09. GM Weeknotes 22 & 29 Oct‘21📅
Hello, Welcome, this is a bumper week! 👋
If you want to catch up on previous weeks start over here. If this is your first time reading my weeknotes, welcome! If not thanks for coming back.
My weeknotes might be slowly morphing into fortnightly-notes as I have been struggling to find the time each week to write them! So this week is a bumper weeknotes from the last two weeks. It has been useful to reflect even over a longer period of time and it’s great to see achievements come together.
Current Projects💻
Future Experiences (Uni)
In this project you will explore and design speculative future worlds and experiences of symbiotic communities of practice leading towards sustainable and equitable health, well-being and care for people and the planet in ten years’ time.
w/e 22nd October
This project officially kicked off 3 weeks ago, here was the initial update. Future Experiences is a 12 week project, focused on Health, Wellbeing and Care in 2031 with a life-centred, symbiotic lens! My particular “lab” is Care, my “domain” is people and then I am focused on Symbiosis.
This week as a group we focused on the future and did a workshop with Studio Goodd run by Brian Proudfoot. This helped us to start exploring our worlds, designing artefacts for them and thinking about what 2031 might be like.
From our research we developed a future prototpia — 10 years from now is a short time to speculate on something wildly different. We imagine the world to be quite similar to today, with the same frictions and complexities that we have in 2021. We see our world as a post-normalcy world, full of hangovers from the pandemic in terms of health and care.
Some of the key parts of our world:
- Communities focused on care
- Care might be mandated by the government
- There will be a larger focus on preventative care
- People will be more connected both locally, globally and remotely
- Greenspaces and nature will become a luxury
- Care will be based on a two tiered system
We pulled all this together for an expert day, where we presented to 12 experts in 3 sessions online. We created an experiential “future tour” so they could see personas, artefacts & information about our future world and then give us feedback around care.
Reflecting on this week, it was so fast paced but we achieved a lot! I am not sure whilst I was doing all this I realised how much information and ideas we were accumulating as a team! The expert day was a brilliant way to test our initial world ideas and get feedback on some of the things we had created, even though this was online and we had to try and convey a physical idea digitally it gave us some rich ideas to take forward into the second week.
This is a really interesting concept, I would love to see a way of people being empowered to manage their own health, to think beyond the role of the NHS
This is a great idea, I think looking at things like social prescribing would be a great way to use some of the artefacts you have made.
Consider Supportive Capital — how can this be translated into tech!
w/e 29th October
This week kicked off with us iterating on our future world and nailing down our ideas in order to present a future world exhibit at the end of the week!
We decided to take our future all the way to 2081 and speculate on ideas as far as 50 years in the future bringing it back to 10 years in 2031, this really got us thinking more speculatively!
Stem Cell Youth! No Care Needed! Care Holidays in the Global South! Mandated Lifestyles! No religion! — some of the ideas we had.
It became clear that wanted we wanted to show for our future exhibit was not a “fully formed world” but an experiential exhibit that allowed people to understand the complexity and chaos of the future. Ultimately we built something that enabled the participants to make choices about care and then understand the world they were creating.
We developed personas that were frictional, people had to go inside our exhibit and with limited resources (because our future world wouldn’t have unlimited) they had to make to trade off and decide with eachother where the resources would go & ultimately what the world would look like together.
This enabled us to show a few things:
- A. that the future is complex
- B. that people’s decisions are not always the same & if we are more global/local we need to understand eachother more
- C. care to eachother is different and care decisions are complex
- D. the reality of the future is about trade-offs, balancing, making decisions that might affect different people in different ways.
- E. the future is about cause and effect — everything we do has a positive or negative impact on something else
Bloomberg (CCI)
I finished bringing all the information of our prototypes into case studies on Miro this week, which feels great! So good to see the work we have done in such a short space of time!
This week I have been pulling together an update of these prototypes and projects as part of the Bloomberg City Bid. It’s been a really interesting experience, distilling down so much work, impact and outputs into a narrative that will be read by people interested in the Bloomberg cities and the stuff they are doing.
You can see some of our work & other cities ideas in their latest update here.
Spontaneous Stories
This week I started to think about more spontaneous stories that we could capture at events. Iterating on the first one we did which was successful but didn’t end up being as spontaneous as we would have liked.
I started to develop ideas around a jam we have coming up on 7th November around food — how could we get people to tell us about their ideas on food or food futures. Our client talked about “Wanting to find out where people saw themselves in the food system” and “What people know about their own ability to change it”.
These are quite tough questions but I wondered if we might be able to make an interactive board that people could give us those ideas on.
Food Jam
on 7th November we are running a food jam with Glasgow Community Food Network and Glasgow School of Art students. This week we developed the jam design, looking at ways to engage people about the food system and understand their understanding. We have also created a way using “postcards for the future” for them to think about the future of food in their area and anonymously send these back to us at the event!
Reflection
This has probably been the busiest two weeks so far since I started doing weeknotes, looking over everything I have done on the GSA work and CCI work in two weeks is really good. I feel like sometimes it is hard to think you have been productive. I read an article recently about productivity dysmorphia which I think, especially online feels very real most of the time, so it is great to see everything here.
Other Projects 📌
Pottery
I have been finally glazing everything and developing a new shape of mug — you can follow my pottery progress now on my Instagram. The new shapes of mugs I am really enjoying — they are more angular than my previous batch. I am currently reading a book a friend lent me called Studio Ceramics, it was published in 1983 and the designs and shapes are SOO inspirational and different from today!
Glazing the milk jug prototypes
New mug forms (soon to be handled)
Listening, reading & watching… 👂 📘 👀
📘 No modernism without Lesbians — such an interesting read!
👀 Nurturing communities of care — Hilary Cottman’s talk in this is brilliant!
& that’s me!
