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.

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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.

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.)

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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

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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

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Related

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.