Designing pacts of collaboration that catalyse imagination into action

Examples of the beautiful Gifts for the High Street created by the student Time Rebels as part of this collaboration

A dive into the conditions for pacts of collaboration that catalyse imagination into action.

Shared insights by Jo, Holly, Mat and Lorna from the CoLab Dudley — Birmingham City University co.Lab High Street 2031 collaboration.

In this note we re-visit the navigation tool the Imagination Sundial; reflect upon the pact conditions in our recent collaboration; and finally turn these insights into design questions to help ensure future collaborations are intentional in creating the conditions to catalyse imagination into action.

As we continue our journey with local makers, artists and creatives in nurturing new urban imaginaries for Dudley High Street we have been testing out a new navigation tool — it is called The Imagination Sundial.

The Imagination Sundial is concerned with the very intentional design of experiments to build and animate imaginative capacity to build an alternative and abundant future. Developed by Rob Shorter you can read more about the Sundial here.

One of the four sections of the sundial is called Pacts. These are the collaborations and relationships that help catalyse imagination into action. In our early testing of the sundial we reflected in our lab note that:

“As a lab we have always prioritised and invested our energy in building relationships and network weaving. Our principles ‘Connections matter’ and ‘Move at the speed of trust’ have helped us hold this focus upon a quality of relationships rooted in trust, care, respect, abundance and reciprocity. Shallow and transactional relationships, (commonplace on High Streets up and down the country) won’t support the emergence of a culture that makes a kinder, more connected and creative High Street possible. As we nurture and build connections with people we trust to become partners in this work the Sundial helps us root that partnership in the conditions for meeting imagination halfway to enable action. This framing helps orientate those relationships and who is drawn to this work”

One such relationship that has drawn upon the sundial is the pact with Co.LAB called High Street 2031. Co.LAB is a collaborative laboratory and learning module embedded within the Birmingham School of Architecture & Design at Birmingham City University (BCU). High Street 2031 is the outcome of a uniquely collaborative and emergent design process led by Dr Matthew Jones and Professor Hannah Vowles. Mat, Hannah and the students generously embraced CoLab’s invitation to be Time Rebels — the results are pretty special, the experience has been all together joyful. [You can read our lab notes about this High St experiment here.]

The students have co-designed their visions in small teams and collaborated with us as a social lab on the High Street to understand, connect with, and dream about Dudley High Street 2031.

This many layered creative process has used desk research, exploration of critical urbanism texts, creative deep mapping methods, the creation of a ‘gift’ for the High St, connections and conversations with other Time Rebels via a digital Human Library, navigation using the Imagination Sundial and our lab principles, collage, storytelling, poetry, and much more besides.

The results of the convergence of such a talented multi-disciplinary cohort journeying together through this creative and collaborative process are deeply hopeful new stories of place.

A quote from Rob Hopkin’s blog introducing the Imagination Sundial: https://www.robhopkins.net/2020/06/30/introducing-the-imagination-sundial/

Below we have come together and taken a moment to pause and reflect upon the qualities and conditions that were designed in or emerged in this joyful pact that nurtured imagination and action in abundance.

These insights are really valuable to us as a lab creating an emergent infrastructure for nurturing conditions for imagination and other abundant pacts to bloom and take action. As ever, we experiment and share our learning out loud to invite conversation and for others to build upon. The journey to a regenerative future High Street is a shared one.

So we asked ourselves the question …

“What are the qualities of the BCU-CoLab Dudley collaboration that point towards what it means to build pacts that nurture our imaginative capacity?”

Here are our notes in response to this question:

• Trusted starting relationship between Holly and Mat & Hannah.
• Holly’s meaningful lived experience of the co.LAB module meant she knew it could be a good fit with our ecosystem and lab ways of working.
• A genuine exchange of ideas, deep listening and co-design. Mat’s deep listening to the lab ways of working and our principles — then responding creatively and thoughtfully with the use of and designing in common tools (e.g. imagination sundial, emergence) and ideas (e.g. gifting, regenerative futures) into the module. There is also a good deal of common ground in terms of the students’ readers and the ideas/authors we have used in our thinking as a lab on the High St (e.g. Richard Sennett, Daniel Christian Wahl, Julian Dobson). In addition, Mat has been an enthusiastic and generous learning leader in sharing ideas and learning resources we didn’t know about. There was a generosity of sharing readers, photos, and stories by the lab team and other Time Rebels, which was particularly invaluable for the students who were unable to visit the site.
• Despite not being able to visit the High Street in person this was still a shared enquiry rooted in place with an exchange of ideas through Google maps, High St reports, Digimap, and web research being supplemented with insights shared by the lab and Time Rebels who know the High St. In non-lockdown circumstances, our pacts would be even more rooted in the lived reality of the High Street but this pact has also shown the power of virtual platforms in building this understanding of the essence of place.
• Use of collaborative digital tools to see the work grow, with the students working out loud on Miro/ slack. This enabled us to add ideas, resources, make connections, weave time rebels together & show gratitude (working to our timescales and theirs). However, Teams made more human connection with the students harder (we can’t use chat, see their faces, use emoticons etc).
• Sharing the gifts and future visions with other Time Rebels has inspired gifts of their own for the High St (Marlene’s dance, Rick’s poem and collage). Gifting is an act that binds creatives to the High St more deeply and creates points around which to connect to other Time Rebels in the ecosystem. The BCU student learning was weaved into other parts of the ecosystem through the printing of gifts, and sharing ideas / images in other project Slack channels.
• The flexibility of the design of the module created space to experiment, share, and collaborate. Co.LAB is a vehicle for a broad range of projects that seek to directly engage students with the dynamic context of the region and use transdisciplinary design strategies to produce conceptual ideas and experimental design approaches in collaboration with partner organisations. By embracing more unorthodox methods, we can test the extremes of disciplinary conventions and generate provocative responses to disrupt conventional design thinking.
• Active reflective learning on the process, and the relationships behind this, is designed into the module and enables deeper connection and empathy between the students, the students and us as a lab, the students and the High St, the High St and the more than human.
• It clearly links the learning and doing, creates space for rapid prototyping, and it builds in multiple disciplines.
• It started from their personal story of High Streets and built outwards towards more collective shared stories.
• Careful documenting and sharing out loud of the collaboration experience along the way by Holly and Jo.
• Multiple connection points with the lab team increased flexibility throughout the collaboration.
• Organic building and weaving of connections for longer term collaboration — learning exchanges, co-writing, future student work, follow up celebration events to share ideas with ground crew.
• The Time Rebel framing allows room for a range of levels of activity and connection to the work, but also makes the students part of something bigger from the start.
• The collaboration has again lifted up the power of visual communication in building connection, conveying complex ideas and nurturing inspiration for alternative high street futures. Co-creating and gifting visual assets helps with inspiring and weaving in future high street narratives.
• The open brief from CoLab Dudley and the framing of the learning module meant this pact echoed the lab focus upon process and journey not just outcomes (e.g. the focus upon co-design). Note this is hard! For students this openness was a particular challenge; they were used to clearly identified outputs. The focus on process and an evolving approach took some getting used to but its value became evident as the project progressed.
• We learnt more as a lab team about how we tell our story — how we can share what we are as a lab, why platforms, the wider high street context — these learning assets have been used in building other connections, sharing.
• There is something in the pace of the module that generates energy. The challenge is then how do we build on that energy, the ideas and work created long term? This led to us exploring future creative touchpoints in the pact that build on the energy and imaginings of this work. We are now exploring CoLab/Co.LAB alumni co-designing and leading High Street summer schools! It would be interesting to compare the pace and energy of this with the weekly Co.LAB sessions.
• There is much in this pact that lifts up lab principles ‘use nature’s guidebook’, ‘join the dots’ and ‘be good ancestors’, perhaps more so than other recent projects. Has this changed its intention? Does it make it more aligned to time rebel practice?
• Prominence in use of narrative by Mat and the students.
• Students chose this project from a selection of others, indicating they are already aligned with this approach or interested in the context.

We have then taken these insights and asked …

“How might we try to intentionally design these qualities into future pacts to catalyse imagination into action?”

We have revisited the Imagination Sundial to cluster these pact qualities according to the sundial segments:

• Space — the mental and emotional space that expands our capacity to imagine
• Place — gathering places that provide platforms for collective imagining
• Practices — that connect us and change our frame of possibility

What this layering on of the sundial conditions shows us is how crucial it is to intentionally design these conditions for imagination into our pacts, not just into the design of programmes, projects or policies. It also gives helpful practical examples and design questions to ask in terms of each of the sundial segments for future designs, which in turn makes them less abstract and so more meaningful as a tool.

Design questions from our pact insights relating to: “Space — the mental and emotional space that expands our capacity to imagine”

1. Have we built a trusting relationship as a foundation to collaboration? What does that look like/ feel like? How might we help that emerge? — this relates to sundial segments of connecting, of feeling safe and welcome
2. Can we create a shared meaningful lived experience so we might test if we are a good fit for each other? What does it mean to be part of our ecosystem and our ways of working? — this relates to sundial segments of opening and permission
3. Have we both created the conditions for a genuine exchange of ideas, deep listening and co-design? Is there evidence of deep listening, creative and thoughtful responses, generous sharing of related ideas and learning resources? — this relates to sundial segments of opening, permission and welcome
4. Is there an embracing of transparency and is working out loud normalised? Is there a feeling of permission and invitation to: add ideas, resources, make connections, weave people together, show gratitude and share ‘mistakes’ or discarded ideas as part of the creative process? — this relates to sundial segments of openness, connecting and permission
5. Is flexibility designed into the shared endeavour in order to create space to experiment, share and fully collaborate? — this relates to sundial segments of openness, connecting, feeling safe, welcome and permission
6. Is active reflective learning designed into the work enabling deeper connection and empathy between the space, the people, and other beings? — this relates to sundial segments of openness, permission and slowing
7. How are we carving out space for personal connection/ stories and then building out towards collective storytelling through the pact? (the journey from me to we) — this relates to sundial segments of connecting, openness and safe
8. Are there multiple connection points with both teams for increased flexibility throughout the collaboration that have taken mindful consideration of ethics and informed consent for sharing of data? — this relates to sundial segments of safe and welcome
9. How might we use time rebel framing to allow room for a range of levels of activity and connection to the work but also make pact partners feel part of something bigger from the start. How might we do this in a meaningful way with you? — this relates to sundial segments of connecting, opening welcome
10. How might this pact echo our own focus upon process/ journey not just outcomes. e.g. the focus upon co-design? - this relates to sundial segments of connecting, opening and slowing
11. How might this pact lift up our lab principles ‘use nature’s guidebook’, ‘join the dots’ and ‘be good ancestors’? — this relates to sundial segments of connecting and opening

Design questions from our pact insights relating to: “Place — gathering places that provide platforms for collective imagining”

1. Is there mutual use of collaborative digital tools (e.g, miro/slack) to see the work grow?- this relates to sundial segments of virtual
2. Are we using stories of place and place based wisdom from a range of sources — web based, ethnographic, oral histories, embodied experiences to root this pact for collective imagining in the High Street? — this relates to sundial segments of virtual, Street, local, civic and natural

Design questions from our pact insights relating to: “Practices — that connect us and change our frame of possibility”

1. What are we all intentionally gifting to the endeavour? How is that creating ripples, connections, inspiring further action? How are we listening out and looking for these, and recording and sharing them? — this relates to sundial segment of playing, making and celebrating
2. Is there a clear link/ loop between the learning and doing? Are we creating space for rapid prototyping and building in multiple disciplines/ a range of perspectives as well as building on / recycling previous experiments, knowledge and perspectives? — this relates to sundial segments of making but also the Space condition of connecting
3. Is there careful documenting and sharing out loud of the collaboration experience along the way? — this relates to sundial segments of inspiration
4. Are we paying attention to the organic building and weaving of connections for longer term collaboration — e.g. learning exchanges, co-writing, future work, follow up celebration events to share ideas with ground crew. Are we weaving this knowledge and ideas into future experiments? Are there many yields and layers of the collaboration? — this relates to sundial segments of making, playing, celebrating, yes and what if?
5. Are we prioritising the power of visual communication in building connection, conveying complex ideas and nurturing inspiration? — this relates to sundial segments of inspiration
6. Are we creating time at the beginning of the pact to tell our story ?— this relates to sundial segments of inspiration
7. How might we reflect upon the pace and rhythm of the pact? How might we build on this momentum in the long-term? — this relates to sundial segments of limits
8. Have we both been clear about resources, capacities, boundaries, what helps are available from the start? Are we ensuring there is a clear permission to ask for help and sharing of resources? How might be recognise and celebrate that abundance and revisit this as opportunities arise? — this relates to sundial segments of limits
9. Are we giving prominence to the use of narrative in the journey in terms of generating ideas, reflection and working out loud? — this relates to sundial segments of inspiration

These insights, built on the shared learning from this pact, will help us be mindful in creating future pacts to nurture imaginative capacity and catalyse imagination into action. It helps us to pay attention to the conditions needed for the mental and emotional space that expands our capacity to imagine IN a pact, as well as the practices that connect us and change our frame of possibility IN and FOR that collaboration. The pandemic context has meant we have learnt in this pact to be especially mindful of virtual places to come together to collectively imagine and collaborate. This has access and design justice considerations just as any gathering place must have. We are always mindful of who gets to tell the story of place — this is a critical consideration for future pacts.

Of course, these design questions point to a deeper layer needed in this analysis around how these pact conditions are shaped by wider systemic processes (also known as dark matter). We explore this nexus of pacts for imagination and dark matter in part two of this lab note and reflect upon what this might point to in terms of the design of imagination infrastructure.