I received a really interesting email from Radko Kovachev at the Institute for Circular Economy in Bulgaria, asking about how to apply the Regenerative Design Field Kit which they had bought to a fascinating project they are working on.
Rather than just email back, we agreed to put this up as blog post, so others can benefit from this too when they’re using the kit. Over to Radko…
We would like to organise a workshop using the Regenerative Design Field Kit for the transformation of Sofia’s abandoned Central Freight Railway Station.
This initiative aims to revitalise the space through a series of exhibitions, installations, events, and discussions focused on cultural heritage and sustainable urban development. We will organise an event and explore the area with the cards.
Special attention will be given to the station’s history and the development of railway transport in Bulgaria. The event aims to foster dialogue among citizens, experts, and institutions about the long-term transformation of the station and its surrounding area.
This project is part of the international initiative “New Inherit“, which involves five European organisations exploring sustainable strategies for repurposing industrial heritage sites into modern cultural spaces.
Great project, right?
How might I think about using the field kit for this then?
Firstly, think about the two main parts to the kit.
There is the Obliquiscope, which is a simple tool to help you examine the present. This is super useful in an existing complex place like this. I would take an initial wander around with the core project time, point it at things you see and ask the questions on the Obliquiscope.
(There is only one in each field kit, of course, but we made them available individually too if you want a greater ratio of Obliquiscopes to people in workshops.)
Quite quickly, you will find yourself guessing rather than knowing.
This is a good thing, but only if you lean into the fact that these are guesses. Your next job is to use those guesses as a research plan; where might you find the real answers, or who else can you contact who might have them?
Whilst the event itself aims to “foster dialogue among citizens, experts, and institutions”, you might now have a rationale to invite some people to participate earlier in conversation and maybe even co-design of the event – e.g. what do they know about the place that feel is worth drawing attention to? Additionally, if you can get people co-designing the event in this way, they will look at both parts of the Regenerative Design Field Kit and suggest new ways in which to use it from their perspective and experience.
As a side note, the Assemblage Space framework we use also points that the past is as important as the future in this kind of work. The reflection of the probable, plausible, possible and preposterous from the Futures Cones is perhaps the tangible, intangible, remembered and forgotten.
The third principle of Assemblage Space is to always ‘seek other views’, which shifts the locus of the view through both time cones. Looking forward, what seems preposterous to you might feel very, very probably to other people. Similarly, they will have tangible proof of a past that is forgotten for you.
Once have examined the present, and uncovered some of the past, the forty question cards help you think about the different futures that may unfold, and how you can do things differently in the present to push into optimistic, regenerative futures.
The question cards were generated by taking the four roles from the Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework, and pairing them with the capabilities from The RSA’s 10Cs framework of capabilities for the 21st century.
For an event as described, it occurs to me that there are three different ways you can set up teams to explore the space, before coming together and highlighting the most interesting and provocative parts of each team’s discussions.
Most obviously, there are the four main suits; Systems Thinker, Leader and Storyteller, Connector and Convenor, and Designer and Maker. You could divide participants into four large groups, give them a suit each, and ask them to find the best location to ask each of the questions.
A subtler approach would be to set up smaller teams based are the capabilities (care, critical thinking etc). You could give them a precise definition of what you want that capability to represent in this project, and then give them the four related questions to wander the site and discuss the four questions depending on what they see.
This also gives you an opportunity to put interesting people in small groups to facilitate conversation, and could be really rich as an experience for participants.
Finally, on the top right of each card, there’s a little symbol; some of them have an individual, some of them a little group, and some of them a picture of the world. These represent ‘Me, We and World’, and came from an iteration of The RSA’s work on the capabilities when I was talking to Andy Thornton and Jahnvi Singh about them a couple of years ago.
You could gather together those cards by icon, and give them to participants to think of opportunities at a scale that they are either familiar or unfamiliar with.
I hope this is a useful exploration, for Radko especially, but also everyone else.
It goes without saying that thinking about this kind of thing is also one of my favourite kinds of work, so if you want to plan something like this for a different place, do get in touch.
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