Category: community
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Design as a Demonstrator
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Over in West London, there is a building whose purpose is to start things, even though it will never be finished. It is The Stone Demonstrator, an installation by the Design Museum and Future Observatory team which is to act as a prototype that starts conversations in the building industry about the what, where and…
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More time than reasonably expected
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Reflections on the quote from magician Teller – “Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” – and how it applies to community work.
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Sussex is a Thing
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I was invited this week to give a short talk on day one of the Sussex & Brighton Devolution Policy Sprint, which was being held to start exploring requirements for the formation of a Mayoral Combined County Authority for the local government areas of East Sussex County Council, West Sussex County Council, and Brighton and…
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Letter from a Steward
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I met Hardeep Kaur (or H) through a The STEPS Collective event in London that Chris Daniel shared to the Long Now London community he is a steward of. In subsequent conversations, H started talking about a Social Moonshot she was launching called Age of the Steward, and asked if I would be interested in writing for…
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Deep Time Walk with The STEPS Collective
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Last Friday (12th Sept), Pins Brown and Sam Jarman led a Deep Time Walk for The STEPS Collective around Devil’s Dyke on the South Downs near Brighton. A Deep Time Walk is a 4.6km walk through 4.6bn years. Each one metre step, therefore, represents a million years. Thanks to the UK weather, it certainly felt…
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Making green spaces visible for communities
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Today I quickly put together a timelapse video using Google Earth Pro, a free-to-download piece of software from Google. This was for our local nature group, to visualise not just the housing development that has happened around here, but also to what has actually happened to some of the farmland that has been rewilding over…
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Reflections on Innovation & Future Thinking
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Toban Shadlyn and John V Willshire Introduction We are approaching the tenth anniversary year of the Innovation and Future Thinking course at IED Barcelona. In the summer of 2024, it will run from Monday 9th July for two weeks. Usually, around this time, we write an explanation of what the theme will be for the…
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Punk Participative Principles
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Yesterday was the third edition of The Steps Collective, which Lizzie Shupak and I took up the speaking reins for. I brought two things together; my experience at Future Days in Lisbon during the last week, and a talk on Participative Futures I explored earlier this year. I’ve uploaded the slides below too, if you…
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Future Days – City Scanning
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As part of the first day at Future Days in Lisbon this week, I was invited to conduct a city scanning exercise Futures Days is a festival for futures and systemic thinkers, innovation-seekers, creatives, purpose-driven organizations and policy-makers to collectively create the futures of urban lives, equitable societies through and beyond technology. Working with the…
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Testing the Community Power Compass
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A year or so after first writing about the Community Power Compass, I was invited by Val Elefante to deliver a seminar on it for The Metagovernance Project this week. Metagov (for short) is an interdisciplinary research collective looking at standards and infrastructure for digital self governance. The video of the seminar will be up…
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How to rewild a new garden
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You may be thinking you’ve stumbled into the wrong blog. And I can understand why. Smithery is a strategic design practice, which admittedly encompasses many things. But never gardens. What follows, however, is a documentation of our personal experience of a nature-based design intervention, and then some broader systemic thoughts on what might have worked…
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Hanging with your prosthetic selves
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This week I read Zoe Scaman’s latest report on communities; there probably aren’t many (if any) people paying as much attention at the intersections behind brands, agencies and whatever community is in these conversations today. If that’s your bag, do check it out. It did spur one particular thought in my mind; are we still…