it is possible to cordon off the mushroom as an asset without taking its underground commons into account is both the ordinary way with privatisation and a quite extraordinary outrage, when you stop to think about it. The contrast between private mushrooms and fungi-forming forest traffic might be an emblem for commoditisation more generally: the continual, never-finished cutting off of entanglement.

Recent contributions

2021-09-06T00:00:00Z

A few recent contributions to various publications:

Caps Lock

I spoke to Ruben Pater about Common Knowledge for Caps Lock, his new book about graphic design and capitalism. The interview was mainly centred on how Common Knowledge works on a practical level, both internally and in collaboration with others. Ruben’s done such a great job with the book, I’m really proud to be involved and glad that a book like this exists! It’s so important to demonstrate alternatives to traditional design practice, and I think he does a good job of making it super accessible.

There’s More Than One Way to Share Your Design Work

I wrote a short explanation of the design of this very website (meta!) for an AIGA article about alternative approaches to design portfolios.

How to Run a Design Sprint

I gave a very brief explanation of the Google design sprint methodology for Stir To Action’s summer issue, with examples of how we used it in collaboration with Cooperation Town.

Golden Hill community garden

2021-11-04T00:00:00Z

A couple of months ago, we decided that all co-op members should move to a four-day week at no loss of pay. We think it’s a really important demand, an idea whose time has come, and we wanted to try it out for ourselves. So far, it’s been super successful. We all feel happier and like we have a better work-life balance, yet we’re just as—if not more—productive. I’ve written a bit more about why we did this over on the Common Knowledge blog.

For myself, I wanted to have a day off for my own practice, to write and to relax. I also thought that I could use the time to get more involved in the climate justice movement. I immediately went along to a few different remote organising meetings, but they just made me feel even more burnt out. It was too close to my day-to-day work, and I just didn’t have the energy to spend my free time sitting on the dreaded Zoom.

I started looking for an alternative way to spend my day off. I’ve always loved growing plants, and for a while I’ve been trying to learn more about regenerative farming, foraging and food sovereignty. I looked for a community garden near me and found the Golden Hill Community Garden. Luckily, their volunteer day falls on a Wednesday, which I’d already decided would be my day off.

Spending some time helping in the garden has been so restorative for me. I joined in late summer so I got to share in the abundant harvest: each week we harvest some of the veggies and take them home afterwards. They taste so much better than anything you can buy. I (really) love weeding, I love being outside all day, I love learning about all the different plants and how to care for them.

One day Lucy, the community project worker, was talking about how much she likes to flip through the daily log from the previous decade, because she can read about her and the volunteers doing the same activities they do every year: harvesting this plant, maintaining this part of the garden. There’s something reassuring and beautiful about having deep roots in one place, knowing that the same cycle will repeat year after year. It probably seems obvious, but as someone who moves around a lot, I’m really starting to see the appeal in this.

There was actually an article about Golden Hill in The Guardian the other day, about the rise of community gardens. Lucy describes community gardens as “revolutionary in a quiet way”. Lately I’ve been thinking about this a lot — how important it is to find the right type of activism.

I spend everyday at work thinking about grassroots activism (or organising or social change or whatever you want to call it) in some form. Yet for some reason, I always feel guilty, I worry that I’m not doing enough or that I’m a fraud… all that good stuff. I have a lot of eco-anxiety. And I’ve read about how eco-anxiety is problematic and white, so now I have guilt about my my anxiety too. Unsurprisingly, this is exhausting and completely unsustainable. At best, it’s silly, and at worst, it’s counterproductive. You can’t contribute to a movement if you’re burnt out.

Helping out a community garden helps me recalibrate, slow down, spend time away from my computer and see things from a different perspective. In some ways, it feels like an antidote to thinking and reading and talking and worrying about climate change on a daily basis. Rather than thinking about global crises, economic levers, parts per million, I’m thinking on a hyperlocal scale, about the soil and plants right in front of me.

There is such urgency in the multitude of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (urgent constant unsustainable growth) that got us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work.

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

With something as unimaginably huge as climate change, the only viable response is through collective action. However, this can take so many different forms, not just direct action or lobbying. This isn’t to say those things aren’t vital – they are. But everyone can find a role that suits their own particular skills, interests, capacity and strengths. Each role is just as important as the next.

Lots of people have made different attempts at categorising these different roles. In The Shock Doctrine of the Left, Graham Jones describes a four-part framework of mutually reinforcing organising strategies: Smashing, Building, Healing and Taming. Similarly, Bill Moyer identifies four roles in his Movement Action Plan: Helper, Organiser, Rebel, Advocate. I think I’ve always been most interested in contributing by “building” viable alternatives like cooperatives and community groups.

We can do, be, and create whatever we want to see, knowing ours is one effort in the midst of many, and the multitude is where our power lies.

— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

Pocket of gems

2021-11-10T00:00:00Z

I’m going through all my Pocket articles that I’ve favourited by not archived, which means that Past Gem thought they were important enough to revisit. Let’s see what I find…

Statements Towards the Establishment of a Proof-of-Rest Protocol

A response to the senseless wastefulness of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, which use up energy to generate artificial scarcity and profit.

Rather than burning ourselves out in bullshit jobs, why don’t we rest and do nothing? If anything, we need to be saving our capacity for transitioning to a post-capitalist society.

A sustainable way of life will necessarily require us to be more in balance with the natural rhythms of our bodies and the world around us, leaving time for rest, repair and regeneration.

Who Taught Me

I found Aimi Hamraie’s work via Futuress and really liked their take on an “About” page. It’s an incomplete list of all the people, stories, lessons and situations that have shaped them and their world view. It made me wonder what I’d put on my own list.

Indigenous World Views

Super interesting critique of permaculture and regenerative agriculture from an indigenous perspective.

Indigenous cultures often share the view that there is no good, bad, or ideal—it is not our role to judge. Our role is to tend, care, and weave to maintain relationships of balance.

The Strategic Independent

I’ve been gradually working my way through all of Tom Critchlow’s essays. To the point where it has become a joke within the co-op.

He’s writing a book (also available online) about how independent consultants can work in more strategic and effective ways. Basically: working smarter, not harder – being curious and spending more time understanding the broader context of one’s work.

Developing our new Systemic Design Framework

An evolution of the divergent and convergent thinking Double Diamond. It recognises the non-linearity of complex problems and the invisible activities that support and interact with the design process. Really interesting explanation by Cat Drew of how the framework emerged and the thinking behind it.

Community Tech in Action

Rachel Coldicutt and the team at Promising Trouble / Careful Industries have been producing some really interesting work. In this series, they explain the research they’ve done into the motivations behind and potential for community tech projects. Tools that are custom-built, rather than just stringing together off-the-shelf consumer tech that aren’t fit for purpose. Basically Common Knowledge’s reason for existence!

What does Community Even Mean?

Short essay on how we need to update our conception of community. They suggest this a new definition, in which care, belonging and shared identity is key:

Community = a group of people that care about each other and feel they belong together.

They argue that only sharing a common goal does not a community make:

I believe that every community needs to have an internal purpose first to truly function as a community. Without trust and relationships, it becomes a project, an initiative, a movement.

I liked the look of the open source Community Canvas linked at the end.

The Intelligent Forest

An excerpt from Suzanne Simard’s book Finding The Mother Tree. Forests are complex, emergent, ever-changing, self-organising systems – somewhat like a society, an orchestra, a family or a brain.

Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have these elements of intelligence helps us leave behind old notions that they are inert, simple, linear and predictable — notions that have helped fuel the justification for rapid exploitation that has risked the future existence of creatures in the forest systems, like us.

Mind in the Forest

More forests! A lyrical essay on meditation, animism, impermanence and meaning.

Only cosmic arrogance tempts us to claim that all this reaching for sunlight, nutrients, and water means nothing except what we say it means. But if it bears a grander significance, what might that be, and what gives rise to such meaning? What power draws the elements together and binds them into a spider or a person, a fern or a forest? If we answer, “Life,” we give only a name, not an explanation.

Conversation is Not a Master’s Tool

An interview between Scalability Project and adrienne maree brown. I was drawn to the question about citations, relations and conversation:

SCALABILITY PROJECT: Reading through your texts, we were inspired by how generously you use citations. What you describe above reminds me of your adoption of the Mervyn Marcano quote “Move at the speed of trust.” You also quote Farhad Ebrahimi: “An ecosystem is not just a list of living things … It’s the set of relationships between those living things.” Could you expand more on this nonlinear process of relations, especially in connection to conversation?
BROWN: I love this question because that quote and the practice of citation are the same. I am not a solitary thinker, solitary learner, or solitary channel of these universal wisdoms and universal truths. I’m constantly learning from other people. And I weave. We all weave in different ways. What is the tapestry of lessons and wisdom that is unique for me? Each person ends up with a different tapestry, but you start to see patterns amongst them. And the pattern for me is something infinite.

Warp, weft

2021-11-17T00:00:00Z

I did a weaving workshop last week and really loved it. I’ve been on the lookout for a new tactile hobby for a while. Tried pottery a few times but just didn’t enjoy it that much – just couldn’t get the hang of the wheel and never enjoyed the process very much. I think weaving could be the one. I’m recording some of what I learned here so I don’t forget them, but this is by no means a how-to guide. I have no idea what I’m doing!

The warp is the strong vertical threads that provide a structure for the weaving. The weft is the threads that you weave through the warp horizontally. We were using lap looms in this workshop, which seem to be the easiest type of loom to learn.

Begin by warping the loom: wind strong, plain cotton thread around the notches at the top and bottom. We added a folded piece of cardboard across the bottom of the warp, to keep from going too close to the edge of the loom.

If you want a fringe at the bottom, start by adding that. Cut some even lengths of thread and lie them on top of two warp threads, then loop them under so they’re hanging off the bottom of the warp. Repeat along the whole row.

In the workshop, we just did a tabby weave, which is the most simple weaving technique. Pull the weft thread over the first warp thread, under the second, over the third, and so on. Once you’ve reached the other side, go back in the opposite direction.

I hadn’t realised how grid-based weaving is – the warp provides a regular but invisible grid of columns. Build up shapes vertically with the weft, beginning at the bottom and working upwards. Add variation by changing how far along the columns you weave the thread.

Change threads to switch up the colours and textures. You can even alternate and blend colours within the same row. I love how this looks! You can use a photo for reference, or else just create an abstract composition. I find the abstract compositions much more appealing and really want to try to make something as freeform as this.

Make sure to tuck the ends of the threads back into the weaving. Otherwise, they’ll hang out the sides of the finished piece. Don’t pull the thread too tight at the edges or else it will start to become an hourglass shape.

Once you’ve finished your composition, cut your warp from the loom and double-knot the thread at the top and bottom. Attach a dowel to the top so you can hang it.

Afterward I immediately went and found a bunch of amazing textile artists, of course. I really like weaving as a concept and a metaphor as well. It feels like a feminist practice in more ways than one! 🕷

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world

2021-11-20T00:00:00Z

The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.
— David Graeber

Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative

Last weekend we visited How We Live Now at the Barbican, an installation exploring the work of the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative.

Matrix was a women-led worker co-op that existed in London from 1980–1994. They challenged patriarchal norms and worked in a way that would still be seen as radical today.

They worked in collaboration with people who were usually excluded from the design process, on buildings that were usually ignored by male architects: women’s centres, childcare groups, housing co-ops. They also conducted research, ran a book group and a support group, and educated women in skills like technical drawing, building law and construction practices.

All this while Thatcher was prime minister! So impressive.

— Poster (1979), from the online archive of Matrix’s work

We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself

We also went to the launch of a new book called We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones. The two authors, Isabelle and Jay, coordinate the art activism group The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (among many other things) and live within the ZAD de Notre Dame des Landes.

— Illustration by Amanda Priebe

The ZAD NDDL is an autonomous zone that begun to protest a new airport that the government planned to build on agricultural land. Activists and environmentalists started to squat in the area, alongside local farmers, and gradually built an entire self-organised community.

Over the years there have been several attempts by the state to evict the people living there and destroy their buildings, but this has been met with lots of resistance and solidarity from all over France. The airport plans have now been cancelled: a huge victory, although very hard won. They seem to now have reached an uneasy truce with the state – they’re negotiating for legalisation so they can stay on the land in perpetuity.

Isabelle and Jay told us about their practice and how they ended up at the ZAD. They were working in London (as academics, I think) and doing their art and activism on the side. They don’t see art and activism as two separate things. In their practice, they worked with both, in a participatory and pedagogical way.

At some point, they realised that they couldn’t live in the city any longer. They felt that cities are designed to keep us all divided from each other. They quit their jobs and travelled around Europe for a while, visiting communities and co-living projects throughout.

They settled in northern France for a while and began a housing co-op, but later realised that they still had a mindset of always travelling and moving around for their art practice. They needed to become more grounded into one place, and wanted to find a way to connect art, activism and everyday life. “Why can’t life be art?”

— Map of the ZAD

They ended up at the ZAD. They shared stories of the repeated attacks on the ZAD by the state, and the messy, complex, everyday reality of building a commons. You can watch two short documentaries that they made about the history and one about the how people there live now.

They see creation and resistance (yes and no) as two interlocking strands, like DNA. You can’t have one without the other. The counterculture of the 60’s was just about “dropping out” of society and alternative living, which made it easy for Silicon Valley to appropriate its ideals to capitalist ends. This made me think of my post about community gardens. They even said something like “if we don’t resist the extractivist death drive of capitalism, your community garden is going to be underwater.”

Excited to read the book!

Edgeryders

Finally, the other day I came across The Reef, a communal living project in Brussels initiated by Edgeryders. I really hope they succeed! I want to live somewhere like this so much.

Gratitude, abundance, new possibilities

2022-02-11T00:00:00Z

A couple of super nice interviews and essays by women I admire:

Alice Grandoit-Sutka, co-founder of DEEM Journal, on how to generate new possibilities:

I want a practice that is both critical and generative. Sometimes we can invest a lot of energy critiquing what was, which can block or limit the potential to cultivate possibilities of what could be.

Sunrise Movement’s Varshini Prakash on how she deals with climate grief:

I find that the key to staying optimistic or having hope is – well, not spending too much time on Twitter – but also really allowing yourself and honoring the feeling grief, pain and fury and whatever is moving through you. In the climate movement, people can lose themselves in the gloom and doom or pretend everything is OK and not process the grief. So, a big thing for me is creating strategies to feel the full scope of the emotional intensity of work — journaling, meditation. We have a strong storytelling culture in our organization and ensuring that I am not letting myself numb or get subsumed by the emotional intensity of what I’m feeling. And having a strong spiritual practice of gratitude. There is something about being really intimate with the potential demise of the world that makes you almost ironically really intimate with the beauty of it and the immense gratitude we should feel to be here. Being able to hold both of those things at once is key to my ability to persevere.

Food writer Alicia Kennedy on abundance:

The flexibility provided by a specific kind of abundance—extra pumpkin, banana blossoms blooming, an excess of food, period, growing in the garden to give away—rather than the idea of abundance we’ve been sold, quite literally, being access to anything at any time to buy is what fuels creativity, excitement, a feeling of safety in the midst of an uncertain future. Abundance doesn’t have to be gifted to us; it can be cultivated. It can be a choice we make, in order to take care of each other and the earth. The world is abundant, I remind myself again in a dark time. I pray it. We just have to be sure to see it that way, to share it that way.

Summer to spring

2022-05-18T00:00:00Z

How and I went back to Australia for about three months during Southern Hemisphere summer. Now we’re back in the UK, enjoying the spring, seeing friends and family and cooperators, discussing lots of books and dreaming about what to do next.

Trip to Australia

This was by far the longest I’ve spent back there since I left ten years ago. I feel so grateful to have a place like that to go back to, to have the freedom to move, and to see friends and family for the first time in two very strange years.

We mainly stayed in Melbourne and worked remotely, which was a whole new challenge with an 11-hour time difference. We did also go to Queensland to see family, Minjerribah (our usual holiday spot when I was growing up and one of my favourite places in the world), Lennox Head and Brunswick Heads in northern NSW, and Tasmania.

Visiting Tasmania was one of the highlights. It was my first time there and I was so in love with the natural beauty. It’s one of the first places in the world that’s gone carbon negative as they’ve shut down one of their big logging mills, so now their native forests absorb more carbon than the whole state emits. We saw so many animals there that don’t exist anywhere else.

We stayed for a week in a tiny house outside of Hobart. It was so dreamy: a huge window at the front looking out to the bay. They had an outdoor bath where you could look up into the eucalypts filled with birds.

One of our favourite parts of this trip was visiting Paprika and Benjamin in Launceston. They and their house full of books and garden full of veg really inspired us when thinking about how we want to live and where we want to go next.

The worst part of the trip was getting caught in the terrible East Coast floods and having to spend a week in an evacuation centre. More on that in another post, but it was a really intense, visceral reminder of the kind of world that we’re heading towards (that we’re already living in). The depressing thing is that the area flooded again about two weeks after we were there, and now Queensland is flooding yet again.

Right now

Now I’m back in London staying with friends while we work out what to do next. It is a joy to be here again, to spend time with people that I’ve barely been able to see for so long.

How and I spent last weekend in a place called Praktyka in Devon and came back very inspired. They spent 18 months travelling the world and visiting other places like retreats and cooperatives to define what kind of space they wanted to build together. I’m really excited to see how it develops.

House dream

We’re definitely still in dreaming/planning mode, but How and I are hoping to find somewhere like this that we can make our own, to build a space where we can have friends visit, grow a garden, run a residency and maybe some type of event/community space.

Realistically we’re going to have to move out of south-east England to do this, so it’s been fun to explore the different options of where we could live. We’re hoping to spend some time over summer visiting a few places that are doing similar things in Italy and Spain.

I’m a little nervous of moving out of a city for the first time, particularly one where I have so many connections and there are so many opportunities. But we just feel so excited about the potential of a project like this. When I think about the times that I have been the absolute happiest, it would be summer 2019 when I stayed at Casa Sasso in Gambarogno and with Brave New Alps / La Foresta in Roverto. I just want that but… all the time.

Capital moves people around and draws them to the center: to find your luck you are urged to move from the village to the town, from the town to the regional capital, and from there to the metropolis. […] Resisting capital’s demand for constant movement is for some designers a strategy against precarisation.
Being exposed to precarity implies a constant temporariness, a constant flux of building and abandoning social and material structures, thus missing out on the possibility of creating interlinking infrastructures that can take us and others beyond precarity, infrastructures that can support critical practice through dire times.

– from Design(ers) Beyond Precarity: Proposals for Everyday Action by Brave New Alps

Reading groups

I’ve joined two remote reading groups. Both are open to join if you’re interested, dear reader.

One of them is Rererereading Group, which Paprika and Benjamin invited us to. So far we’ve read Blockchain Chicken Farm, which I enjoyed a lot, and The Question Concerning Technology in China, which I found too complex and philosophical so have dropped out for the time being. I have really enjoyed the calls that I have joined though – it’s just so fun to discuss a text so deeply with a small group and to deepen our understand together.

The other is a feminist sci fi reading group organised by Yuli. In our first session, 🌿 Entangling the Forest 🪱, we discussed Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, Adam Curtis’ All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace and The Daoist Yin Principle in Ecofeminist Novels by Amy Chan Kit-Sze.

I usually hate after hours Zoom calls as it feels too much like work and even during remote lectures I end up zoning out. But I just found this session so engaging and fun. More exciting than a lecture because there wasn’t any hierarchy – just a group of people exploring ideas together. Yuli did a really great job curating the readings so there was so many interlinked topics to dive into which made for a very rich discussion.

Lots of Taoist/Daoist themes running through both reading groups. Next I’d quite like to read Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.

I just finished reading a book called The Feeling Buddha, so I’m thinking a lot about mindfulness and spirituality. I also started therapy, and all of these things feel like they’re combining in really generative and healthy ways.

The co-op

One of the nice things about being in London again is being able to spend time IRL with the rest of the co-op. We’re working from a space called Pelican House now, which is full of other left organisations like The World Transformed, Green New Deal Rising, Autonomy and London Renters Union.

The space got off to a bit of a slow start due to the pandemic, but it’s feeling more convivial now as people settle in. The hope is that the building will become a bit of a hub for the left in London.

At the moment, our co-op is trying to work out how to move into a calmer, slower, more abundant mindset. We’ve always had this as an intention, but the sheer amount of projects we’ve been working on and other pressures outside of our control have meant that we’ve slipped into frantic, scarcity thinking.

I feel really lucky (as ever) to have colleagues that are equally committed to thinking about collective care and addressing burnout. It does feel like things are gradually getting better in terms of our work-life balance.

The Beatles

Quite random, but it seems I’ve temporarily slipped into Beatlesmania after watching the Get Back documentary. I’ve never paid much attention to them before, but the film is a fascinating look into their creative process and their group dynamics. Now I can’t stop reading about them or listening to them. (Hopefully it’s just a phase.)

In general

At the moment I do feel a deep despair at climate inaction and the invasion of Ukraine and the (waves hands) state of the world. But then I’m oscillating between that and an intense gratitude for my present and excitement for our future plans. Trying to just ride the waves and direct these feelings towards doing something meaningful and generative with my time.

Past, present, future commons

2022-07-22T00:00:00Z

Tracing the history of enclosure with Eula Biss, collecting modern stories of commoning with Future Natures, dreaming and planning for a Half Earth Socialist future, and a little bit of solarpunk.

The Theft of the Commons

I immediately devour anything written by Eula Biss, so was very excited to see this article by her in the Sentiers newsletter a few weeks ago.

In the essay, she traces the history of the commons and enclosure, which began here in the UK.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

She debunks that awful essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin. It’s so unfortunately that this idea / phrase has somehow wormed itself into popular consciousness when talking about the commons. It’s been decisively disproven by Elinor Ostrom, who became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize for her work.

One of the things I love about Biss’ work is her ability to weave together so many different strands, wandering across topics like capitalism, feudalism, luddites, gleaners, nostalgia, art, myths, symbols, language, class.

I loved this quote:

The history of the distant past is often speculative. Like science fiction, it gives us a way of thinking about what might be possible, as much as what might have been. In this sense, both the past and the future are imaginary, but real, too, as ideas.

It ties in with the ideas from The Dawn of Everything, which we’re currently reading in Re-re-re-reading Group. In it, the Davids retell history to open up our imaginations, challenge commonly held beliefs and suggest that we might have done life and politics and society very differently in the past (and therefore, we might be able to do it differently again.)

“Would you go back?” strikes me as the wrong question to ask of nostalgia. The question, as Zadie Smith puts it, is how to “restate the things you find valuable in the past… in a way that’s livable in this contemporary moment.” How to locate the commons in a world that is mostly enclosed. How to recover a tradition of rebellion against monied claims to property. How to use machines rather than be used by them. How to be canny, like the workers of the past, and how to be conservationists, like commoners. We can learn from the time before enclosure, but we can’t go back there.

Eula Biss’ other books include Having and Being Had, about money, ownership, capitalism and class and On Immunity, about pandemics, vaccinations, individualism and community. Cannot recommend them enough.

Future Natures

Speaking of the commons, we just launched a new website for Future Natures, which explores the “emergent ecologies of commoning and enclosure through stories, arts and research.” It was such a great project to work on – the team was so easy to collaborate with and their research is so interesting. They have big plans for building up an international network of commoners so I’m really excited to see where it goes.

They’ve created this incredible comic that also explores the history of enclosure, the intersecting crises we’re living through and what commoning is and can be.

Half Earth Socialism

I’ve just finished reading Half Earth Socialism by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese.

I was really impressed. It’s a short but dense book that covers a lot of ground, like a non-fiction chaser to The Ministry for the Future. They criticise mainstream environmental solutions, paint a picture of what a socialist utopia might look like (including a speculative fiction chapter inspired by William Morris’ News From Nowhere, which is clunky but quite sweet) and outline a clear plan on how to get there.

Enough should be a human right, a floor below which no one can fall; also a ceiling above which no one can rise. Enough is as good as a feast—or better.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future

They also worked with Francis Tseng and Son La Pham to create a Half Earth Socialism game. I played it straight after finishing the book. It was really fun and helped drill home some of their ideas. It felt very moving to be able to pass policies and take action to address climate change, and then to watch as these played out and some of our worst possible futures be avoided.

On the other hand, it felt overwhelming to think on a global scale and 80 years into the future. While I agree with most of the ideas that the book proposes, just the thought of us actually succeeding to implement them at the speed and scale we need feels almost impossible. Still, I think it’s so useful to have these ideas laid out so clearly, as a discussions point or north star.

Your lifetime bridges centuries of harm that set the stage for climate change and centuries of healing that need to start now. Just be a bridge.
– Elizabeth Sawin

Refuge for Resurgence

We went to the Barbican’s Our Time on Earth exhibition a few weeks ago. It was pretty disappointing. It’s probably partially because I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about these topics already, but the ideas they proposed just seems so cliched/unambitious/self-indulgent. Eirini Malliaraki summarises it well in this thread.

However, I did enjoy the window view designed by Superflux and Sebastian Tiew – love a bit of post-capitalist solarpunk ambiguous utopia!

Mirror

2022-08-10T00:00:00Z

How and I went for a hike in Snowdonia last weekend. Almost 40km of walking over two days. Over the last few months we’ve gradually been collecting all the basic kit you need for multiday hikes: tent, sleeping mats and bags, backpacks, this incredibly compact wood stove.

It was such an incredible hike. The weather was unusually warm and sunny – I just read that Snowdonia is one of the wettest parts of the UK, so it really was unusual. On the first day, we could see out to the ocean for most of the hike. We swam in a pool fed by a waterfall, walked through ferns and forests and across heather-covered hills. There was a tough bit when Komoot decided to take us across a difficult field without a real path, but we managed to find our way back again.

We camped by a lake (Llyn Du) on Rhinog Fawr. I took these three photos about an hour apart around sunset. Entranced by the changes in light over such a short time.

19:50:25

20:42:50

21:04:09

No!

2022-08-20T00:00:00Z

History is full of people who just didn’t. They said no thank you, turned away, ran away to the desert, stood on the streets in rags, lived in barrels, burned down their own houses, walked barefoot through town, killed their rapists, pushed away dinner, meditated into the light. Even babies refuse, and the elderly, too. All types of animals refuse: at the zoo they gaze dead-eyed through plexiglass, fling feces at the human faces, stop having babies. Classes refuse. The poor throw their lives onto barricades. Workers slow the line. Enslaved people have always refused, poisoning the feasts, aborting the embryos. And the diligent, flamboyant jaywalkers assert themselves against traffic as the first and foremost visible, daily lesson in just not.
— No by Anne Boyer

Strike!

It’s a hot strike summer in the UK. Last week’s edition of The Week in Work was the longest ever. Transport workers, postal workers, barristers, lawyers, gravediggers, journalists – all on strike. Withdrawing our labour is the most powerful way for workers to say NO to exploitation.

Don’t!

Meanwhile, the energy crisis keeps getting worse. Now they’re predicting that energy bills will pass £5000 in January, while energy companies are reporting record profits. Two movements based on mass refusal have emerged in response – Don’t Pay and Enough is Enough.

The theory of change for Don’t Pay takes its inspiration from the Poll Tax protests in early 1990. They’re aiming to get a million people to pledge that they won’t pay their energy bills on 1 October, then use this bargaining power to get the government to intervene and reduce the bills to an affordable level.

Enough is Enough is led by MPs like Zarah Sultana and trade unionists like Mick Lynch. They’re planning to hold rallies, support picket lines and form community groups to deal with the crisis.

No!

No, the 2012 film by Pablo Larrain, is based on the story of the plebescite in Chile that ended 15 years of Pinochet’s authoritarian rule. In it, an advertising professional and many other creatives support the campaign by creating joyful propaganda focused on how liberating and positive it would be to vote NO.

Smash!

The Luddites were early nineteenth-century weavers who smashed the machines that were ruining their working conditions. Luddism is not about being scared of new technology (in the sense that the term is used today), it’s about being critical of any progress that makes life worse for people.

Though the Luddites are often only glibly referenced in modern debates, the truth is that they were directly concerned with conditions of labour, rather than mindless machine-breaking or some reactionary desire to turn back time. They sought to redefine their relationship with technology in a way that resisted dehumanisation.
— Lizzie O’Shea, Future Histories

Degrow!

Luddism might also link with the politics of degrowth, a movement that originated in the Global South and shares with Luddism an acknowledgement that liberation is not tied up with the endless accumulation of capital, and further, that well-being cannot be reduced to economic statistics.
— Gavin Mueller, Decelerate Now!

In Degrowth: No, let’s not call it something else, the authors argue again a common criticism of degrowth: that it’s too negative. That’s the point! Unlike net zero or green capitalism, degrowth doesn’t pretend that we can continue our current way of life with a few added solar panels.

It’s not going to be easy, but we must rapidly downscale our consumption in order to wrench ourselves away from our current trajectory. The potential, however, is that in leaping from this runaway train of constant growth and exploitation, we land somewhere much more abundant.

As adrienne maree brown says in Pleasure Activism:

Your no makes way for your yes.

Woven

2022-08-29T00:00:00Z

I learn more with each weaving I make.

This one is particular favourite of mine, made last month for H’s mum. It’s inspired by the colours and textures of the Welsh landscape: green hills, purple and red heather, mountains, lichen. I bought some roving from a local shop in Dolgellau – it’s incredibly soft, hand-dyed in purple, green and yellow. I also found some wool on our hike and added that in as clouds.

My first weaving, made for Lizzie and Paul in Melbourne using my new loom from Wunder Weave. I experimented with making shapes, adding rya knots and soumak weaving. Hung on a piece of driftwood found on Minjerribah.

A simpler composition for Nik and Grace in Melbourne. I played with blending similar colours and adding texture through different thicknesses.

A colourful one for Hannah’s birthday, using hand-dyed pastel wool from The Wool Kitchen in London. This was incredible to work with – the patterns of colourful specks gradually emerge in the process. I felt more confident about blending shapes with this one.

One for Piper and Sam. With this one I was playing with subtle colour changes again, as well as trying a narrower overall shape. I found the branch on Ilkley moor when we were there to visit them. Really loved the intertwined sections.

I used the same green thread for the weft as is throughout the warp. I really like how you can see coming through, particularly with the thicker wool.

I was a bit disappointed that it’s drawn in at the middle where I’ve only used really fine wool. It’s hard to know that this is happening when it’s on the loom, but I’m going to be more conscious of not pulling the thread too tight next time.

Next I want to experiment with making smaller weavings, like these. I also want to try one with much more texture, potentially by layering rya knots and loops.

Snippets

2022-09-17T00:00:00Z

Lisbon

My wonderful friend Linsey made us a guide to Lisbon, filled with natural wine spots and local, seasonal food. Particular favourites were Senhor Uva and Comida Independente. We also stumbled on Bar Boca one night, a tiny natural wine bar in Alfama that does vegan tapas.

One of the highlights was the Atelier-Museu Júlio Pomar. I love his work, so colourful and joyful. The exhibition we saw was all about how he explored narrative and classic mythology in his work.

I’ve been really enjoying Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s new album Reset. When we were in Lisbon I discovered that Panda Bear has been living there since 2004!

Water and its memory

At the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, I was pleasantly surprised by a map of the Brisbane River at the beginning of their Reclaim the Earth exhibition. It was part of a series of works by Judy Watson, an Indigenous Australian artist.

The works all centred around water and its memory, responding to both the history of the Seine and in Queensland. She sources artificial and organic materials to make natural dyes, then lets the pieces evolve in open air and on the ground.

Her creative process leaves room for the accidental and the random, and for the effects of time, environment, and natural material on her work in a context of deep climate change. The artist’s method evolves by working from site and memory, revealing Indigenous histories, following lines of emotional and physical topography.

Practicing

In Rotterdam, I visited my friend Ben at Extra Practice, a studio space he shares with four of his friends. It’s a wonderful converted shopfront on a corner, glass windows open to the world. Same energy as Evening Class, except it’s amazing how much further you can take it if you do it outside of London.

While I was there, we did a show for their radio station Good Times Bad Times. It was a lot of fun! They’ve just started a new “season” centred on refusal, which linked in really nicely with some of the themes I’ve been thinking about too.

We also visited Varia during their open hours. We were just planning to drop by briefly but ended up staying for many hours – they even cooked us lunch. Really enjoyed hearing about their projects, how they got started, what they’ve been thinking about.

Nightjet

So excited to see the new Nightjet trains from OBB. They look so cozy! I would be happy to never set foot on a plane again if I could just travel around on one of these.

Nature?

Love this quote from a recent Kim Stanley Robinson interview:

Nature and natural are words with particular weights that are perhaps not relevant now. We are part of a biosphere that sustains us. Half the DNA in your body is not human DNA, you are a biome like a swamp, with a particular balance or ecology that is hard to keep going – and indeed it will only go for a while after which it falls apart and you die. The world is your body, you breathe it, drink it, eat it, it lives inside you, and you only live and think because this community is doing well. So: nature? You are nature, nature is you. Natural is what happens. The word is useless as a divide, there is no Human apart from Nature, you have no thoughts or feelings without your body, and the Earth is your body, so please dispense with that dichotomy of human/nature, and attend to your own health, which is to say your biosphere’s health.

Walkaway

I just read Walkaway by Cory Doctorow and really liked it. It felt clunky in parts (often this kind of idealistic sci-fi does) but I enjoyed a lot of the themes: post-scarcity, anarchism, refusal of bullshit jobs, open source everything, mutual aid.

He wrote a short article in Wired about it: Disaster Doesn’t Have to End in Dystopia.

One of the phrases that has been rattling around in my head after reading it is “slicing time thick”:

Even after years of walkaway, she was used to slicing time into rice-paper slices thin enough for one discrete thing, before moving onto the next. Most of the time, she rushed to complete this current moment before the next thumped the door. Every adult she’d known matched that rhythm, the next thing almost upon them, the current one had best be taken care of in haste. Etcetera sliced his time thick.

It’s something I’ve been trying to focus on over the last few weeks. I’m thankfully on holidays now, but in the lead up to my break I was feeling so burnt out and overwhelmed. The more exhausted I got, the more I would scramble around rushing through tasks and not doing a good job of anything.

I’m trying to focus on moving very slowly, not planning too much, not expecting too much of myself. Easier to do on holidays, of course, but I want to find ways to bring this slowness with me once I go back to work.

The path to the Acropolis

2022-09-23T00:00:00Z

We were in Athens last week, so naturally we visited the Acropolis. What surprised me was that the pathway to the Acropolis is a masterpiece in its own right. (Thanks to my dad for sharing this.)

Designed in the mid-50s by Dimitris Pikionis, it’s a collage of historical references, regionalism and modernism. They build it with reclaimed stones from demolished buildings nearby, celebrating their imperfections and making a direction connection to the local history.

Throughout the path, there are bold, gestural forms made from concrete, inspired by the artwork of Paul Klee. By choosing a modernist material like concrete, Pikionis created a dialogue with the International Style of architecture that was spreading throughout Athens at the time.

What I loved most was that he worked with local craftsmen and let the design emerge from the bottom up:

Pikionis enlisted a crew of skilled local Greek artisans and craftsmen to work the stones and materials. At the outset of the construction, Pikionis eschewed typical dogmatic plans and chose to set the tone for the design through few drawings. He encouraged the local workers to the find the path within the landscape and imbue the materials with their own particular spirit and design through shapes, textures, and patterns. Pikionis was employing the traditional method of the master builder, constructing the site through the hands of the craftsmen and generating a pluralistic design.

Alive in the sunshine

2022-09-24T00:00:00Z

I recently read Our Shared Storm by Andrew Dana Hudson, a speculative fiction novel based on each of the five climate-modelling scenarios in the latest IPCC report. It’s got me ~~thinking~~ obsessing a little about solarpunk!

Solarpunk is an optimistic vision of the future where we’re in dynamic balance with environmental systems. It’s polyphonic, abundant, collective, anti-capitalist and decolonial. What I like about it is that it’s not just an aesthetic or genre or utopian vision for the future, it’s something you can do and be in the present. In Jay Springett’s words:

Solarpunk as a movement is building new futures in the minds of individuals but also creating and inspiring communities to DIY their own better futures into existence from the bottom up.

Solarpunk fiction

I think most of the science fiction I read these days could be defined as solarpunk. This list of solarpunk canon by Paul Fletcher Hill reads like a list of my favourite books:

The Earthseed series (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler
The Mars trilogy (especially Green Mars) by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside
by Xiaowei Wang
The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin
How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm
Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

(I’d add Station Eleven and Half Earth Socialism as well.)

Solarpunk societies

In Our Greatest Political Novelist, Tim Kreider outlines Kim Stanley Robinson’s usual ingredients for his [solarpunk] utopias:

He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias.

Most of these utopias include:

common stewardship—not ownership—of the land, water, and air
an economic system based on ecological reality
divesting central governments of most of their power and diffusing it among local communities
the basics of existence, like health care, removed from the cruelties of the free market
the application of democratic principles like self-determination and equality in the workplace—which, in practice, means small co-ops instead of vast, hierarchical, exploitative corporations—and,
a reverence for the natural world codified into law.

While in Berlin earlier this year I saw Adam Greenfield’s lecture at the Weizenbaum Conference. I missed the first bit of it, which apparently was very doomy, but made it for the second half where he talked through his vision for the future, which I would argue is a solarpunk one:

Local community infrastructure, made/adapted/reused from available materials
Short supply chains
Independence from the grid
Lightweight, convivial technologies
Local knowledge of how to build and maintain systems
An ethos of maintenance, repair and mutual care

Solarpunk now!

A few places I’ve visited this year that have tangibly felt solarpunk:

The Future Food System house in Melbourne

A self sustaining, zero waste, productive house that demonstrates the potential of our homes to provide shelter, produce food and generate energy.

The Floating University in Berlin

A series of DIY structures floating in a rainwater retention basin next to the former Tempelhof airfield.

An inner city laboratory for collective, experimental learning, knowledge transfer and the formation of trans-disciplinary networks to challenge routines and habits of urban practices.

documenta 15

This year’s documenta was directed by a collective from Indonesia called ruangrupa and centred around the values of lumbung.

lumbung, which directly translates as “rice barn”, refers to a communal building in rural Indonesia where a community’s harvest is gathered, stored and distributed according to jointly determined criteria as a pooled resource for the future.

The lumbung practice enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution. lumbung is anchored in the local and based on values such as humor, generosity, independence, transparency, sufficiency, and regeneration.

Four Thousand Weeks

2022-10-09T00:00:00Z

Four Thousand Weeks – that’s the amount of time you get if you live to 80. Not only does it feel like an impossibly small amount of time, it also speeds up the older you get.

I really enjoyed this book by Oliver Burkeman. It’s less of a self-help book, more of a meditation on time and our relationship to it. It reminded me a bit of another all-time favourite of mine, How To Do Nothing.

Most productivity frameworks are about trying to control your time and squeeze more activity into your finite day. You end up spending all your time “clearing the decks” of urgent but unimportant tasks, and never actually get around to the really important stuff. Day-to-day life becomes an endless to-do list that we have to get through efficiently on the pathway to a point where our real life can begin.

Burkeman suggests there is always going to be too much to do and there will never be enough time. We shouldn’t try to be more productive, but instead embrace our finitude and accept that there’s a whole lot of stuff that we’re just never going to do.

The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control… The more you confront the facts of finitude instead — and work with them, rather than against them — the more productive, meaningful and joyful life becomes.

This necessarily requires some sacrifice. It’s not just about saying “no” to the things you didn’t really want to do anyway – it’s also about giving up some things that you really want to do.

There are hard choices to be made: which balls to let drop, which people to disappoint, which cherished ambitions to abandon, which roles to fail at.

Instead of clearing the decks, declining to clear the decks, focusing instead on what’s truly of greatest consequence while tolerating the discomfort of knowing that, as you do so, the decks will be filling up further, with emails and errands and or to-dos, many of which you may never get round to at all.

The key is not more productivity but conscious choices and acceptance – the joy of missing out. We have to accept that this is a sacrifice, that we will feel discomfort, that the to do list will always be infinite…

The core challenge of managing our limited time isn’t about how to get everything done but how to decide most wisely what not to do, and how to feel at peace about not doing it.

Personally, I feel like I’m always living in the future: either anxiously worrying about what’s going to happen or excitedly/impatiently imagining various future scenarios in great detail. I really agree with Burkeman’s arguments about letting go of our obsession with the future and paying attention to the current moment, but in practice it’s obviously much harder.

You can’t know that things will turn out all right. The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one, which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.

One bit that really resonated with me was the part about time as a “network good”: our time is only valuable when it’s in sync with the people we care about. This necessarily means relinquishing control over our own time, in order to fall into step with others. Digital nomadism (I hate that term) optimises for extreme personal sovereignty over time, at the expense of being connected to others – which is ultimately what makes life meaningful.

To be deeply rooted in a particular community or place, you have to stop moving around. These kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments just take the time that they take.

The book gets more practical in the appendix, which summarises the main points and suggests some actual things you can do day-to-day, like:

Much advice of getting things done implicitly promises that it’ll help you get everything important done — but that’s impossible, and struggling to get there will only make you busier. It’s better to begin from the assumption that tough choices are inevitable and to focus on making them consciously and well.
Establish predetermined time boundaries for your daily work.
Focus on one big project at a time, and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitons by getting stated on them all at once, but you’ll make little progress that way; instead, train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating the anxiety.
Strategic underachievement: nominating in advance whole areas of your life in which you won’t expect excellence of yourself.
Pay more attention to every moment, however mundane: to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.
Not knowing what’s coming next — which is the situation you’re always in, with regards to the future— presents an ideal opportunity for choosing curiosity (wondering what might happen next) over worry (hoping that a specific thing will happen next and fearing it might not) wherever you can.

Long live RSS

2022-10-09T00:00:00Z

I’ve had quite stringent settings on my phone for a long time: no badges, barely any notifications, screen time restrictions on social media and downtime in the evening. Despite all this, I still spend around 90–120 minutes on my phone every day. Like most of us, I default to picking up my phone and doom-scrolling every time there is minute or two of empty time.

I had a bit of a forced digital detox while we were in Greece: my roaming data ran out so I had a few weeks where I could only access the internet on wifi. I decided to make the most of it, partially inspired by Four Thousand Weeks, and deleted Twitter and Instagram from my phone. I still reached for my phone in every spare moment but it was a lot more boring.

I decided that I should start using RSS again to keep up with blogs and people and news instead. I’m using Feedly as an RSS reader and Pocket to save articles to read later. My Pocket articles go directly to my Kobo, which I love, but unfortunately it doesn’t let me highlight the text. I’ve also moved a lot of my Substacks to RSS now in an attempt to have less in my inbox as well. It seems like it’s not possible to do this with Tiny Letter though.

Here’s a few blogs and newsletters that I really love:

Harper’s Magazine publishes a Weekly Review that reflects the chaos of our current reality and always makes me laugh out loud.
The Baffler has a similar dispatch called Fresh Hell.
Claire L. Evan’s Wild Information. Her most recent post, Intimate Geographies, is sublime.
Patrick Tanguay’s Sentiers. I think this is the best newsletter out there… I usually save almost every one of the articles he shares to read later.
Alicia Kennedy writes weekly essays on (vegan) food, politics and culture.
David O’Reilly writes about digital technology and creative practice. It’s an honest and insightful look at what it means to be creative.
Gnamma by Lukas W is poetic and watery and so well-written.
Adam Greenfield writes occasional dispatches about politics and mutual aid.
Naive Weekly seems sweet and peaceful (via Piper).
Tom Critchlow’s blog on strategic consultancy
Dark Matter Lab’s Provocations on strategic design, governance, urbanism and complex systems.
The White Pube for art criticism, culture and game reviews.
Branch, an online magazine about using the internet as a positive force for climate justice.
Climate in Colour, on the intersection of climate science, diversity and sustainable living.
We Can Fix It, on facing climate change with a mix of fact, feelings and action.

By the way — my own RSS feed is available here.

Milos

2022-10-20T00:00:00Z

Mushroom season

2022-10-29T00:00:00Z

October is mushroom season! Last Saturday was particularly bright and sunny after a few days of rain, which is perfect for mushrooms. We went to Hampstead Heath with a few friends who forage mushrooms regularly.

We were lucky and found so many different varieties including honey fungus, black-staining polypores, laughing gym, curry-scented milkcap, fruity brittlegill, porcelain fungus, shaggy scalycap and the iconic fly agaric. Most of these were either inedible or poisonous, so we left them alone after identifying them. Some, like the honey fungus, are edible but we didn’t pick them because we found so many other “choice” mushrooms.

The tastiest find of the day was this hen of the woods. We also found some charcoal burners, parasols, cauliflower fungus and red cracked bolete, which we cooked and ate the next day (after extensive rounds of verification and double-checking.)

I enjoy the process of finding mushrooms in itself, even if we didn’t eat them afterwards. It’s all about paying careful attention. It requires a different way of looking: soft, out of the corners of your eyes. There are certain trees, like beech and oak, where they’re more likely to grow around. Once you learn how to see them, it’s like unlocking a hidden visual layer on the world. Suddenly, there are mushrooms everywhere.

To identify the species, you need to pay even closer attention, examining the mushroom’s structure, shape, texture, gills and smell. I’m following Emergence Magazine’s Writing From the Roots course at the moment and identifying mushrooms reminds me of some of the writing exercises we’ve done: gradually zooming in on something and describing it in closer and closer detail each time.

It takes loads of practice to safely forage mushrooms and I’m not sure we would have eaten any without the guidance of our friends. They recommended two apps for identifying mushrooms: Picture Mushroom and Shroomify. I’ve heard that Mushrooming with Confidence is a really useful identification guide that only includes mushrooms that aren’t easy to mix up with a poisonous doppelgänger. There are also good videos online by Wild Food UK.

🍄

The Forest Multiple

2022-11-07T00:00:00Z

The Smart Forests Atlas is a living archive and virtual field site exploring how digital technologies are transforming forests. It provides tools for researchers and other stakeholders to explore, analyse and reflect upon smart forest knowledges and technologies. The Atlas is designed to allow for multiple entrypoints into the research content. Visitors are encouraged to wander through the site according to their own interests, guided by the four wayfinding devices (Map, Radio, Stories and Logbooks).

Alex and I had the pleasure of going to Cambridge to launch the Smart Forests Atlas at The Forest Multiple in October. We’ve been working on the Smart Forests Atlas for a good part of last year, so it was great to publicly launch it.

All of the other speakers were incredibly interesting, exploring topics like the complexity and limitations of carbon sequestering and the politics of sensing and monitoring. Some of the highlights included Lydia Gibson, Jenny Goldstein and Tone Walford. I really loved Andrea Botero Cabrera’s playful more-than-human derivé project which I felt brought everything back down to earth.

Many of our projects are centred around building tools that encourage localised political action. A lot of the time, this involves an element of mapping. In our experience, maps tend to be a powerful way of situating people, helping them find others in similar situations and, ultimately, giving them more agency.

We started working on the Smart Forests Atlas in early 2021, after working with Jennifer Gabrys / Planetary Praxis on the Airsift platform in 2020. What we liked about the Atlas was that it questioned and complicated the practice of mapping, particularly its colonial roots. When the Smart Forests team briefed us, they made sure to stress that they weren’t trying to present a neutral, top-down view of the world, but an entangled, situated, plural, participatory one – a “prismatic collection of mappings” to borrow Shannon Mattern’s words:

Ideally, we should balance or juxtapose different modes of knowledge and production: Western scientific and indigenous epistemologies, human and other-species ontologies, mechanical and organic means of experiencing and representing place, cartographic rationalism and empiricism, projection and retrospection. No single über-map can encompass all such subjectivities and sensibilities. Instead, we can aim for an atlas, a prismatic collection of mappings, that invites comparison and appreciation of the ways in which our world is both known and unknown.

The process of working on the Atlas stretched our thinking around designing digital experiences. Software development tends towards binary thinking and absolute truths, simplifying complex information so it can fit into a structured database or a set of user personas. In this project, we were asked to do the opposite of this: exploring multiplicity, complexity and more-than-human contributors.

I was frequently reminded of the Smart Forests Atlas while reading James Bridle’s wonderful new book Ways of Being. In the book, they suggest that “our machines should be non-binary, decentralized and unknowing”:

Unknowing, means acknowledging the limitations of what we can know at all, and treating with respect those aspects of the world which are beyond our ken, rather than seeking to ignore or erase them. To exist in a state of unknowing is not to give in to helplessness. Rather, it demands a kind of trust in ourselves and in the world to be able to function in a complex, ever-shifting landscape over which we do not, and cannot, have control.

This project was an opportunity to really explore this idea in practice. It was a fascinating and, at times, challenging, project to work on. (I think at one point we wrote user stories for a tree.) I’m really grateful to have had the opportunity to think about these questions so deeply.

Process

We started working on the design of the Atlas in parallel with the team developing the concept and starting their initial research. We began with a workshop with us and the Smart Forests team, where we explored their ideas around what the Atlas could be.

Our goal with the design was to strike a balance between usability and experimentation. We wanted to the Atlas to challenge conventional expectations about what a digital experience could be, but we also wanted to make sure that people could find their way around the site and access the content. We wanted the site to have its own voice, but without overpowering the contributors’ content and the diverse forms that this might take.

We started by mapping out the site, content taxonomy and modules. We went through several iterations of the design, moving from low fidelity wireframes to high fidelity visual designs. We met with the Smart Forests team a number of times to feedback on the designs and shape the direction of Atlas.

▲ An early sketch exploring how to offer clear navigational cues (at the top) and weave the main content with related multimedia.

The Atlas needed to be be flexible and accommodate a whole range of content, languages and contributors, weaving together local perspectives with external datasets and sensors. We chose to build open existing tools and data sources rather than building everything ourselves. This was partially a pragmatic decision and partially a way of connecting into existing digital ecosystems.

The digital (forest) garden

One key requirement was that the website needed to be able to evolve over time. This led us to the idea of digital gardens: websites that are exploratory, bottom-up, contextual and constantly evolving.

▲ Illustration by Maggie Appleton

Digital gardens require maintenance and invite participation: website as process rather than finished product. A digital garden is a constant work in progress, where the associations between different blocks of content matter more than when they were posted. Unlike a blog, which might be structured according to a strict content taxonomy or ordered chronologically, a digital garden is freeform and emergent.

Visitors are invited to explore the content and go on tangents according to their own interests. It’s expected for a digital garden to grow and change over time, with new information or perspectives added as the research process continues.

▲ Some early visual language sketches. I was looking for ways to visually show plurality – through always using multiple photos to communicate an idea, using a wide range of greens in the colour palette, using pixelated or blurred imagery and reversing expectations around foreground and background with the map.

The Atlas is designed so that there are multiple entrypoints into the content. Visitors are encouraged to wander through the site according to their own interests, guided by the four wayfinding devices (Map, Radio, Stories, Logbooks).

The design of each wayfinding device is visually differentiated through icons, typography and content structure, while remaining densely interconnected through the tagging system.

Logbooks are intended to be a digital working space where people can collect up rough ideas as they develop over time. We designed this so that individual logbook entries could themselves be tagged and thus connected on a more granular level to other parts of the site.

These are collected together and linked with each other, eventually feeding in to the Stories, which are more polished and in-depth.

The Map is designed to situate the Atlas’ content geographically – it reappears on the metadata column of Logbook and Stories pages.

The Radio is an ever present feature that can play while you browse the rest of the site.

Tagging system

The tag cloud, which features on the homepage and at the bottom of each Logbook and Story, is one of the core ways that people navigate the site. Clicking one of the tags here will open a side panel that surfaces related content within all four wayfinding devices, as well as the contributors who have used that tag.

The tag cloud represents the Atlas in a visual and abstract way. It allows people to explore content intuitively rather than via a direct search, making space for emergent themes and unexpected connections. We chose tags as the means of relating content within the Atlas rather than a strict taxonomy of metadata. We wanted to remove any hierarchy between types of tags, allowing the content taxonomy to emerge from the bottom-up.

The technique we use to visualise the tags draws on graph theory and in particularly Eigenvector centrality. It surfaces the tags that are most frequently used and connected to other tags. In particular, it visualises the relationships between the pieces of content, even the unintentional ones.

Eigenvector centrality is most famously deployed in Google’s PageRank algorithm. The difference between this and something like PageRank is that PageRank is concerned with ranking pages on the basis of how many other pages link to them. Here we are ranking tags based on how other tags link to them.

When someone creates a new page that has tags, we perform a search of the page that it is linked to. We then look at the tags on the pages in that search, up to a fixed number of pages. This constructs a list of related tags.

For the related tags at the bottom of each page, we rank the list of related topics according to that degree of connectedness within the collection of topics that are related to that page. That is: how many times these particular topics are linked to each other throughout the site.

Initial versions of the homepage map were too visually dense to be useful or attractive. It wasn’t particularly useful, or even possible, to view the whole network of tags at once. So we limited the cloud to 30 tags, which we then randomise. This adds an elements of serendipity to the site – it’s different every time you visit. I also liked how this linked in to Shannon Mattern’s ideas at the beginning of this post: it’s not possible to view or understand the entire system from the top-down – you can only get snapshots from a particular viewpoint.

Contributions

One of the important design considerations was how to invite participation from a range of contributors. We chose a CMS called Wagtail for its robust editor experience and granular editorial pipeline permissions. We wrote guidelines on how to the use the CMS, which is published on the wiki of Smart Forest’s public GitHub repository. From the outset, we set up localisation so that people would be able to post in their own languages in future. We also set up a public API of the website content to enable people to use and appropriate the research themselves.

In many ways, we’re just getting started with the Smart Forests Atlas. A website is never finished, even more so if it’s a digital garden. The team has added a lot content over the last few months and are onboarding more contributors now. We’re about to start a new phase of work, where we smooth over some of the rough edges and make improvements to the site as it is. Then we’ll work on some new features and improvements to how content is curated throughout.

A continuous and never ending process

2022-11-12T00:00:00Z

I read three of Emily St John Mandel’s books in quick succession last month: Sea of Tranquility, The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven. Her work often involves parallel universes and time travel, but it’s subtle and bit different to a lot of the science fiction I read. More like narrative where the boundaries between moments in time feel shimmering and fragile.

One of the interesting things about her work is that, although the books aren’t a series, the same characters appear throughout. The main character of one book might be a background character of the next. Sometimes they’ll be more or less the same, other times their storylines will be slightly altered. It really adds depth to her suggestions about the nature of time.

Pandemics and the end of the world are a common theme, but it’s much less bleak than it sounds. There’s something hopeful about it too — an acceptance of living in post-apocalyptic times, a realisation that there is still beauty after the end of the world.

My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

▲ The Structured Tails of Comet NEOWISE by Zixuan Lin, from Nasa’s Astronomy Picture of the Day

It was interesting to read Station Eleven the novel after loving the miniseries so much. It was enjoyable to compare Mandel’s original text with Patrick Somerville’s interpretation. Both were incredible in their own way, but also so different. There’s a great (spoiler-ridden) New Yorker article about this: In Station Eleven, all art is adaptation.

HBO’s Station Eleven is obsessed with adaptation, the way that people (many of them actors) reuse and project upon a source. It’s awash in references: Christmas carols, the funk band Parliament, Bob Dylan, King Lear and Hamlet. There’s also the most transcendent cover of rap music that I’ve ever seen on TV, a set piece that somehow crystallizes a character, a situation, and the human situation, all at once. Most of the art featured on the series doesn’t exist in its original form. It comes filtered through individuals, who carry and change it in time—shaping, recontextualizing, extracting what they need. One feels as though Somerville were triangulating between the texts and his characters to locate some mysterious quality that hovers in the middle. When Kirsten, Jeevan, and Frank stage Station Eleven, for example, the play works because the actors and the dynamics among them are so real. Yet the players grow more alive in the performance; their actual dynamics are heightened by it.

Speaking of interpretations and adaptations, we watched the 2007 film I’m Not There last night, which was “inspired by the many lives of Bob Dylan”. There are six characters played by different actors (including a transcendent Cate Blanchett) in separate and nonlinear storylines. Each represents a different facet of Dylan’s persona and life.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself. I mean, I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me.

Bits and pieces

2022-11-12T00:00:00Z

I’ve been enjoying listening to Overthink, a podcast about philosophy. Really engaging and accessible. One of the hosts, Ellie Anderson, is an expert in feminist approaches to love and sexual consent, particularly the work of Simone de Beauvoir. I really want to read some of Beauvoir’s journals now.

Wonderful conversation between Elvia Wilk and Claire L Evans on Pioneer Works.

I’m always extremely suspicious, for that reason, of any technology marketed using even remotely utopian language—specifically claims that some new sphere or realm is going to be a fresh start or an unspoiled new beginning. That signals to me immediately that the people who are involved in building the thing have no interest in maintenance.

One of my posts got a mention in a Space10 article Where Ideas Come From, thanks to Linsey. In very good company alongside favourites like Brian Eno, The Bloomsbury Group and Donna Haraway. I didn’t realise that this quote originated from indigenous activists in 1970’s Queensland / Lilla Watson:

If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.

Great episode by Maria Somerville on the NTS Early Bird Show. This week she was joined by Róisín Berkeley, who also lives on the west coast of Ireland and has a similarly soothing accent.

Via Right to Roam on Twitter (RIP) I learned that our continued access to Epping Forest was made possible thanks to people protesting its enclosure in the 19th century.

I don’t pay enough attention to interesting websites anymore, but this one for Nosaj Thing by Eric Hu and Bureau Cool really stood out thanks to a combination of Eric’s distinctive typography / art direction and the fact that all the images are generated by Stable Diffusion.

Some highlights from recent books

Our Shared Storm:

Life did not have to be lived in the shadow of onrushing doom, or with a sense of guilt at the damage one did by simply existing, or consumed by anger at the sins of a greedy, foolish past. There were so many ways to live, so many scenarios of human being to explore.

New imaginaries were possible, small things could be part of big plans…

Half Earth Socialism:

The task of unbuilding makes clear that environmentalism isn’t so much the idealisation of ‘pristine’ nature (though it is vital to protect intact ecosystems) but the recognition that it is still possible to repair our broken world.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous:

Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we’ve come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

Walkaway:

I’m suspicious of any plan to fix unfairness that starts with “step one, dismantle the entire system and replace it with a better one”, especially if you can’t do anything else until step one is done. Of all the ways that people kid themselves into doing nothing, that one is the most self-serving.

You got the world you hoped for or the world you feared — your hope or fear made it.

The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with people who love them too.

Hello better world

2022-11-15T00:00:00Z

I’m @gem@social.coop on Mastodon.

I like it much more than Twitter already! I had gotten to a point where I barely posted anything on Twitter because it was too noisy and overwhelming, and reading the feed mainly made me feel depressed about the world. There sure were some good memes though.

I found a tool called Debirdify that helps you find your Twitter friends on Mastodon.

This article from Wired — How to Get Started on Mastodon — is a really useful introduction.

Strong agree with what Robin Sloan wrote about Twitter ending back in April:

There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum; that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.

Also Jay Springett’s 10 tips for leaving Twitter.

On routines

2022-11-19T00:00:00Z

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my routine. I’ve been trying to introduce a bit more structure into my work day… not as an attempt to be more productive, more so that I create stronger boundaries between work and the rest of the work. I can sometimes start working at 8am, forget to finish early and then feel totally wrung out by the evening. This isn’t how I want to work at all, because I really believe the research that says working longer hours doesn’t mean you’ll get more done. But with remote work, it can be so easy to slip into working longer and longer hours.

I found Overthink’s episode about Productivity really interesting. I like their suggestions at the end: aim for creativity over productivity, focus on the process not the product, and move more slowly and sustainably.

▲ Ursula Le Guin’s daily routine

I also really liked this advice from the Doist blog that suggests you should “pay yourself first” each morning. Instead of waking up and diving straight into work (or social media), it’s about setting aside the first hour or so of the day for yourself. This is time to do the important-but-not-urgent things that contribute to your own wellbeing or creative practice, rather than try to squeeze them in around your professional work.

Lately I’ve been writing morning pages… not quite every day yet but I’m getting there. This is one of those practices that is so simple but incredibly effective.

Morning Pages are three pages of longhand, stream of consciousness writing, done first thing in the morning. There is no wrong way to do Morning Pages — they are not high art. They are not even “writing.” They are about anything and everything that crosses your mind– and they are for your eyes only. Morning Pages provoke, clarify, comfort, cajole, prioritize and synchronize the day at hand. Do not over-think Morning Pages: just put three pages of anything on the page… and then do three more pages tomorrow.

I’ve found it really useful to have a “shutdown ritual” in the evening, which helps in creating that work-life separation. I like to exercise straight after work as well, to clear out my brain and re-situate myself in my body.

Centre for Alternative Technology

2022-11-20T00:00:00Z

Wales is absolutely beautiful at the moment (and always). The autumn leaves and soft sunlight turn the whole landscape golden and warm.

We visited the Centre for Alternative Technology last weekend. It’s an amazing place, built on top of a mountain of waste slate from a nearby disused quarry. The Centre was started by a group of people who moved there in the mid-70s. Their goal was to provide a space where people could test things out and learn how to live more lightly on the earth.

It has examples of different renewable energy technologies, a collection of buildings demonstrating innovative architectural/construction techniques and a few different gardens. It’s all completely off grid, including running its own water and sewage systems.

It was so inspiring to spend time somewhere like this. You can feel how many different people will have contributed towards building the centre and its vision over the years. It really gave us the sense that most of the ideas we need to transition to a zero carbon economy are already there, tried and tested…

Less like an object and more like the weather

2022-12-04T00:00:00Z

It’s so nice to be in north Wales as the seasons change. The beech trees still have the most amazing orange-yellow-red leaves, but now there’s snow at the top of Cadair Idris. It’s wild to think that just three months ago we camped on top of it. There’s a legend that says anyone who sleeps on Cadair Idris’ summit will wake up as either a madman or poet. Three months on and I’m still no better at poetry so…

I’ve been trying to get better at identifying fungi, trees and birds while we’re here. I saw a bright yellow bird the other day which I think is a siskin. There are so many robins around too — I love listening to them sing. I found a database full of recordings of British birds.

I’m also thinking about water a lot, it’s so incredibly wet here. On the weekends when we go hiking the ground is completely saturated and boggy. The Afon (River) Wnion was the highest I’ve ever seen it a few weeks ago.

Really enjoyed this article What does water want? Most humans seem to have forgotten:

Slow Water mimics or collaborates with natural systems, restoring space for water to slow on land in wetlands, floodplains, mountain meadows, forests, tidal marshes, and mangroves. Slow Water is distributed, not centralised: think of the wet zones scattered throughout a wild watershed instead of a big dam and reservoir. It is also socially just: Slow Water doesn’t take water from some people to give to others, or protect some communities while pushing floods on to another. Slow Water gives communities agency to restore resilience to their local landscapes and revive local cultures. And in taking a systems-oriented approach, it simultaneously supports local water availability, flood control, natural carbon storage, and other-than-human life.

▲A meander map of the Mississipi river by Harold Fisk, 1944

Just west of here the river feeds into the Afon Mawwdach and enters a huge estuary that feeds into the ocean. Fairbourne, a town at the end of the estuary, is the first place in the UK that the government has announced it won’t defend from sea level rise so it’s due to be abandoned by 2054…

c,o,n,t,i,n,u,o,u,s and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d

In Are you the same person you used to be?, they suggest that some people divide their lives up into discrete chapters, constantly reinventing themselves, and others see their lives or identities as one continuous narrative.

I can’t decide which category I belong to. I mostly divide my memories depending on which city I lived in at the time, but I can also see the broader patterns that continue through all my experiences and interests. I guess it’s both.

The article describes research conducted in Dunedin where they studied over a thousand children from the age of three, meeting with them every two years until they were forty-five. They categorised the kids according to their temperaments and watched how they developed over time. How much of our identity is innate and how much is the product of our environment?

Human beings, they suggest, are like storm systems. Each individual storm has its own particular set of traits and dynamics; meanwhile, its future depends on numerous elements of atmosphere and landscape.

▲ An image from open-weather, capturing transmissions from a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite

They suggest that although there are some patterns and cycles that are evident from an early age, one way that people can break out of their patterns is through close relationships with others. It reminded me of a bit in The Mushroom at the End of the World, where Anna Tsing talks about indeterminacy:

Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal”, meaning they die from disease, injury or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits – and when we do we stray into magic. Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form is not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminacy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter.

Building alternatives

Really good article on Noema by one of the co-founders of my instance Social.coop: Mastodon Isn’t Just A Replacement For Twitter. I was reflecting on the Twitter exodus to Mastodon the other day… It feels to me like a really great example of how important it is to be building these alternatives in parallel to the mainstream.

Acts of smashing, while vital for disruption, do not create the kind of resilient, large-scale, long-term bodies needed to replace dominant powers. As we have seen, the direction our world takes in moments of chaos will be defined by the ideas and institutions that are already available. If we want a world of workplaces owned and run cooperatively, of political decision-making power in local community hands, we stand a much better chance if this is already being built in time for social shocks.
— Graham Jones, The Shock Doctrine of the Left

It is so important to be optimistically building, testing, iterating on these institutions alongside the present day, rather than waiting for some perfect utopia to arrive in which we can start building.

It’s just so easy

Speaking of which, I find it so hilarious that in Victoria 3, a political simulation game, it turns out that communism is the most economically efficient government system:

Capitalist playstyles, they suggest, are too inefficient. The bosses at the top of Victoria 3 capitalist societies get high pay, while workers get very low pay. But in a Victoria 3 communist economy, worker cooperatives ensure that all capitalist wealth is turned over to the workers. As a result, their high purchasing power allows them to spend more money in the economy, which increases economic demand. This leads to higher living standards, which attracts more immigration, another big boost. “It’s just so easy,” the player concludes.

Bits and pieces

So inspired by Jeff VanderMeer’s experience of rewilding his property in Florida.
Lots of really useful tips on writing image descriptions here. I also didn’t realise that hashtags should be written in camel case so that screen readers can read each word separately!
Found a new Substack series on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed.
It is really relaxing to watch this livestream of waterhole in Namibia. So many critters! (via Matt Webb)
Great interview with Mindy Seu about her Cyberfeminism Index. I love the idea of YACK / HACK: “YACK is discourse whereas HACK is practice.”
I’ve been using a hot water bottle to keep warm here because my desk is in the attic below a skylight — extremely cold. Kind of hilarious to see photos of early hot water bottles in this piece from Low Tech Magazine… they look so uncomfortable.
Love to see some pleasure activism in action: Repair Together are hosting repair raves to help clean up areas of Ukraine.

Reflections on 2022

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

This year has been a bit of a weird one because How and I still don’t have a permanent home. We spent the first three months with friends and family in Australia, three months living with friends in Camberwell, six weeks subletting a friends’ place in Hackney, six weeks of visiting friends and holidaying in Europe (Portugal, France, The Netherlands, Germany and Greece), some time at H’s parents place and a few months living in Wales.

Reflections on the first half of the year
Snippets from our late summer travels
Photos from Milos in Greece
Mushroom picking in late October
Visiting the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales

▴ Camberwell Beauty

▴ Glengall Wharf Gardens in Camberwell

▴ Visiting Leila & Stu and their boat Dirty Penny in Oxford

▴ The view from Luke & Reba’s place in Paris

This year we did a few more multiday hikes and I hope next year we’ll do many more. I find hiking to be so meditative. I love walking through different landscapes, being completely connected to my body, seeing the stars, waking up again in the middle of it.

▴ Hiking near Coed y Brenin

▴ Camping next to Llyn Du

▴ Swimming in Llyn y Gader

More photos of camping in Wales

We also did a lot of camping with friends as it seemed to be everyone’s birthday celebration of choice this year. So much fun. I never did it much as a kid so it’s a bit unfamiliar to me but I’ve found I really love it.

I’ve really enjoying doing more weaving this year — I’ve made a few of them as gifts for friends and family.

Another big change was beginning therapy. I’ve been finding it transformative to have regular sessions. It’s helped me to reflect on big patterns in my life, pay attention to my body and learn frameworks for dealing with future situations, having difficult conversations and giving clean feedback.

▴ Driving along the coast in north Wales

Books

I read 40 books this year! The ones I enjoyed most were:

Ways of Being by James Bridle, which explores more-than-human intelligence through the lens of both technology and ecology.
Death by Landscape, Elvia Wilk’s collection of fan nonfiction essays on feminist sci-fi, solarpunk, larping, compost and ambiguous utopias.
The Actual Star by Monica Byrne, an epic sci-fi that jumps from an ancient Mayan civilisation to the present day to a far future post-apocalyptic utopia.
The Living Autobiography series by Deborah Levy.

I’ve also loved reading books together with Paprika, Benjamin, How and others in Rererererereading Group.

Work

To be honest, this was a tough year for Common Knowledge at times. Although we’ve had plenty of interesting and important work on, our finances at points over the year have been rocky. This has been due to a whole range of factors, some of which were out of our control and some which were just lessons we needed to learn the hard way.

Nevertheless, we’re ending it in a much healthier place than where we started and we’ve learned loads. I feel really optimistic about 2023 for us. We’ve made a lot of changes in how we run that I feel will protect us from future risk. In the meantime, if you think our work is important and want to support it, we have an Open Collective for donations.

Despite this turbulence, I think we’ve done some great work. The type of work we’re doing is evolving slightly. We did some much bigger projects (digital transformation projects rather than campaign websites) and more consultancy/coaching work (rather than delivery). I think both of these are a move in the right direction. The downside is that there’s a lot less to show for it at the end of the year, but I think that’s fine.

The good thing about these bigger projects is that we got to do more extensive research and discovery phases, which I deeply enjoyed. (Shout out to Dovetail for being the best research tool out there.) I feel like I learned a lot about interviewing people and I got over some of my insecurities around this. In particular, Will Myddelton’s framework for running discoveries provided us with a lot of useful guidance.

The biggest project we did was a complete redesign and replatform for Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, an international organisation focused on humanitarian action and community-led development through participatory mapping and open data. This was a huge undertaking but we all learned a lot and I’m proud of the result. HOT are still working on the content at the moment but hopefully the new site should be launching early next year.

I really enjoyed working with The Architecture Lobby. I interviewed a bunch of their organisers in the US, which was an interesting look at a different political landscape. We made recommendations for gradually streamlining their entire digital infrastructure alongside redesigning their website, which should also launch next year.

I coached participants of the UnFound Accelerator again this year, which is a program that helps founders turn their ideas into platform co-ops. I also got to (remotely) have a really interesting discussion with John Caserta and the Design & Politics students at Rhode Island School of Design. It was really nice to go back to doing some IRL talks/conversations this year too: at the Weizenbaum Conference in Berlin, with Good Times Bad Times in Rotterdam and at The Forest Multiple symposium in Cambridge.

Transcript of our talk about the Smart Forests Atlas
Some thoughts on Future Natures and commoning

We also had some internal changes within the team: we hired Anna T to help us manage our projects and the co-op in general, and Jamie joined us for a year-long placement from Kingston College of Art. We also did a lot more work with our associate members Everin and John. It’s so nice to have more people join the co-op and I really hope this continues next year. As ever, I feel so grateful that I get to do what I love with people who love it too.

Looking forward

Although it’s been wonderful to freely move around this year and see people that we haven’t seen in years, How and I are at the point where we really need to put down some roots and stay still for a while.

It’s taken quite a while to decide where we should live. I kept getting into endless cycles of rumination and indecision: weighing up options, worrying if they’re the right one.

One of the things that I’ve learned this year is that at a certain point, any decision is the right one. We just have to try it out and see. If we don’t like it, we can change our minds. It’s funny because this is one of the principles of sociocracy that is so foundational to our work at Common Knowledge: “is it good enough for now and safe enough to try?”

You can only ever choose to take the next most elegant step. The best decisions I’ve ever made have been full of uncertainty at the time: choosing to quit my job in Brisbane and spend six months in Europe (which has now become 10+ years); moving to London which led to getting involved with Evening Class and then Common Knowledge.

Anyway, what we’ve decided is to move to Lisbon early next year. If all goes well and it feels like a good fit, we’ll hopefully look for somewhere just outside one of the cities and start on our housing co-op dream. We’re inspired by people who are doing this already like re:gen, Casa Beatrix and Project Kamp in Portugal, as well as collectives like Robida and Brave New Alps in Italy. Who knows where this step will lead, but I’m very much looking forward to 2023.

▲ Lisbon in late summer

Previous years

2021 in review (on the Common Knowledge blog)
2020 in review

Everything is deeply intertwingled

2023-01-03T00:00:00Z

The structures of ideas are not sequential. They tie together every whichway. And when we write, we are always trying to tie things together in non-sequential ways. The footnote is a break from sequence, but it cannot really be extended. The point is, writers do better if they don’t have to write in sequence (but may create multiple structures, branches and alternatives), and readers do better if they don’t have to read in sequence, but may establish impressions, jump around, and try different pathways until they find the ones they want to study most closely.

▴ From Computer Lib / Dream Machines by Ted Nelson

I’ve recently started using Obsidian as a note-taking tool. It’s so interesting to observe how its affordances shape the way I think. The core app is beautifully minimal — a simple interface for editing local markdown files — which makes it super fast, secure and offline-first. You can extend this core functionality by installing plugins built by the community. I love this approach to software: letting people customise their own experience rather than trying to build the entire spectrum of features into the main product.

The main feature of Obsidian is that you can add backlinks as you write. I love being able to link all my thoughts together so fluidly. It makes the process of writing feel different: more like tending a garden. I think carefully about how I categorise ideas and spend more time revisiting past entries.

A few of the projects we’ve worked on at Common Knowledge lately have been digital gardens or wikis, where the usual hierarchical sitemaps don’t capture the interconnectedness of their structure. This prompted me to suggest that we read Christopher Alexander’s foundational text The City is Not a Tree in Rererereading Group recently. For fun, here’s Readwise’s GPT summary of the essay:

This text looks at the difference between structures (trees and semilattices) which are used to think about how a large and complex system is made up of many small systems. It is argued that the tree structure, which has been adopted by many designers and planners when creating artificial cities, is inadequate and cannot properly reflect the reality of the city’s social structure. It is proposed that the semilattice structure, which allows for overlap between elements, is a better representation of the living city, and should be adopted instead.

I think a digital garden full of bidirectional links is a kind of semilattice. The content can be collected, remixed and resurfaced in many different ways, appearing in lots of different sets according to the context. Working in this way requires a whole different approach to design. It’s complex and nonlinear, which can be challenging to get your head around compared to a tree website. Instead you have to understand it from the bottom-up, thinking in sets or patterns instead of trying to establish a top-down map or plan.

In simplicity of structure the tree is comparable to the compulsive desire for neatness and order that insists the candlesticks on a mantelpiece be perfectly straight and perfectly symmetrical about the centre. The semilattice, by comparison, is the structure of a complex fabric; it is the structure of living things, of great paintings and symphonies. It must be emphasized, lest the orderly mind shrink in horror from anything that is not clearly articulated and categorized in tree form, that the idea of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect and the semilattice are not less orderly than the rigid tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure.

▴ From The City is Not a Tree by Christopher Alexander

In Towards Growing Peaches Online, Claire L. Evans writes about Christopher Alexander and what he referred to as “living structure”. She describes how A Pattern Language influenced software development in general and the design of Are.na more specifically.

Living structure is the natural order of life lived at human-scale. A compost heap has living structure. So does a good bus system, or a small public square. You can feel it in the difference between a lovely old building and a sterile new development; one is built by its inhabitants, and the other is designed by architects. “When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it,” Alexander writes. “It is so filled with the will of the maker that there is no room for its own nature.” On the other hand, things with living structure feel right; they’re harmonious.

To me, there’s something so exciting about this approach. Instead of designer as author/architect, it’s designer as facilitator: creating the space for unexpected things to happen; for emergence, indeterminancy, ambiguity. (I’ve written a bit more about this here.)

What this means, really, is a rethinking of one’s own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together.

▴ From Composers as Gardeners by Brian Eno

One of the features I love about Are.na is that the sidebar of each block lists all the other channels that it has been connected to in the sidebar. This helps to prompt further exploration and strengthen connections to the rest of the community. Similarly, Obsidian notes have an Unlinked mentions section that surfaces any occurances of the current note’s title in other notes. It’s Ted Nelson’s dream of hypertext in action!

The task of hypertext is not to manufacture connections, but to discover where they have always been. Hypertext researchers before the World Wide Web built systems to support this endless, sacred hunt for entanglement and hidden structure, as inherent to thought as ecosystems are to the natural world.

▴ From Women in Hypertext: On Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall’s Forward Anywhere by Claire L. Evans

What’s interesting about this to me is that this allows for discovery via other people’s curation rather than algorithms. As Jenny Odell points out in How To Do Nothing, the algorithms of mainstream tech platforms are always streamlining our taste, reducing our personalities down to smaller and smaller sub-categories of taste and feeding this back to us. This closes down pathways instead of opening them up, removing any opportunity for real serendipity.

But connecting to other people, discovering new things and making unexpected connections makes online spaces so much more interesting and alive! Other people are the best curators. For example: NTS is one of my favourite places on the internet because it’s content-driven and entirely powered by people with very good taste. Each show is curated by hand by people who deeply love music. There’s a strong community that anyone can join, either actively in the chatroom or by supporting them financially. They’re always looking for new ways to curate their content: picking their favourites, making themed collections or creating new infinte mixtapes.

On an even more intimate level, this is why I love reading together with friends. I get so much more out of every text by hearing about it from other people’s perspectives. Each person brings their own experiences and interpretations to the same text, making it richer and more multilayered as a result. Through discussing and untangling the text together you create something new in common, taking it to a whole different place.

It is of the nature of idea to be communicated: written, spoken, done. The idea is like grass. It craves light, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

▴ Ursula Le Guin

Even without the community element, Obsidian’s backlinks and outgoing links are interesting because they create a network from your thoughts. Individual ideas become less important that the links between multiple ideas.

One of the suggestions of Giles Turnbull’s Agile Comms Handbook (which I reference at work all the time) is to gradually build a narrative over time. I love this approach because it removes the need for each post to be a perfect, polished thought. This makes publishing less intimidating and more like thinking out loud. It allows for your ideas to change over time too.

In this way a blog, comprising a series of posts, can become a digital hyperlinked narrative of thought. New posts can link back to past posts. Teams can document what changes, and show how it has changed. They can show how their minds have changed, and what evidence or research brought those changes about.

This fits with Jay Springett’s and Matt Webb’s advice for publishing online too, which in turn vibes with Julia Cameron’s morning pages practice that I mentioned previously.

Persistent work, created with rhythm, results in an accumulation of creativity. The demonstration of effort, the work of the body, becomes practice.

▴ Jay Springett

Keep the channel open

2023-01-27T00:00:00Z

I came across this interview with Rick Rubin the other day, which prompted me to fall down a rick-rubin-rabbithole. What an interesting guy.

Reading his new book The Creative Act, one of the things that struck me was the idea that when we’re being creative, we’re not conducting — we’re being conducted. Artists are receivers, translators, antennae. There’s a passiveness to it, a calmness. Looking at the world with soft eyes.

How do we pick up on a signal that can neither be heard nor be defined? The answer is not to look for it. Nor do we attempt to predict or analyse our way into it. Instead, we create an open space that allows it.

This strongly reminds me of Ursula Le Guin too. I was listening to an episode of the Crafting with Ursula podcast series the other day and realised that the intro track had an excerpt where she says exactly that:

I see my job as holding doors open or opening windows. Who comes in or out the doors, what you see out the window… how do I know? My responsibility is just to keep the mind open, not close it off. That’s enough right there.

Zadie Smith included something similar in Feel Free too:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

Edit: I thought the quote above was by Zadie Smith, but someone on Arena tells me it’s from the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham! Not sure where I got it mixed up, but there you go.

Give it all away and compost the rest

2023-01-28T00:00:00Z

We’re working with an organisation called Platform at the moment to refresh their identity and create a new website. They’re a non-hierarchical team of campaigners, researchers and artists who work on creative projects centred in eco-social justice.

They’ve already been running for 40 years which, in a world of short attention spans and daily news cycles, feels unbelievably long. They’ve done so much work already, not all of it fitting within a coherent narrative, and have plans for so much more. The challenge is how to represent all of this, the breadth and diversity, without trying to be a comprehensive archive.

I interviewed most of their members at the end of last year as part of our research process. One of the ideas that emerged from these conversations was the idea of archive as compost. We don’t necessarily want to document every past project in great detail, but we do want to mix together all their past activities, learnings and ideas so that they can sprout new ones.

I like this idea because it’s all about creating unexpected connections and celebrating the overlaps and interdependencies. In the archive-as-compost, everything is entangled and messy. There isn’t a curatorial voice and ideas emerge that you wouldn’t expect. Everything is an experiment.

Of course, the compost heap is a rich and fertile space to play in. So many of the people I admire are already here. Starting with the queen of compost, Donna Haraway:

We require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all.

The artist Katrin Bohm, who in 2021 started composting all her past work.

I don’t want to do another project, I want to make a pile.

Vida Rucli of Robida Collective wrote a lovely reflection on her residency at Bibliothek Andreas Zust, On hosting and guesting.

I spoke about reading as finding unexpected things by change, as collecting things that sediment in a fertile humus, reading as composting. Comp(h)osting. Interlacing hosting and composting – it’s about temporality, let encounters, conversations, events sediment, stay, be in contact with other remains, become a meshwork of elements which decompose to create humus to host again. Does this relation about composting and hosting speak only about finding a time for letting things, meetings, conversations deposit – does it only speak of a slower temporality, of a time dedicated to waiting for the transformation of the material. To compost means also to accumulate in a place…

And finally, the most literal composters are Compost Mentis. They’re a co-op that care for the soil, build compost toilets and co-design community growing infrastructure. They have a manifesto-in-progress, we want the soil back, that includes slowness as an inspiration:

The long, hot ferment of a compost pile. Recognising the different temporalities, rhythms and scales that we need to work at, and actively resourcing ourselves to work at a pace that is comfortable for each of us. Our ethic of slowness allows us to build trust and care, making time to gather, & reflect on our work, methods, values and decisions. For us, slowness supports accessibility and the long term sustainability of our work together.

PS — How & I are moving to a new apartment in March that has a little garden (!) complete with a lemon tree (!!) and compost heap (!!!). Beyond excited.

New tools

2023-03-03T00:00:00Z

Lately I’ve been enjoying using Arc , a new Chromium-based browser. It’s such a joy to use: they’ve completely rethought the UI / UX design of a browser. There are big changes (like spaces; easels; a sidebar with all your tabs, including pinned tabs with previews) and little details like “mini-Arc” (which opens a small version of the browser when you follow a link in a messaging app or email). The only problem is that it they haven’t worked out the performance issues yet so it crashes quite often. I have high hopes though!

I’ve also migrated from using Feedly + Pocket to using Readwise Reader for everything. It’s really well designed and great to have everything in the same place. The highlighting works really well, including over the original article, and it’s fun to play with their Ghostreader GPT tooling.

I’m also using the original Readwise app, which surfaces three random highlights from my collection every morning. It’s surprisingly hard to get highlights off a Kobo (something I miss about my Kindle, which just had all highlights in a plain text file). However, I found this tool called October which syncs from Kobo to Readwise. I added my old Kindle highlights too, which means it’s been surfacing my highlights from the last decade or so, which has been amazing.

The other tool that I’m happy to have found recently is Voiceliner, a simple app that allows you to record voice notes which it then automatically transcribes. You can rearrange the hierarchy of notes and attach a location too. It’s super useful — basically what I was using my Signal note to self for anyway. Plus, it’s open source and does everything locally.

March update

2023-03-12T00:00:00Z

This year feels so full already and it’s only March. All the energy I would have usually spent on writing has been going towards moving country and relaunching the Common Knowledge website. Things are starting to feel a bit more settled this month though.

Living in Anjos

How and I moved into our new (rental) apartment in Anjos, Lisbon at the start of this month. I’m completely in love with it. The main space is a semi-open plan living/kitchen/dining/sunroom with huge south-facing windows. We look out onto the internal gardens of the entire block, filled with figs, lemon and orange trees. One of the trees in our garden has small yellow fruits that the birds seem to love. I’ve never seen this particular fruit before — the owners told us what it was called in Portuguese but I immediately forgot.

I’m really enjoying the weather here already. It’s only March and we can have the windows wide open. We want to plant some vegetables and herbs in our garden soon, while it’s still spring. We have a lot to learn about growing vegetables in this climate instead of in the UK.

We’re enjoying exploring the city too. It’s small enough (well, compared to London) that you can walk most places (if you love walking like I do). Our area has many community spaces, cooperatives and associations — it feels like there is a really strong community here. We’ve found a good sourdough bakery (Terra Pão) not too far from us in the Mercado de Arroios. I already have a favourite neighbourhood wine bar (Bom Bom Bom), clothing store (Somewhere a Process) and cafe (Malabarista).

Moving country is a lot of effort and because I’m quite impatient I want to get all the bureaucracy over with as soon as I can. But it’s only possible to work at it slowly, one step at a time. Finding somewhere to live was one of the biggest steps and I’m so grateful it worked out as well as it did.

Now it’s lots of smaller things and working out which order to do them in: getting a Portuguese mobile number and bank account, finding an accountant, working out how to remain employed by the co-op but living in a different country, shipping our stuff over from the UK. We also have to get an appointment with immigration to sort out H’s residency card. Apparently it’s almost impossible to book an appointment, but you can’t just turn up to the office and wait either.

Visiting Glasgow

I spent a few weeks in Glasgow at the end of February, staying with my wonderful friends Dan & Lizzie of Rectangle.

Three days of this was for a Common Knowledge team retreat, our first since September 2021. We worked from the Project Space at Agile City’s Civic House, which was perfect for what we needed. They have a canteen that makes the most delicious vegan food inspired by Pakistani flavours.

It was so valuable for all of us to spend time together in person. I love the freedom that working remotely gives us, but there isn’t anything that can fully replace being in the same room together, sharing food, going for walks, talking about life outside of work. We hope to do a retreat like this every six months at least, maybe even every quarter if we can somehow manage it.

The co-op feels like it’s in a really healthy place at the moment. It’s still challenging but it feels like the projects we’re working on at the moment are what we’re meant to be doing and we’re learning a lot in the process.

There are seven of us now! Having new people join feels slightly nerve-racking and makes everything feel more serious. But it’s worth it to have new people contributing and shaping the co-op in their own way. I’m reminded of Dan Taeyong’s advice on growing a co-op like you’d grow a garden:

If you make a cooperative, you have to know that you can’t design them; you can only grow them, like plants. If you grow one and you do it with other people, then everyone will undoubtedly have ideas about what the best way to grow it is. In my experience, there have been a lot of times where I’ve been like, “I think this is right,” and things haven’t gone my way. And in the end, that’s turned out okay.

When you trust in other people, really incredible and unexpected things can happen. Usually, it’s things where you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even think of doing that,” or, “Oh, I don’t think that will work out well,” but it actually does. Part of trusting other people might involve letting go of certain images you have of what the outcome should look like. If you can do this, then things can flourish in a really healthy way—like a healthy garden with a lot of different plants growing around each other.

We managed to launch our new website! I’m really proud that we managed to make the time for it, mostly thanks to Anna C’s hard work — she built it as the final project of her apprenticeship. Documenting work from the past three or so years is extremely time-consuming though, so the content is still fairly unfinished.

It’s designed so we can collect projects into thematic pages that give a bit more of a narrative overview to the work we’ve done. This idea is that this will allow us to highlight the connections and overarching themes between multiple projects, rather than presenting in-depth case studies of each individual project.

I really like this section of the About page on our shared vision. It felt good to articulate what we’re working towards.

We imagine diverse communities rooted in care and reciprocity working together to achieve ecological and social justice. A just, abundant future where people have the tools and confidence to effectively organise themselves; where it’s easy to unionise, start a food co-op or organise a protest. Cooperatively-run workplaces and platforms powered by lightweight, convivial technologies rooted in an ethos of maintenance and care. A resilient global network of local communities with the power to make decisions over their own lives. A world where we’ve learned to live in equilibrium with our environment and in kinship with other humans and more-than-humans.

Reading / listening / watching

I really enjoyed this Screen Walk with Everest Pipkin where they wander through Wikipedia while talking about collective memory on the internet.

I’ve been gradually working my way through the Crafting with Ursula podcast series. I particularly loved the episode with Molly Gloss (On Writing the Clean, Clear Line) and of course Kim Stanley-Robinson (On Ambiguous Utopias).

I’m discovering and rediscovering so much of Le Guin’s work through each interview. I rewatched The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin documentary and reread The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Here’s an excerpt from the short piece Deep in Admiration:

Changing our minds is going to be a big change. To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it. Skill in living awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. Darwin first gave that knowledge a scientific basis. And now, both poets and scientists are extending the rational aspect of our sense of relationship to creatures without nervous systems and nonliving beings—our fellowship as creatures with other creatures, things with other things. Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

I started listening to the Doomer Optimism podcast. This episode on degrowth, solarpunk and anarchism encapsulates my political orientation pretty accurately.

Some species of slime molds fruit simultaneously in the Southern and Northern hemispheres, but no one knows why. (Read this in Creatures That Don’t Conform on Emergence Magazine.)

I just finished reading the “potluck book” Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography. I love the idea of a messy history, which recognises that histories are never entirely exhaustive or accurate, and represents the stories of collectives as well as individuals.

I’m going to be talking at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon tomorrow. The event is called The Designer As… and Ruben Pater will be speaking too. Feeling excited (if a little nervous) about doing a talk in person instead of online.

How to co-op

2023-04-01T00:00:00Z

I went to the Futuress talk by Cooperativa de Disenio last week. They’re a feminist worker co-op from Argentina. They’ve been running for 11 years and have 12 members, all women. They do a mix of product, identity and audiovisual design work for communities, cooperatives and recovered factories.

It was very interesting to hear about how a different co-op is run. The way they spoke about their co-op felt so familiar: it’s not perfect, but “it fits us like a glove” — they can shape it however they like and put their values into practice.

The talk was entirely focused on how they work as a co-op, rather than their design work. They spent a fair bit of time explaining what being part of a co-op means, what the seven cooperative principles are, how they govern themselves.

This made me reflect on the talks I usually give — I realised that I try to cram way too much into the 30-45 minutes I have. I usually cover a bit about my own practice and how I got into this type of work, touching on Evening Class and Designers + Cultural Workers, and then onto Common Knowledge: who we are, what a co-op is, why we’re a co-op, the kind of work we do, our attitude towards technology and politics and a bunch of examples of our work. No wonder I’m always exhausted afterwards!

I think I need to split my talk out into a few separate ones, something like:

Exploring different collaborative forms: learning groups, unions, cooperatives
An introduction to worker cooperatives: what they are; how to set one up; how to make decisions
How digital technology can amplify grassroots politics
Community-led design practices

Community-led design practices is the one I’m most interested in but least certain about. Sonia and I developed a workshop centred around this for a LCC masters course back in 2021. It ended up feeling quite speculative because we weren’t actually working with communities directly, just thinking about how we might design the design process. It was a little too meta.

I’m really curious as to how you can involve diverse groups of people in the design process while still eventually producing something that does what they need and that most people involved are happy with. I think the main issue is that this takes time, so much more than we ever have in our projects.

I asked the people from Cooperativa de Disenio how they approach this, as they do quite a lot of work with other non-hierarchical groups and communities. They agreed that it can be difficult and slow. You have to meet people where they are, slow down to their pace, listen to their point of view and decentre yourself.

I agreed with all of this, but I still feel that there are missing pieces. Maybe that’s just because there is no one methodology that will suit every project — you have to develop new methods to suit each new situation.

There seems to be so much interest in worker co-ops for designers at the moment. In both this Futuress talk and my talk at FBAUL the other week, there were lots of questions from the audience on the practical details of starting and running a co-op like:

How can new graduates start or get involved with a co-op?
How do you make sure hierarchies don’t seep in?
How do you deal with problems?
What legal form should it take in Italy/in Portugal?
Is there anyone who gives accountancy advice to co-ops?

I would love to run a question and answer session exploring questions like this for people interested in starting worker co-ops.

I think the best way to do this would be to get a few design cooperatives from around the world involved, like Cooperativa de Disenio, Partner & Partners in the US and Commonin Australia. There are so many legal considerations that are specific to each country, so having co-ops from a range of countries there would help answer some of the specifics.

I think it would also be good to have multiple co-ops so we could compare different approaches. From 2020–21 I regularly met with six people from other co-ops working from Space4 (a coworking space and co-op incubator in north London). We discussed any challenges we were facing or ways that we wanted to improve our co-ops, gave each other advice and held each other accountable. I think we all got so much out of learning from each other and sharing our different approaches.

April in Anjos

2023-04-02T00:00:00Z

Some photos from this weekend.

We spent today cleaning up our garden and planting some seeds that Susana kindly gave us last weekend — tomatoes, butternut squash and zucchini — as well as some wildflowers and cat grass. The cat that regularly visits us watched us intently as we worked. Later in the afternoon, two new cats visited to investigate the changes too. We must be doing something right.

We’ve worked out (also thanks to Susana) that the yellow fruit is a loquat (nêspera is Portuguese). They taste very sweet and somewhat like apricot. H picked some and made them into a jam — two parts loquat to one part sugar and one part water, with lemon juice, cayenne pepper and rosemary.

We also planted basil, mint, coriander, parsley and thyme in pots to sit on our kitchen bench.

I love my riso-printed calendar by Lauren Doughty. Happy April!

All flourishing is mutual

2023-04-25T00:00:00Z

A few weeks ago we visited Cooperativa Integral Minga, a multisector co-op in Montemor-o-Novo, about an hour east from Lisbon in the Alentejo region.

They have around 100 members across four branches: agriculture, products, services and housing. These branches run as autonomous working groups using sociocracy. They also have a number of elected administrative roles that make up their board.

Anyone living in the area around Montemor can pitch an idea to join the group, as long as their practice is in accordance with Minga’s values: sustainability and degrowth. Once they join, they can run their company through the co-op rather than individually, sharing resources and lowering costs for everyone. In return, 5% of each invoice goes towards Minga.

They have a small store in the centre of town where you can buy local and seasonal fruit and vegetables, groceries, ceramics and textiles from co-op members. The shop is a way of promoting locally sourced goods, fair trade and a circular economy. Everything is grown or made by hand, with natural materials and human energy.

On one of the shelves there are skeins of cream and brown yarn, produced by Suarda. Last year, two cooperators (Jorge and Telma) started the company, which is focused on encouraging fairer and more sustainable wool production from all angles: fair prices for producers, improved animal welfare, and a regenerative approach to environmental stewardship. It’s an attempt to create an entirely new value chain around wool and revive the national textile industry.

Around the corner from the store is the Espaço Integral, a coworking and event space which houses a communal library, seed swap and some wooden looms. Another cooperator (Teresa) weaves with Suarda wool there, sharing her knowledge with anyone who is interested in learning the craft.

For me, the fascinating thing about Minga is how it weaves together so many strands of life: from food to housing to work to education to health. They share the same cooperative values, but operate at a whole different scale to a worker co-op. Rather than focus on one industry, it’s possible to work in collaboration with many other in order to address issues across and between sectors, with a philosophy of degrowth underpinning everything they do. The people involved have such a wide range of expertise, sharing knowledge across different sectors and different generations. They are deeply rooted in Montemor, slowly creating a commons from which everyone can benefit.

Community Economies in Action

2023-07-29T00:00:00Z

I’ve just come back from an inspiring week at the Community Economies in Action practice retreat in Terragnolo, Italy. It was designed and facilitated by Bianca Elzenbaumer, Kate Rich and Flora Mammana as a practical counterpart to the Community Economies Institute’s summer/winter school.

There were 24 participants with a diverse range of practices: academics and researchers, artists and designers, gardeners and organisers. Everyone was somehow involved in community economies, whether through a food / worker / housing cooperative, ecovillage, market garden, urban landscape, band, radio program, library of things or design lab. Over the week, we learned about all these diverse forms of commoning, exchanged ideas and identified new methods for collaborative survival. We were encouraged to be honest with each other about our struggles as well as celebrating our successes.

Underpinning the retreat were the ideas of J.K. Gibson-Graham, two feminist geographers from Sydney who collectively wrote books like The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) and Take Back The Economy. Their work is all about rethinking the economy by foregrounding diverse economic practices and giving them credibility. These diverse economies include unpaid labour, cooperatives, Community Supported Agriculture, alternative currencies, voluntary organisations, underground economies, gift giving, foraging and barter.

▲ Iceberg model diagram by Bianca Elzenbaumer, Brave New Alps

The programme itself was quite emergent, with open spaces where we could propose our own ideas and free time for rest and reflection. Although there were some readings and a lot of deep thinking, there was also a strong focus on connecting with the land and with our bodies. We learned about the long history of commoning in the valley from our host Gianni of Il Masetto. One afternoon we went for a hike on a nearby mountain and foraged edible plants. We did a contact improvisation dance, swam in the river many times and cooked food together.

▲ Photos by Flora Mammana

Economy as Ecological Livelihood

We read two of their essays and reflected on the conversations they opened with our practices. The first, Economy as Ecological Livelihood by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller, suggested that we need to see the economy as something deeply entangled with everything else (social and ecological) rather than some separate sphere of human activity.

If we cease to think of ourselves as singular, self-contained beings and begin to think alongside, for example, the multiple communities of bacteria and bacterial symbionts from which we continually take shape and of which we are but fleeting, temporary manifestations (Hird 2009; Hird 2010); or if we place our activities in the context of the billions-of-years-old, emergent, planetary-scale process of bio- logical self-construction known as “Gaia” (Lovelock 2000; Harding 2006; Volk 2003), it is no longer possible to identify a singular “humanity” as a distinctive ontological category set apart from all else.

What difference might it make if we accept that from the scale of Gaia, to the scale of the microscopic bacteria that form the laboring basis for nearly all biological energy production and transformation, there is a “we” bound together in myriad interrelationships that are themselves the very conditions of existence for our sense of a human “we”? Being-in-common—that is, community—can no longer be thought of or felt as a community of humans alone; it must become multispecies community that includes all of those with whom our livelihoods are interdependent and interrelated.

They suggest four ethical coordinates to navigate the question “How do we live together with human and non-human others?”:

PARTICIPATION: Who is the “we” that participates in the constitution of livelihoods and community economies? This involves cultivating forms of knowing and becoming that open us to the complexities of our interdependencies, to their animate interactions with us, and to the forms of responsibility this calls forth.

NECESSITY OR SUFFICIENCY: What do “we” need for survival? What constitutes “enough”? This includes asking about what is necessary for the dignified survival of all living beings and communities with whom we are inter-dependent, and about how we might consume in ways such that one species’ or community’s consumption does not compromise the survival chances of others.

SURPLUS: How do “we” produce, appropriate, distribute and mobilize surplus? Our new accounting must include surplus that is generated not just by human labor, but by the work of plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and dynamic energetic systems.

COMMONS: How do “we” make and share a commons, the material commonwealth of our community economies, with this new, more-than-human “we” in mind? Can we, for example, begin to see the chickens, bees and fruit trees of a cooperative farm not as part of that farm’s commons (as shared resources), but rather as living beings partici- pating in the co-constitution of the community that, together, makes and shares the farm?

Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds’

The second text, Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for Other Worlds, highlights all the diverse economic practices that already happening in the here and now.

Gibson-Graham take a post-structuralist approach to the idea of capitalism. Rather than just adding new or forgotten categories to the existing definition, they instead want to completely restructure how we understand the economy. Economic activities are usually defined in terms of their relationship to capitalism, the master signifier — everything exists in relation to it, whether that’s as a complement or supplement, against or within.

In The end of capitalism we addressed familiar representations of capitalism as an obdurate structure or system, coextensive with the social space. We argued that the performative effect of these representations was to dampen and discourage non-capitalist initiatives, since power was assumed to be concentrated in capitalism and to be largely absent from other forms of economy. In the vicinity of such representations, those who might be interested in non-capitalist economic projects pulled back from ambitions of widespread success – their dreams seemed unrealizable, at least in our lifetimes. Thus capitalism was strengthened, its dominance performed, as an effect of its representations.

They argue that we need to move instead to seeing capitalist practices as one element within a landscape of diverse economies. By moving beyond this capitalocentric viewpoint, we open up space for imagination and new possibilities. We can begin to imagine new worlds that we want to participate in building.

What if we were to accept that the goal of theory is not to extend knowledge by confirming what we already know, that the world is a place of domination and oppression? What if we asked theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility?

▲ Photos by Flora Mammana

We discussed the text together, asking ourselves:

How are we making ourselves open to the possibility of new economic becomings?
How do our practices already contribute to the exciting proliferation of economic experiments occurring worldwide in the current moment?
How can we study our strategies of survival, support each other’s efforts and help each other change what we wish to change?

I found the discussion and the overall framing incredibly generative. Rather than seeing ourselves as fighting against some all-encompassing, all-powerful system, it’s about shifting focus to seeing all the diverse possibilities that already exist and that could exist in the near future. Our discussion was focused in on the tangible and the concrete: what we’re already doing, what resources we already have, useful tools and techniques to continue and deepen this work. There is something so optimistic and playful about this approach.

Our interest in building new worlds involves making credible those diverse practices that satisfy needs, regulate consumption, generate surplus, and maintain and expand the commons, so that community economies in which interdependence between people and environments is ethically negotiated can be recognized now and constructed in the future.

We spoke to Katherine Gibson via Zoom one morning. One question that someone asked her was around critique and resistance — how do you keep proliferating possibilities when the whole system is working against you? She suggested that we don’t need to make things harder for ourselves by imagining big bad capitalism always waiting around the corner to gobble up our attempts. It’s easy to be angry at what’s there, it’s much harder to imagine and create desire for the not-quite-yet. You have to imagine that it is possible to create new worlds, working with fragments and wreckages, balancing fighting with building.

Feral Clinics

We did two mornings of Feral Clinics, a practice adapted from Kate Rich’s Feral MBA and previous iterations of this retreat. Each collective or practitioner took turns hosting a session, arriving with one crucial question that they’re currently facing in their practice. The rest of the group took turns either asking questions or holding space, helping the host to work through their own problems through active listening and thoughtful questions. Rather than asking questions out of your own curiosity, we were encouraged to ask questions based on what the person needed to hear, to help them draw their own conclusions.

In the first round, we helped the host fine-tune their question to the group. In the second round, we helped them proliferate possibilities. In the final round, we helped them identify the next, most elegant steps — a term that adrienne maree brown uses to refer to small, achievable and exciting steps forward, so easy to make that they feel like dancing.

Thinking about…

Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.
— adrienne maree brown

The week opened up a lot of questions for me. I found it challenging at times because I started to doubt my own practice, particularly in relation to digital technology. At Common Knowledge, we focus on understanding patterns shared by a broad range of political organisations and using the affordances of technology to help scale up their activities. It felt a long way from the practices of other people there, which was much more place-based, focused on working with their own local community.

I was lucky to have a two-hour mentoring session with Ethan Miller remotely from his housing co-op in Wabanaki Territory / Maine. I feel so grateful for the facilitators for setting this up because there were so many overlaps between the questions I had for my own practice and the work that he’s been doing for decades. We spoke about the challenges of being part of cooperatives and other non-hierarchical organisation models, how they set up their Community Land Trust, feminist science fiction, building capacity and desire within communities, being rooted in a particular place, commoning infrastructure… lots for me to think about!

I found it really heartening that quite a few of the other people there were also puzzled about where to live and how to balance the desire/need to travel with the need to belong to one community. I find it really difficult, as an immigrant from Australia who has lived for the last 12 years in The Netherlands, the UK and now Portugal, to understand where I belong. I also can’t imagine a life where I stay in one place and never travel — I would lose connection with so many of my friends and family, to familiar landscapes and to my past. At the same time, I feel a real need to slow down and feel rooted in one place.

Some of the questions I want to explore further are:

How can we work on a local community level and respond to all the idiosyncrasies of a specific place, but also still make sure we’re connecting with other initiatives, learning from each other, sharing resources and acting in ways that will have an impact on the planetary challenges we face?
When does it make sense to stay small, and when does it make sense to start organising on the national or international level?
What does place-based, small scale, low tech, convivial technology actually look like?
Is there a way to have community if you also need to travel? Can we develop communities across borders, with protocols and rituals than ensure a fair exchange between rooted and transient types? Can we develop new models of kinship and solidarity that enfold all these different needs and contradictions?
How do we create the desire for self-governance and economic experimentation in more people?

PS — How & I chatted to Vida from Robida Collective about the retreat when we visited Topolò last week — listen here.

Hearts, minds, rhizomes & other worlds

2023-09-17T00:00:00Z

Mobilising Hearts and Minds

I’m just about to start the Mobilising Hearts and Minds course initiated by Max Haiven and Sarah Stein Lubrano. We’ll be exploring the question “How can we change people’s minds and create the conditions where they not only support but join the movements for radical change we desperately need?”

I’ve been following Max’s work for a while and am in the middle of reading The Radical Imagination, so looking forward to a few months of guided study and reflection and conversation. I’m curious about how to learn from psychology / sociology / philosophy / critical theory and apply it to my design practice, given that a big chunk of my work is about motivating people to take political action and join movements.

Centre for Other Worlds

I’m really happy to share that I joined the Centre for Other Worlds, a research centre for art and design initiated by Lusófona University in Lisbon. It’s a distributed network of designers and researchers, all of whom I deeply admire. They also publish a journal edited by Silvio Lorusso.

We value design cultures, but we approach them without devotion. Instead of celebrating the power of design, we focus on the power structures that, willingly or not, design reproduces. For us, more than a solution, design itself is a problem and a challenge.

Rizoma Cooperativa

I’ve also joined a local cooperative, Rizoma. It’s similar to Minga, which I wrote about previously, in that it’s a multi-sector cooperative with five integrated strands: consumers, services, culture, agriculture and housing. It’s based in Arroios with a grocery store, cafe and terrace at ground level, a co-working space upstairs and a cultural space downstairs. They also have two fledgling sector groups focused on habitation (campaigning against the housing crisis and setting up cooperative housing) and agriculture.

Post-branding

2023-09-17T00:00:00Z

Very excited to read What is post-branding? How to Counter Fundamentalist Marketplace Semiotics, a book by Jason Grant & Oliver Vodeb published by Set Margins (which seems to be publishing all the good design books these days).

Post-Branding empowers better design of public communication for civic and activist groups by replacing corporate branding’s predatory principles with a new set of strategies embedded in a new culture of craft. A new way of being and knowing, for a new way of relating with the world.

Jason is runs the Brisbane-based studio Inkahoots. For the last 30 years or so they’ve worked in direct collaboration with social movements, transforming from a community-run screenprinting workshop into a non-hierarchical design studio focused on creative political expression.

Jason was one of my tutors at the Queensland College of Art. At the time I was in my final year at uni, about to graduate into a recession, and seriously questioning my choice to become a designer and design’s complicity in consumerism. Learning from him and about his practice had a huge influence on me. It prompted me to do a masters of Design Futures with Tony Fry and to try to find ways to be a designer outside of / against capitalism.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking about writing a series on design and design-adjacent practices that are modelling new ways of working. My shortlist so far is:

Transformative Work as Livelihood

2024-02-20T00:00:00Z

In December I went to the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano to teach a seminar on Transformative Work as Livelihood for the Eco-Social Design masters students. Over three days, we explored potential pathways available to socially and politically engaged designers, how to balance financial stability with meaningful work, and feminist strategies that ensure that transformative practices remain open to many and viable in the long-term.

Rather than focusing on strategies for individual success, we discussed and imagined new models for working together based on solidarity and care. To do this, we gathered a wide range of practices and tools that challenge the dominant narratives of design and work, exploring the multitude of alternative social and economic approaches that already exist in the here and now.

The seminar cycled between individual and collective exercises: brainstorming, reading, self-reflection and building a toolkit. My goal was to make the seminar really practical, full of useful tools that they could easily apply in their lives, and signposting them towards a broad range of further resources and readings that I’ve found useful in my practice. I wanted to be both critical of our current capitalist reality while also pointing to hopeful possibilities and new pathways. I’ve collected the slides and all the resources into this Arena channel.

I learned so much throughout this process. Below is an overview of what we did, my reflections on how it went and the changes I’d like to make if/when I run this seminar again. I’m documenting this (in probably too much depth) for my own benefit, but if it’s useful for others to read then that’s great too!

Finding common ground

The first afternoon was about finding common ground and defining a collective vocabulary. We did a brainstorming session to collectively unpack the words transformative, work and livelihood, then I defined a few key concepts like reproductive labour, capitalist realism, feminist economics and intersectionality. We discussed some of the central elements of capitalist work economies and how they manifest in design work specifically.

The students shared some of the burning questions that they had about their livelihoods:

Will I work as a designer? Will I get a job related to what I studied? Will I find a job that I like?
How do I say no to some opportunities?
Should I return to my home country? Do I have a responsibility to do this? How do I deal with moving around for work?
How do I explain what I do and what I want to do?
How do I create opportunities for the kind of work I want? To what extent should I plan out my career or should I just do what I find fun right now? How do I balance planning with being open to opportunity? How do I stay adaptable?
How do I deal with uncertainty? What can I do about feeling precarious?
How do I find jobs through word of mouth or networking?
Is it bad to use work as a coping mechanism?
How can I design ethical solutions and not just create more problems?

Livelihoods

Later that afternoon, we went deeper into the concept of livelihood based on Ethan Miller’s book Reimagining Livelihoods, which proposes a new way of looking at livelihoods that expands possibilities for collective agency rather than individualism. His definition of livelihood is much broader than the usual one of making a living — instead it is “open-ended, always-revisable, experimental set of tools for enhancing the capacities of collectives to enact forms of life”.

His thinking is encapsulated in this diagram, where livelihood is an ongoing convergence between making one’s living (autopoiesis), having one’s living made by others, both human and nonhuman (allopoiesis), and making livings for others (alterpoiesis). The boundaries between the three are blurred: “making-others can mean being-made and self-making at the same time”. Each student drew their own livelihood triad to reflect upon what they make, receive from and provide for others.

I’m drawn to Miller’s framework because it resonates with my own experiences living and working in collectives. Cooperatives are autonomous self-help initiatives, in which people unite voluntarily to meet their individual and common needs. In cooperatives, autonomy and interdependence are two sides of the same coin — you help others to help yourself. This isn’t about erasing the individual or putting the collective before the individual, but about recognising how working with others can be a means to benefit oneself. Individual freedom is realised through mutual interdependence.

It is difficult to relinquish the illusions of power and delusions of exceptionalism that come with privilege. But it is strangely liberating to realise your true status as a single node in a cooperative network. There is honour to be found in this role, and a certain dignified agency. You won’t be swallowed up by a hive mind or lose your individuality—you will retain your autonomy while simultaneously being profoundly interdependent and connected. In fact, sustainable systems cannot function without the full autonomy and unique expression of each independent part of the interdependent whole.
— Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk

Starting with ourselves and moving outwards

In the same way that interdependence is also about the unique expression of each node, I wanted to explore the idea of care from the scale of the individual to the collective.

Care is less about predetermined behaviours than about a situated, embodied way of responding to interdependence as it shifts across different contexts and temporalities. […] We can disrupt the uncaring attitudes, environments, cultures, economies and structures we inhabit, starting with ourselves and moving outward.
— Alison Place, Feminist Designer

How does self-knowledge and self-development connect to wider challenges? How can we recognise and build upon our own individual experiences without succumbing to individualism?

The students each drew Ikigai diagrams to identify what they love to do, what they’re good at, what they can get paid for and what the world needs. The last two questions were the more difficult ones — it’s hard to know what you can get paid to do when you haven’t had much experience yet.

Next time, I would like to come up with a more indirect and creative way to help them answer all these questions more intuitively. It can be hard to directly answer a question like “what do I love to do” in words, but perhaps collaging or drawing would help people look at the question sideways and come up with more unexpected answers that surprise them and deepen their self-understanding.

Around these diagrams, we widened our focus towards mapping relations and resources, adapted from a Diverse Relations Mapping tool developed by Bianca Elzenbaumer as part of the Alpine Community Economies Laboratory.

This exercise prompted them to make an inventory of the social and material resources they had access to, which communities they were already part of and what people they could rely on, in order to identify potential points of leverage and understand where it makes sense to invest more time and energy.

Despite encouraging everyone to use images rather than / as well as words, most students just used words. I think I need to focus on creating an environment that is more conducive to drawing, collaging and mapping: clearing the space, rearranging the furniture so everyone is gathered around one central table, providing more pens and pencils, finding materials to collage with.

I’d also like to come up with some metaphor or visual method to connect or combine these three diagrams (livelihood triad, ikigai diagram and diverse relations mapping). Potentially this could be based on the generative somatics Sites of Shaping, Sites of Change diagram: moving from the self to intimate network, community, institutions and society, with a strong focus on feelings, care and interdependence. Or potentially the permaculture domains.

Principles, models and strategies for transformative work

The second day was about providing them with a broad range of principles, models and strategies for transformative work. We started building our collective toolbox of frameworks, models, strategies and tactics for practising transformative eco-social design.

I began by sharing four sets of principles that guides our work: the cooperative principles, the Design Justice Network principles, Emergent Strategy principles and our own vision, mission and values. Next time, rather than providing an overview of all four, I would choose principle from each and demonstrate how we apply it in our day-to-day work. Otherwise I think ethics and values are just a list of nice sentiments that make us feel good, not really connected to reality or practice.

My favorite way that adaptation with intention and interdependence get practiced is through shared principles. Having clear principles or intentions means, that as conditions change, there is a common understanding of what matters, a way to return to shared practice and behavior.
— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

In the assessment, I noticed that many students described their practices as underpinned by “ethics” in general, without defining their ethics in any more depth. I’d like to do some kind of exercise to get them to think about one ethical value, what it means to them specifically and how it connects to their practice. I think I would also reframe it a little to talk more explicitly about politics rather than ethics.

Experimenting with new models

I provided a range of examples of different models for design work (broadly defined), touching on how each organisation was structured, how they work and who they work with. This included other cooperatives like Cooperativa di Disenio, community interest organisations like Migrants in Culture, research organisations like Dark Matter Labs, hyperlocal place-based initiatives like Krater and Floating ~~University~~ and shared workspaces like Extra Practice.

I offered a few different ways of categorising these models. One way was by their relationship to capitalism, as outlined by Graham Jones in The Shock Doctrine of the Left: smashing (direct action), building (infrastructures of support), healing (community responses to oppression) or taming (working within existing institutions to bring about change). We also looked at categorising by type of organisational structure, financial model, context, methods, scale and location.

We did a collective archiving session where each person documented one practice that they were interested in. I would like to make this a more physical exercise in the next iteration, perhaps going to the library to source, photocopy, cut and paste content from interviews with the different practices. Working on computers is no good for collective creativity!

From there, we split into four groups and did a collective brainstorming session to explore these four questions:

What ethics or values do you think should underlie engaged design practices?
What forms can eco-social practices or organisations take?
In which contexts could eco-social designers work?
What skills do you think engaged designers should have?

On reflection, what was perhaps missing from this spectrum of practices was a focus on career paths that involve working for government or within academia. I am less familiar with these options so the workshop was definitely weighted towards the kinds of practice that I personally know about. In the assessment, most people described wanting to work in or set up their own small practice, but I’m not sure if this is due to a lack of in-depth knowledge about other pathways.

Working with others

In the afternoon, we moved our focus towards working with others. I shared some strategies for democratic, non-hierarchical organising and mutual aid based on my experience working in collectives. We discussed common challenges like making decisions collectively, navigating power and privilege, resolving conflicts, using failure as an opportunity for growth, surviving times of scarcity, and distributing surplus in times of abundance.

We read and discussed Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness and how this could be applied to collective work today. She suggests tactics like distributing authority and responsibility through transparent and democratic methods amongst as many people as possible, rotating tasks, and ensuring continuous diffusion of information and resources to the group.

I shared the horizontal organising practices that we use within the co-op, and answered their questions about the challenges we’ve faced over the years and how we’ve overcome them.

Next time, I would like for us to practice more of the organising methodologies rather than just just discussing and documenting them. An obvious one would have been to practice making a decision using sociocracy. However, I do think this section would be better suited to a weekly class rather than one afternoon of a seminar, because learning sociocratic techniques is most effective when you’re applying them to an actual collaboration.

This day was too long (9am — 6pm) and everyone was totally exhausted afterwards! I need to intersperse thinking and talking work with opportunities for us to move around, rest, eat and relax. Running this seminar for four hours per day over five days would be even better.

Strategies for collective survival

The final day was about developing a toolbox of strategies for collective survival. We discussed the different forms of support we can give each other: material, social, financial and moral. I shared a range of support structures and strategies that I’m aware of, moving from an understanding of the self-as-designer to self-as-worker to self-as-member of an community, industry and society. As with the rest of the seminar, my goal was to start with individual experience but make a direct connection to oppressive systems and how to resist them collectively, rather than just protecting oneself from precarity (if that is even possible).

— lumbung Kios, Harvest by Angga Cipta, 2022

This included a broad range of strategies like:

Forming collectives
Starting a shared wallet
Running events to do tedious freelance admin work together, like Extra Practice do with their ThemeWork sessions
Joining a renters union
Living in a housing cooperative

Each student filled out a worksheet with questions from Precarity Pilot’s Creating Fertile Ground for your Practice, which focuses specifically on what students can do during their studies to start on a pathway towards transformative work.

Finally, they worked in groups to come up with ideas for building support structures that they could start while still in university. They were all really engaged with this, I guess because it was more directly linked to their everyday experience and less about speculating on their future.

Again, this day could have been more creative and interactive somehow. It would be good to do less talking (particularly because this was a Friday afternoon after an intense week for all of us) and do more creative and visual work instead — creating a zine or a reader together instead.

Ideal practices

After the seminar, the students had two months to create a short presentation envisioning their ideal practice five years from now, including the kind of work they’d like to do, who they’d like to work with and how, the values that underpin it, the diverse economies that could sustain it and what their day-to-day might look like. I asked them to identify one aspect of their practice that they could easily attain with small adjustments (the next most elegant step) and one aspect that they would need to build towards over the five years.

I think this worked really well and I was super happy with what everyone did. They said that they enjoyed the exercise, particularly the opportunity to be a bit utopian and imagine what their future might be like.

Reflections

Condensing such a huge topic into three days meant that both the students and I were totally exhausted by the end of it. They also seemed quite stressed with all the other work they had to finish before the end of the semester. I provided a bit too much information and I think this overwhelmed them (and me).

If I ran this again, I would aim for less breadth and more depth. Instead of sharing the broadest range of practices and methods, I’d like to choose a few examples and go into depth with them. I need to more clearly connect theory to concrete reality, showing how values and methods manifest in day-to-day work.

I’d like to spend a bit more time supporting them in finding ways to explain what they’re interested in and what they’d like to do. Some “transformative” work pathways are hard to talk about because they don’t exist yet. How can we develop new vocabularies that are also understandable by others?

The challenge with preparing this seminar is that, of course, there isn’t a one size fits all solution to these questions — everyone has their own practices, resources, needs and desires. I based everything on my own experience (working in small studios, participating in collectives, running a worker co-op) but the pathways that many these students will take will be different from this. Last year, Flora Mammana had asked a few friends to record short videos explaining what they did after graduating the masters, which I think is really a good idea.

I would have more moments of doing a variety of gentle, creative, intuitive, meditative and somatic exercises rather than so much thinking work. This might mean making collages, going for a walk together, going to the library, doing breathing exercises or dancing. I would reduce computer work to the bare minimum, and instead do as much as possible with paper and pen. I think a bigger room with less furniture, where we could stick things up on the walls and sit in a circle and move around freely would make a big difference.

Thank you

I’m grateful to Flora Mammana who taught this seminar for the previous two years and recommended that I apply for the position. It was so valuable to be able to hear about her experience and build upon her work while preparing my own version of the seminar. Also for the support and friendship from the UNIBZ professors I met there, including Aart van Bezooijen and Rosario Talevi.

Mapped launch

2024-03-24T00:00:00Z

We’re hosting an event in London in a few weeks to launch Mapped, a project we’ve been working on over the last six months with the support of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust.

Mapped integrates with common organising platforms like Airtable, Mailchimp and Action Network to augment membership lists with other useful data sources. Organisers can visualise their membership lists on a map overlaid with contextual geographic, demographic and political data. The goal is to enable more strategic organising beyond data collection and broadcast communications, empowering organisers to look for insights and patterns that aren’t available when membership lists are locked into static databases.

If you’re in London, come along!

6:30 PM — 9:00 PM, Tuesday 2 April
Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Rd, Bethnal Green, London E1 5QJ
For more event details and to RSVP: lu.ma/sw0qjba9

Project background

I’m really happy with this introduction that I co-wrote with Jan and Alex for the Common Knowledge blog. It distills our thinking around the upcoming election and why we’re doing this work:

Elections as a moment of political terraforming

At Common Knowledge, our particular interest is in bottom up (or grassroots) rather than top down politics. When the bread and butter of conventional politics is oriented towards political elites, whether by lobbying and policy advocacy or by installing new political elites through elections, we instead emphasise collective self-organising as key to radical social change.

But while elections are not our key focus, electoral cycles will always be a crucial time in politics. We see elections as a moment or tactic in the wider field of social change. The process and outcome of an election shapes the terrain on which movements operate. They can either operate on highly unfavourable terrain, where their effort needs to go into firefighting and even sheer survival, or they can operate on more favourable terrain, where some needs are met and other questions can be addressed. Elections to some extent terraform this terrain.

Despite a general (and understandable!) trend of apathy towards formal politics, it is also true engagement always rises significantly during an election year. This means a larger audience, with more attention being paid than usual. While organisers often have an expanded theory of politics, elections are one of the main times when “politics happens” for a lot of people, i.e. when social needs, possibilities and political decisions are collectively discussed and considered, especially for those who aren’t involved in other organised political activity.

These moments are a crucial opportunity for grassroots groups to build power, recruit new members, strengthen their collective leadership and push the Overton window towards their own agenda. In elections, groups can learn new skills, raise capability and capacity and become more coherent as a group. We have seen these skills are transferable to other organising contexts. This includes the basic mechanics and tactics of elections: to hold a strike, one needs to first win a ballot. Something like “get out the vote” drives are an important element of this.

Regardless of which party comes into power, we want to empower non-electoral actors within the movement ecology before, during and after the election, particularly those that operate at pivotal sites of struggle like universalising access to healthcare, homes and energy, or responding to the climate crisis.

Methodology and technology

Our goal is to use this moment as an opportunity to establish a set of practices and software, or ‘methodology and technology’ as our comrades at the Zetkin Foundation like to say, that will strengthen these organisations’ relational power and persist after the General Election cycle is over. In doing so, we will enable them to focus on the quality of the relationships between members and ultimately facilitate more people to take up progressive collective action in the long-term.

Focusing on long-term goals

As The Social Practice Europe identified in their Organising at Scale Briefing Note, in order to build power through elections, it is crucial to prioritise medium and long-term goals like leadership development, building relationships with members and having a plan for those people after the election.

Another reference point is the book Prisms of the People , which gives really clear analysis and strategic recommendations from the US, where civil society and particularly community organising-based organisations are regularly involved in electoral work. Elections are a moment of potential crystallisation that builds power over the longer term.

To put this in a different way: our goal with this project is to help facilitate election mobilisation without the accompanying demobilisation.

Read the full post on the Common Knowledge blog

Owen Jones has just launched We Deserve Better, a campaign to send Starmer’s Labour a message, support Green and left-wing independent candidates, and build an alternative politics based on hope.

Gemma Copeland

Making a website

Light

Accessible

Structured

Fluid

Open

Further reading

Protocols

A conversation with La Foresta

Evening Class asks La Foresta:

La Foresta asks Evening Class

What kind of Internet do you want to live in?

Mushrooms from Epping Forest

Design & agency

Resurgence

Dissenting Ephemera

Context

Interoperability

Ephemerality

Maintenance

Layers

Activation

Update, 22.02.2020

Minjerribah textures

On worker cooperatives

What is a worker cooperative?

Traditional design studio structures

Being part of a worker co-op

Cooperation among cooperatives

Hyperlinks

Thinking about archives

A permeable archive

An active archive

A local archive

Time during quarantine

From pages to performances

Process-driven design

Designing for flux

Emergence

This stands as a sketch for the future

Background

Developing the aesthetic

Join!

All lichen, all coral

Cooperative evolution

Diversity and complexity

Collaborative survival

Strike!

Teach-outs

What’s next?

Further reading

Delete your account

Listen to these

Hyperlinks

Teaching digital

What I taught

Workshops

Week 1: What is the Internet?

Week 2: Digital Publishing

Week 3: The ABC of WWW

Week 4: HTML and CSS Basics

Week 5: CSS Compositions

Writing

What I learned

Llyn Cau

Making writing a habit

Hyperfocus

Setting intentions

Scatterfocus and recharging

Clouds

Kindle to Arena

Design Justice

Intersectionality in design

Structure

Practices

Pragmatism

Designing the future

Reading list

Bells