Today being my birthday, it seemed an appropriate time to think about the future.

A couple of days ago I read this article from Tara Sophia Mohr, centred around the idea that "There is another way". It struck me that phrase was making much the same point as the title of this blog – evoking the possibility of a world "as we don't know it".

The article seemed to be suggesting that the "other way" was something specifically feminine, something to be articulated by women:

‘The answer lies in women trusting themselves when something in them whispers, There is another way…

That feeling may arise when you look at our food system or energy consumption, or when you think about how we reward and punish children. "There is another way" may come up when you look at how people are managed at your workplace or when you observe how our government is operating.

… every woman knows that something very deep connects these moments. In each of them, she is experiencing a world organized by a different set of values, a different sensibility, a different way of seeing than her own. She is witnessing a world in which it seems as if someone decided, long ago, that the most important things should be cast to the margins, or relegated to the bottom of the priority list, because there is no room for them among the necessities of "the real world."’

On the one hand, this resonated with my recent thoughts about the masculine and feminine following the Uncivilisation festival. I do feel that we are living in a time in which breakthrough is as much a potential as breakdown, and that for the former to become as widely evident than the latter, feminine perspectives are crucial.

On the other hand, when I try to imagine the world as we don't know it, I don't think women have exclusive access to that emergent reality. My imaginings of the "unknown world" have been coalescing recently around a few themes, and these have been influenced as much, or more, by male visionaries and pioneers as female ones. But I'm curious about what the relationship between these "other ways" and the feminine might be.

The paths into the unknown world that I'm exploring are:

• Co-working and collective intelligence: it's become clearer to me lately that the important thing about Brixton Reuse Centre (or the Remakery, as it's soon to be renamed), is that it will be a co-working space, a space for co-creation, where the whole will be more than the sum of its parts. So I'm seeking out people involved in co-working spaces,makerspaces and hackerspaces, co-operatives, squats, and all sorts of shared and collaborative environments. I'm also pondering how this relates to the broader notion of "collective intelligence" – having taught Dragon Dreaming to TTB with the goal "to enable participants to work effectively and confidently with the power of collective intelligence", I keep in mind the question of how that "power" can be accessed. I recently joined a Facebook group called CoLucid, based on the premise that "in waking life we can become aware, as with becoming lucid in a dream, that we are the architects of our experience and reality to an extent far greater than ordinarily is realized. The idea of 'colucidity' is that we can do this even more powerfully together, and in this way be a collaborative and positive reality-generating engine for the experiential world as a whole. The aim of the CoLucid Group is to serve as a venue for exploring these ideas and pursuing this work collectively." But most attempts to access collective intelligence that I've come across apply some sort of "rules": for example in Dragon Dreaming there is the assumption that the group has gathered to focus on a specific "project", and then specific rules around what kinds of things should be said about the project at different stages (e.g. first dreams / visions, then plans / activities / tasks etc). So participants perhaps lose the freedom of choice that "lucidity" suggests. To really be colucid would require a very high degree of trust of the other participants.

• Urban Permaculture: I am currently doing this Urban Permaculture Design Course and looking at how permaculture principles could apply to the business model of BRC. The key seems to be identifying inputs and outputs of the various systems involved, and how they relate to each other. I'm particularly intrigued by the permaculture principle that "the problem is the solution", and how this might apply to the "problem" of waste.

• The new economy: an umbrella term for emergent economic forms based on increased sharing / commoning and multiple forms of currency / exchange.

All to be explored more in future posts. And I'm intrigued by the question of how they might be influenced by, and have relevance for, women in particular.

An event or conversation that stirs up such fundamental fears – and, perhaps despite itself, hopes – seems to call for an overarching narrative, a framework in which its inner tensions might be resolved. Perhaps the lack of one is part of the point of Uncivilisation; but I found myself feeling frustrated by the bittyness. As one person, I could only attend about one-third of the sessions and it was hit-or-miss whether I got to hear about the others. The participatory structure of the “What Next?” discussion felt needed; I wished the whole festival had had more of this open discussion, perhaps with plenaries between each break-out session so that the threads of various themes explored in different spaces could be brought together to share and cross-pollinate. (The widespread calls in the “What Next?” session for small, local meet-ups beyond the festival seemed to reflect this wish for more co-creation by participants.)

Subsequently, my brain has persistently been struggling to make sense of the whole experience, which is why I have been writing these posts.

If there is a narrative big enough to encompass the unfolding dynamics of the Dark Mountain project / movement, I suspect it can be summed up as one of initiation. I’ve got this notion not so much from the festival itself, but from some of Dougald’s writings – which also resonate strongly with my own experiences – such as the following: “our first class education had left us unprepared to resist the realities of the world it spat us into: we'd been taught to deconstruct everything, then left in pieces, like one half of an initiation. No one was offering to do the reconstruction, so we would have to do it for ourselves, along with whoever else we could find who seemed to be heading in the same direction.”

While much of the conversation at Uncivilisation revolved around a visible “outer” collapse – ecological destruction, extinctions, financial crisis, riots, overcrowded prisons, epidemics, etc – what remains harder to address directly (though clearly “pointed towards” by the emphasis on writing and call for new narratives) is its corollary of “inner” collapse, the crisis of meaning that is perhaps both the cause of, and exacerbated by, the visible collapse symptoms. 

On reading in one of Dougald’s recent articles that “the archetypal shamanic initiation involves the initiate’s body being cut to pieces, and then being reborn in a new body” (I also stumbled across an illustration of this process recently), I found myself beguiled by the notion that the entire crisis / collapse-of-civilisation scenario might be a kind of planetary-scale “shamanic initiation”.

As someone whose creative life has come to focus, for reasons I don’t fully understand, on the motif of reuse, recycling and remaking, I envisioned this “initiation” as quite a literal, physical experience – the earth’s body being cut to pieces (mined, extracted, deforested, fished and hunted), with the pieces sent criss-crossing her surface in all directions on a mind-boggling scale, all cut from their original contexts in a way that threatens every fragment with meaninglessness. Perhaps, I thought, the act of creative reuse – bringing one or more of these fragments of industrial detritus into a relationship of renewed mutual engagement with its human and non-human surroundings – becomes, when multiplied (to encompass the whole tide of civilisation’s detritus, if that were possible), that rebirth in a new body.

The inner corollary of the outer death-and-rebirth scenario (though perhaps after “rebirth”, inner and outer should no longer appear separate) is, I suppose, a remaking of language, or more broadly of meaning. The destruction we participate in has left language cut to pieces, fragments separated from their original animating spirit and in many circumstances bereft of the power to encompass and articulate the dimensions of our experience.

At university I experienced this on a visceral level – somewhat as evoked by Dougald’s description above, though in my case we weren’t so much “taught to deconstruct everything” as taught that everything had already been deconstructed so we didn’t even need to bother. Design education in the late 90s, postmodernism at its height, the end of history, relativism, a barrage of different lenses of interpretation amid an all-encompassing fog of meaninglessness. At the same, rapid and intense changes in my personal circumstances and various learning curves, the impact of which I felt powerless to express, to give voice to, since there was no framework in which to make sense of them. The sense of dumbness and fragmentation was traumatic – yet it did, in my experience, give rise to a kind of initiation. The extremity of alienation gave way, suddenly and surprisingly, to an experience of unity, timelessness, intense presence; as if by recognising the visible world and the concepts describing it as illusory, the reality of pure potential that underlies it became directly knowable. This state of grace couldn’t or didn’t last; perhaps it was too much for me at the time; I couldn’t interpret it or integrate it into the narratives I tried to inhabit with others. Nevertheless, it left me with an indelible impression that a state of apparent fragmentation and collapse is to be understood as a precursor to some kind of reunion or rebirth. It is with this expectation that I came to Dark Mountain; and so while collapse and fragmentation remain the dominant dynamics I feel that there is more to come.

If such a rebirth is to occur, though, it can only be emergent and not imposed. Hence, the existence of Dark Mountain, with its insistence on staying present, observant and receptive in collapse – not papering over the cracks or rushing forward to some kind of “positive action”, despite the wishes of some participants in the “What Next?” session – says to me that the narratives of rebirth that have emerged thus far (I’m thinking primarily of the Transition movement, in which I situate my own work) are not yet whole enough. Indeed, during the “new myths” session I found myself naming Transition as an example of a “Return to Eden” myth; not really fair, perhaps, but the fact that it is even possible to think it (and for me, a committed Transitioner!) in a way speaks for itself. I was struck by some of the “What Next” participants using the word “relief” to describe the feelings of environmental / sustainability activists (themselves and others) when encountering Dark Mountain for the first time. Relief at finding a space where it is possible to admit how bad things are, and how much worse they could get, and not to know what to do about it, and not to make “doing” the point. 

I suspect that the step beyond that, if there is one other than giving up, involves recognising (on a bodily and not merely intellectual level) that “bad”, “worse”, and “collapse” are after all concepts, and that we do not live among concepts but “at the still point of the turning world” (as quoted by Liminal), where the dance is.

Footnote: Mountain, Tower and Valley

As the Dark Mountain is such a central image here, I think it is worth some attention. Talking to Rashad who has explored in some depth the mythology of “the tower and the mountain”, I’ve sometimes felt that the use of the term “mountain” as a shorthand for a collapse-bound civilisation is insensitive to the reality of mountains; I wonder if a more appropriate image is that of the tower.

The phrase Dark Mountain is taken from a Robinson Jeffers poem that describes “the dance of the / Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.” To me it has always evoked the “peak” of consumption and of our civilisation’s “dream”: peak oil, peak everything.

Yet a mountain is a natural phenomenon, an organic structure that plays an essential role in ecosystems as, among other things, a watershed. Because of mountains, we have precipitation; clouds gather around mountain peaks and rain falls to nourish the land.

I’ve recently been browsing Charles Eisenstein’s book (readable online) The Ascent of Humanity, which features the image of the Tower of Babel prominently. The tower in the picture he uses has proportions reminiscent of a mountain, and is used as an image of more or less the same situation that Dark Mountain is referring to: a precariously built-up civilisation that has overstretched its limits and is beginning to crumble. Like Dark Mountain, he is also setting out to make space for a narrative that goes beyond both denial and despair.

Is it just a loose, even careless use of imagery that places a mountain here instead of a tower? Or does the mountain imply a different set of possibilities?

What if the phenomenon of our civilisation is as “natural” as a mountain? What if its peak actually serves a purpose – to bring down the rain (water, of course, being associated with the feminine and the soul) to feed the “Bright Valleys” and renew the wellsprings of our culture?

Rashad talks about “tower civilisations” and “mountain civilisations”, the latter being those that evolve their technologies in co-operation with natural processes (as people living in the harsh environment of a mountain must do) rather than in defiance of such processes as the architects of the tower attempt to do. In an optimistic scenario, perhaps the insights of the “Dark Mountain” are actually part of our journey towards becoming a “mountain civilisation”.

If the suggestion above about collapse (of physical and meaning-structures) constituting a kind of global “shamanic initiation” can be taken seriously, the naturalness of the peak would be implicit, although perhaps not evident until the initiation is complete. The Jeffers poem dwells in the tension between on the one hand the "grandeur" and "tragic beauty" inherent in the "disastrous rhythm" of the masses on their descent down the mountain, and on the other the "tearing pity for the atoms of the mass, the victims, the persons". An initiation, perhaps, would somehow unite these two paradoxical perceptions.

Lastly I would touch on the significance of the “Darkness", and the poetic reversal employed by Zoe who hosted the “Bright Valleys” circle. The mountain / valley, masculine / feminine symbolism is obvious; but traditionally darkness is yin (feminine) and brightness is yang (masculine). Robert Bly in “A Little Book on the Human Shadow” articulates the mythology of lightness and brightness that surrounds in particular the American notion of masculinity. With this in mind, a mountain that is dark perhaps implies a masculinity that has integrated the darkness of the feminine – her sorrow, knowledge of death, recognition of her / his own destructive power.

This conversation, mainly between Dougald and Vinay (with some evocative music from Ansuman Biswas and a few other short contributions) was perhaps the most thought-provoking, if inconclusive, of the sessions I attended at Uncivilisation.

Dougald said he was using the term “sacred” as a “placeholder”, but I didn’t get a clear impression of what it was holding a place for. Recently in the book Sacred Economics, I found what seemed a meaningful definition of the term: “the sacred… has two aspects: uniqueness and relatedness. A sacred object or being is one that is special, unique, one of a kind. It is therefore infinitely precious; it is irreplaceable… Unique though it is, the sacred is nonetheless inseparable from all that went into making it, from its history, and from the place it occupies in the matrix of all being.” I mention that definition by way of reference or comparison, because in fact neither of those aspects of sacredness was discussed here. Sacredness was not overtly defined, but the three sub-topics of the discussion – death, sex and revolution – seemed to imply that it has something to do with the great transitions of life: leaving the world, entering it, and transforming it. 

Death: Dougald’s mum spoke touchingly of dying patients she had nursed. I felt some resonance with the Kapalika sect that Vinay spoke of (and belongs to) who, by tradition, eat their meals from a skull belonging to one of their own former incarnations: the consciousness of death is always with them. I feel this has also been the case with me since the death of my dad when I was four left me with an early awareness of the reality of death that in some way implies the value of life, and brings with it an impatience to live as fully as possible, an intolerance of pretence and a willingness to defy conventional expectations. Vinay discussed reincarnation – in the sense that “what is different from other people dies, but what is the same as other people doesn’t die” (though the mention of the Kapalikas or the Dalai Lama recognising their own skulls from previous lifetimes seemed to imply that some recognisable “difference” had endured; this inconsistency wasn’t explained). The point seemed to be that recognising both the mortality of the self as you know it, and the immortality of those universal aspects of the self that you truly value, frees you to do things that are risky to the known self yet serve the universal self.

Sex, the second topic, seemed to highlight part of what was missing from the festival. No, I don’t mean that there should have been an orgy (though I was told Ansuman's musical performance later on in the Hexayurt might have been conducive to one!)... but that overall, the major focus of attention was clearly death in its widest sense: Uncivilisation, the death of civilisation; the Dark Mountain, the darkness of which evokes death, and from which we are assumed to be descending. There’s not much place for sex in this imagery, on the bare rocks of the mountain or among the collapsed ruins of the city. Fecundity, I suppose, starts to creep in when attention turns from Uncivilisation to the flipside of civilisation, the wild nature that is always its context (Paul Kingsnorth spoke the next day of the two themes of Dark Mountain being collapse and wildness / deep ecology – sex is inextricable from the latter, but wildness tended to play second fiddle to collapse, at least in my experience of the festival). Gender became a hot topic during the weekend, with much comment on the under-representation of women as shapers of the Uncivilisation narrative (inevitably perhaps for a movement started by two blokes in a pub). Raga Woods briefly took the stage during the sex discussion to talk about Sheela-na-Gig and her cunt – a much needed intrusion of the feminine.

The audience participation segment – in which I was among a group of 10 women who filed up to the front of the room to mingle with 10 men, then formed separate huddles on opposite sides of the room before turning to face each other – was an intriguing illustration of something that remained undefined. “You could cut the tension in here with a knife,” said Vinay as the two genders gazed across the room at each other (I’m not sure what the men had been doing – if it was the same as the women, they had a group hug – but somehow they were all looking unusually radiant and slightly flushed; I had a sense of tenderness towards them, as if they were a group of new initiates at a tribal ceremony). That tension implies creative potential; if the narrative of Uncivilisation is to move from breakdown to some sort of breakthrough, I suspect an engagement between the two genders (and other sets of polarities) will have something to do with it. It’s more or less a cliché that enlightenment involves the integration of the masculine and feminine, and that our overheated and brittle civilisation is the apogee of the masculine awaiting its feminine complement (or perhaps nemesis, as represented by the Baba Yaga in the tale of Ivashko Medvedko on the first night). Richard Tarnas (in the closing words of the epilogue to his book "The Passion of the Western Mind") perhaps puts this idea most succinctly: "Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of "man" himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome – and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine."

As a search for alternative narratives started by two people who are in many ways deeply embedded in the established paradigm (male, white, middle-class, highly educated) Uncivilisation seems to edge awkwardly around these issues, perhaps structurally unable to confront them directly. The Revolution part of the conversation was sketchy and unsatisfying – perhaps because the Sex part remained unresolved.

A week ago I attended Uncivilisation – the Dark Mountain festival – and it struck me as a significant enough punctuation-mark in the process of transition that I am experiencing (on both the individual and the social / cultural level) to merit some response here.

I think I expected some kind of breakthrough to occur, as if enough people together facing up to the precariousness of our circumstances would invite a collective illumination, making the creative potential of the situation suddenly clear. But instead it was an oddly mundane, even anti-climactic experience. There was a sense of “calm before the storm”, an odd contrast between the apocalyptic possibilities (and already widespread decline and disaster) that occasioned this event’s existence, and the peaceful rural bubble in which it took place. We seemed to remain in suspense, the threads of possibilities gently tugging in various directions; different views and approaches in tension with each other but jointly holding us in a kind of stasis that felt uncomfortably temporary.

To give a flavour of the content – or at least my experience of it – here’s a brief run-down of the sessions I attended:

• Ivashko Medvedko – a folk tale pitting a super-strong boy and his team of macho giants against the archetypal terrifying crone, Baba Yaga. It seemed significant that it’s only by descending to Baba Yaga’s underworld that he meets his true love and so – after rescuing her and defeating the witch – becomes a man in the upper world.

• Collapsonomics panel – people with experiences of collapses including the financial crises in Ireland and Iceland and the more wide-ranging one in Russia (where overcrowding in prisons, 45 men to a 15-man cell, and the consequent spread of diseases was a focus). It seems prison overcrowding is also becoming an issue here in the UK, particularly since the recent riots, and one of the speakers (an Irish former banker) prophesied a financial collapse here in 9 months’ time, casting a discordant sense of potential irrelevance over the more esoteric discussions that followed.

• Melanie Challenger’s writings “On Extinction” – a bleak topic, but I felt warmed by her efforts to re-educate herself (and so to be able to educate her son) on the names and features of native wildlife that her grandmother had known by heart but which by her generation were almost lost.

• “New myths for new worlds” with the writer Nick Hunt. This was probably the “keynote” session for me, being the most systematic attempt to tackle Dark Mountain’s mission of finding new narratives as the old ones crumble. It started with a run-down of existing narratives’ “greatest hits”: “Man Over Nature” with its Promethean pro-technology stance; “Return to Eden”, longing for tech-free innocence; and “Apocalyptic Collapse”, pushing the inevitability of doom. We brainstormed abundant examples of each, underlining what a powerful influence such oft-repeated myths must have in structuring our assumptions about what is possible and desirable. The last section, where we attempted in groups to invent some myths of our own, was entertaining, but too hurried to allow the deep-level restructuring that the first part seemed to call for.

• An intriguing discussion of “the sacred”, touching on Death, Sex and Revolution – of which more in a separate post.

• Poems from the Bard of Glastonbury, Dearbhaile Bailey – heartfelt and well-crafted verses, but in this context they felt a little too nice and conscience-stricken. The session was interrupted by a man in the audience going very grey and collapsing (with unfortunate poetic aptness) which made me want to retrain in first aid – fortunately there was a nurse in the audience, but my first thought was panic. An ambulance was called, but I’m glad to say he was looking OK the next day.

• Stomping folk-rock from the aptly named Merry Hell.

• Theatre in the woods from Dougie Strang under the name of Liminal. An evocative mix of ingredients that played on the notion of liminality in various ways: a chanted verse full of contradictions (“Late one night in the middle of the day, two dead boys got up to play. Side by side they faced each other, drew their swords and shot each other!”) was followed by a walk along woodland paths punctuated with images that blended human and animal – lightboxes scratched with Picasso’s Guernica, cave paintings, Inuit and Minoan images all involving animals, an actor dressed as a stag, and a naked man curled on the forest floor around a lightbox containing a deer’s skeleton. Finally a recitation of some famous lines from Eliot, again laden with paradoxes (“at the still point of the turning world, neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards, at the still point, there the dance is”) and actors tracing with their fingers the outline of mazes that glowed red through the soil of the clearing. For me the amount of preparatory work and technology visibly involved somehow undermined the sense of magic and presentness; but the themes it played on, of paradox pointing beyond where the mind can go, brought a sense of needed relief from the conceptual strain of holding the idea of collapse in mind.

• “What next for Dark Mountain?” As the audience contributed to this discussion, it became apparent that different people were there for different reasons and in some cases had different hopes for the future of the project. If there had been more opportunities for participatory discussion, perhaps these various dynamics would have had more chance to converge and co-evolve; as it was they seemed to stay un-integrated. I’ll explore this more in another post.

• “Coming Home to Bright Valleys”, a circle conversation hosted by Zoe Young with opportunities to share stories of experiences with animals and the wild; I only heard part of it but all of these stories were touching and potent, and in their gentle jarring on our conventional understanding of reality, seemed to open onto wider vistas of possibility and unexpressed feeling.

• A session of improvisatory games with Alex Fradera, drawing on practices from improv theatre but suggesting possibilities of relating in wider contexts – for example, practising the different ways a conversation can go depending on whether one responds to the other’s suggestions with a no, a yes, or a “yes, and…”

"Your life's project is the way in which while you are changing yourself you simultaneously change the world." John Croft, founder of Dragon Dreaming

I recently hosted a couple of workshops for Transition Town Brixton (TTB) offering an introduction to Dragon Dreaming, a framework for creating and developing new projects collaboratively.

Back in February I completed a weekend training course with its founder, John Croft, and was keen to share the tools and concept I'd learnt that could usefully be applied to TTB's projects in Brixton. My aim for the evening was "to enable participants to work effectively and confidently with the power of collective intelligence", and I think Dragon Dreaming really does support this.

I put together an overview of the Dragon Dreaming process, which has 4 stages: Dreaming, Planning, Doing, and Celebrating. These stages take a project from being a concept in an individual’s mind, to a plan of action shared by a group, to a reality that engages with its community and environment, and is enjoyed and celebrated by those taking part and experiencing it.

The first workshop (29 June) included opportunities to practice two key methods for the initial stages of Dragon Dreaming:

• Dreaming Circle (for stage 1 – a deep visioning process, setting out what will make a project worthwhile for all participants)
• Karabirrdt (for stage 2 – a diagram used for project planning, scheduling and budgeting within a group)

The latter stages of the process are more flexible, so the second workshop (27 July) was based on participants sharing their own experiences and learning from each other, within the framework set out by Dragon Dreaming: 

• The four stages of Doing: implementing your plans, management and admin, monitoring progress, and re-examination
• The four stages of Celebration: acquisition of new skills, recognising transformative results, discerning wisdom, and re-evaluation

To help participants apply the methods in their own work, I made some handouts summarising Dragon Dreaming in simple terms, and in the spirit of accessibility I'd like to share these here. Please note these are my own interpretation of Dragon Dreaming, which I have not yet discussed with John Croft (though I intend to). They are based closely on the training I received from him and the original fact sheets, but drastically simplified so may have lost something in "translation". If you're deeply interested in the method it's worth going back to the source.

Here are my quickie versions:

Click here to download:

Introduction_to_Dragon_Dreaming_and_Further_Resources.doc (976 KB)

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Click here to download:

Introduction_to_Dragon_Dreaming_and_Further_Resources.doc (976 KB)

Click here to download:

ABOUT_DRAGON_DREAMING.doc (73 KB)

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Click here to download:

ABOUT_DRAGON_DREAMING.doc (73 KB)

Click here to download:

How_to_hold_a_Dreaming_Circle.doc (37 KB)

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Click here to download:

How_to_hold_a_Dreaming_Circle.doc (37 KB)

Click here to download:

How_to_plan_a_project_using_a_Karabirrdt.doc (75 KB)

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Click here to download:

How_to_plan_a_project_using_a_Karabirrdt.doc (75 KB)

Click here to download:

DOING_-_key_questions.doc (40 KB)

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Click here to download:

DOING_-_key_questions.doc (40 KB)

Click here to download:

CELEBRATING_-_key_questions.doc (43 KB)

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Click here to download:

CELEBRATING_-_key_questions.doc (43 KB)

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EMPOWERED_FUNDRAISING_–_summary.doc (48 KB)

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Click here to download:

EMPOWERED_FUNDRAISING_–_summary.doc (48 KB)

For further information, visit the Dragon Dreaming site – I highly recommend their training courses. Materials available on the site are extensive, but a challenge to navigate – they include 32 fact sheets, all worth exploring if you've got time for lots of reading. If not, my top two are:

For a thorough introduction: Fact Sheet 7 HOW TO BUILD AN OUTRAGEOUSLY SUCCESSFUL PROJECT

For key tools: Fact Sheet 12 DREAMING CIRCLE, and Fact Sheet 19 PLANNING A PROJECT - HOW TO CREATE A KARABIRRDT

Roles and Realisations for Creative Practitioners

Outline of a presentation I'll be doing at Camberwell College of Arts on 11 May 2011. 

When we think of a design process, we typically envision a movement upwards and forwards. An S-curve perhaps: starting with the gradual building up of knowledge through research; progressing through a steep learning curve as designs are sketched, worked up, prototyped, tested, iterated; steadying into a plateau as the product reaches its final form ready for manufacture. The Design Council's model of the design process describes four stages: Discover (identifying user needs and forming an initial concept), Define (interpreting the concept and aligning it to business objectives), Develop (iterating and testing solutions) and Deliver (final testing, approval, launch, and evaluative feedback).

I was trained as a designer, but my work is not perhaps what most people would think of as design. If I have to put a label on it, I might say community activism, social entrepreneurship or social innovation. Currently I'm involved in setting up Brixton Reuse Centre, a local hub for enterprise, training and creative projects based on reuse of waste materials. In the last couple of years I've run two pop-up shops showcasing creative recycling and skill-sharing, and co-founded a local currency, the Brixton Pound. (Before that I actually did work in the design world, but I was curating exhibitions – with my friends at [re]design – rather than designing things myself.)

I quite often wonder how and why I ended up doing all these things that I wasn't really trained or qualified to do – and frankly, am making up as I go along, in collaboration with others, and with varying degrees of success. 

And I think I've come up with a hypothesis: maybe what I'm doing is Design for the Back Loop.

What is the back loop? The term comes from the work of C. S. Holling, an ecologist, whose theory of "Panarchy" – a way of "understanding transformations in human and natural systems" – highlights the existence of multiple, nested "Adaptive Cycles" within ecological and social systems. An adaptive cycle has a front loop and a back loop. The front loop comprises two broad phases: Growth and Conservation. During the Growth phase, the various species in an ecosystem compete for space and resources, and in some cases develop interdependent relationships with each other. During the Conservation phase, the results of the competition are in and the relationships have matured, and the system stays basically steady, within its regular seasonal cycles. It's easy to draw an analogy with the Develop and Deliver stages of the design process described above.

The back loop also comprises two phases, known as Release and Reorganisation. But when I tried to map the Design Process onto the Adaptive Cycle, I realised something was missing. The Discover and Define phases seem to align with what Holling calls Reorganisation – which I'll discuss more in a minute. But nothing in the design process as typically defined bears much resemblance to the preceding phase, Release.

Release is what the economist Schumpeter termed creative destruction. In an ecosystem, "a tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients are suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, drought, insect pests or intense pulses of grazing." Closer to home, a young arts professional, Cat Harrison, recently commented that the Release phase "reminds me of that visceral image that sinks in everytime I hear the words 'economy in freefall'. To quote [the poet] Lemn Sissay 'I jumped off the bungee bridge and I hadn’t measured the rope'."

Notice I said design for the back loop, not design of the back loop. I certainly don't mean that I, or anyone else, would intentionally design the situation of economic freefall in which we find ourselves. But thinking more broadly about systems and societies, there is certainly a role for creative practitioners – perhaps more often artists than designers – as what has been termed Disruptors, those who "draw attention to chaos and uncertainty" in a system through revealing its "dissonance, entropy [and] degradation", and thus (albeit indirectly) "highlighting the potential for new growth".

In fact, there is more than a hint of that role in my own work: both with [re]design and now with Brixton Reuse Centre, I've ended up engaging a lot with artists, designers and organisations that use waste as their raw materials – waste, the very visible symptom of "entropy and degradation" in our society. They transform it into products of use and aesthetic value, but in many cases its identity as waste material remains recognisable, drawing attention to the dysfunction of the system that created it.

These practitioners embody the philosophy outlined by Barcelona's Drap-Art Festival of Recycling Art: 

"The habits of using and throwing away should be redirected to the realization that nothing disappears, everything transforms. During the twentieth century, characterized by increased urbanization in a world more and more dehumanized and consumerist, waste material becomes a recurring element in some of the most significant artistic movements. Both Duchamp and the Dadaists, as well as Miró and Tàpies, incorporate found objects in their works. Also Pop Art, Arte Povera, Fluxus and the Nouveaux Réalistes, among others, use apparently worthless everyday objects and waste to symbolize the growing materialism and objectification of human beings. 

Now that a desolate panorama, caused by an unsustainable global development, presents itself with increasing clarity, Drap-Art finds it imperative to encourage new generations to use recycling as a resource not only for criticism but as a tool, available to everyone, for the transmutation of protest into positive proposals, which are the seeds of a more sustainable world."

But I would say the emphasis of my work lies more in the second phase of the back loop, Reorganisation, also known as the "exploration phase". As Cat Harrison puts it, at the end of the Release phase's bungee jump "We will know who has safely bounced, who has skimmed the ground, and who will need to be scraped off it. Whatever happens, we will all need to change."

What does that change look like? In an ecological context it can be described this way: 

"Following a period of destruction a system's boundaries and internal connections are tenuous. Reorganization can involve the transient appearance or expansion of organisms that begin to capture opportunity.

Such a loosely defined system can easily lose or gain resources and actors. During this period a system can easily be reorganized by small inputs. These can arise from growth of previously suppressed vegetation, from germinating seeds stored in seed banks accumulated in the past, or the migration of plants and animals from neighbouring areas. It is at this time when exotic species of plants and animals can easily invade and dominate an ecosystem. During this period the future organization of the system can be shaped by chance events, and a system can reorganize into a new type of organization...

The new system that emerges from these interactions may replicate a previous system organization or it may be something entirely new. The lack of systemic connection and control makes it difficult to predict what type of organization will form."

This kind of landscape, I think, is very much the home territory of the Transition Network, the grassroots movement that forms the context for the work I've been doing for the last two years in Brixton. Both the Brixton Pound and Remade in Brixton (the group that gave birth to the Brixton Reuse Centre project) formed under the umbrella of Transition Town Brixton – as have several other groups including the Food & Growing Group (who support local growing projects), Brixton Energy Group (who plan to set up an energy co-op, including generating renewable energy locally), Community Draught Busters (who insulate and draughtproof homes), and Velocal (a bike delivery service for Brixton market).

Brixton is just one of about 300 official Transition initiatives in the UK and around the world, and thousands more are shown on the Transition map of the world as "mulling" (considering becoming one). A Transition initiative is usually started by a group of local residents in a given area. Each local Transition group uses loose guidelines and methodologies provided by the co-ordinators of the wider Transition Network, but there is very little hierarchical command. Instead the whole network self-organises in pursuit of a common purpose – to find practical answers to the question "how can we make our community stronger and happier as we deal with the impacts of peak oil and economic contraction while at the same time urgently reducing CO2 emissions?" 

Transition was born from the converging crises of climate change and peak oil (or more broadly, diminishing resources) but it is a positive, solution-focused movement. In this it is new and distinctive from the environmental movements of my parents' generation, which were typically focused on raising awareness of problems (an example of the Disruptor role mentioned above) – protesting and campaigning in the belief that someone else, usually government or big business, must make a change. Transition instead works with an assumption of decentralised, distributed power, the power of individuals and communities to change their own lives. The Transition concept was born in 2005, paralleling the emergence of "Web 2.0" and the peer-to-peer social networks that have become such a key feature of the way we now communicate and form opinions. Local Transition initiatives springing up around the world may be imagined as the seeds of "previously suppressed" species (varieties of thought and action) sprouting into life during the Reorganisation phase, as the obsolescence of previous systems is revealed through the symptoms of peak oil, climate change, economic disruption and contraction. It’s this self-starting quality that the government’s “Big Society” agenda seeks to harness for the public good.

What is the role of designers, artists and other creative practitioners in all this? Well, the early stages of the design process – Discover and Develop – are closely aligned to the Reorganisation phase.

At this time of transition and radical uncertainty, there is an important role for creative practitioners in researching and discovering what they can about the niches in which they find themselves, in order to identify opportunities that conventional wisdom would not have made apparent. Artists' and designers' skills of probing and provoking, exploring and recording, recognising and interpreting the environments and situations around them through visual and experiential representation, all play a role in making visible, and engageable, resources and potentials that were previously hidden.

Equally important, the development of new solutions can be speeded up, diversified and enriched by applying art and design skills to the visualisation and prototyping of possibilities that don’t yet exist. People begin to imagine new stories, new ways of living, when creative practitioners offer them the experience of artefacts, services and organisational forms that will form part of those stories.

Ultimately, your role as an artist or designer can only be determined by you, and it will be shaped by your personal strengths and passions. Some people become designers because they really like making stuff; others are happier putting together things that other people have made. Some people are constantly generating new ideas; some enjoy connecting and synthesising others’ ideas into a larger whole. You might enjoy working at any scale, from a tiny accessory to a whole society. Get to know your own patterns and preferences – but don’t let them limit you: you are bigger and more complex than any image of yourself! Develop your strengths, but also expect that you will sometimes need to work outside your comfort zone to achieve your visions. Having said that, don’t try to do everything yourself – ask for help at every opportunity. If you have good ideas – or even no ideas, but well expressed problems – people will want to help you.

The phase of Reorganisation we are currently going through – which became evident (from my perspective) in 2009, following the “Release” of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent surge in unemployment, and is presumably due to intensify with the current round of cuts – is, from an ecological systems perspective, a promising if risky context for emerging creative practitioners: “a welcoming environment for experiments, for the appearance and initial establishment of entities that otherwise would be out-competed. As in good experiments, many will fail, but in the process, the survivors will accumulate the fruits of change.”

Looming on the horizon is the potential for a bigger “Release” than we have yet seen – a collapse of civilization as we know it, from the combination of systemic instability and diminishing resources that the Transition approach attempts to address, but is yet to prove it can successfully resolve. The theory of adaptive cycles notes that “the Alpha [Reorganisation] phase is the condition for the greatest uncertainty – both the greatest chance of unexpected forms of renewal as well as unexpected crises… This is a key element in Nature Evolving – the condition where, momentarily, novel reassortments of species in ecosystems can invent new possibilities that are later tested.”

Should the end of the world as we know it come to pass, I’ve been advised by a man who knows (John Croft from the Gaia Foundation of Western Australia, who carried out a comparative study of “dark ages” in different cultures following civilisational collapse) that there are 7 key tips to survive a dark age. Apparently, all of these were done in Ireland, particularly by monks, during the last dark age after the fall of the Roman empire – and those Irish monasteries that had preserved knowledge and creativity then sent emissaries who became the catalyst for the re-seeding of civilisation across Europe, such as the building of the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages. I’d like to leave you with this as a brief for your creative practice – actually, a number of different and potentially quite inspiring briefs to choose from:

1. Build community

2. Simplify – to create time 

3. Maximise creativity

4. Maximise non-violent resolution of conflict at all scales

5. Preserve knowledge in a variety of forms

6. Re-sacralize the world – develop inclusive spiritualities

7. Create a new financial / economic system that supports the other 6

Good luck with your experiments and stay in touch!