Seeds we’re holding to nurture in 2021
A round up of experiments initiated by lab team members during the first year of the pandemic
This lab note has been written to acknowledge, honour and celebrate the creativity, commitment and care invested in collective work by CoLab Dudley team members during 2020.
Our work to involve local people in creative and practical projects together has been hugely impacted by lockdowns and the social distancing required to keep everyone safe during the pandemic. However slowdown created an opportunity for a deepening of relationships within our lab team, a team whose members changed significantly between summer 2019 and summer 2020.
The focus of our work had already shifted in 2019, as local creatives and doers we convened developed collective efforts to nurture a kinder, more creative and connected High Street. Five of these local creatives have since become lab team members, and now these creatives comprise the majority of the lab team. This has fundamentally changed what we do and how we do it.
A charactersitic of social labs is permeable and ever changing boundaries between the lab team, network and wider ecosystems. Social labs engage in a very deliberate process of network cultivation; in Dudley we use network weaving approaches. The flexibility to call on different parts of our network and ecosystem is critical to lab work. (Labcraft, edited by Hendrick Tiesinga and Remko Berkhout has helped us to appreciate this dynamic of lab work.)
Below is a little about each team member’s journey into the team, and an overview of thier experiments and explorations in 2020; a year in which bringing people together on the High Street was highly restricted. (For context: other than me, lab team members spend only 1 or 2 days a week on CoLab Dudley work; they all have other jobs and/or run their own enterprises.)
Dave O’Coy
Exploring and celebrating Dudley’s rich heritage and vibrant present through photography, art, publications and stories
Dave joined the lab team in October 2019 when Fused joined us as a Creative Partner, having joined the CoLab Dudley Collective in January 2019 and collaborating with the lab on Paint Dudley. With Kerry, he worked on funding applications for the next phase of Paint Dudley and began generating ideas for using the lab space on the High Street to invite local people to bring stories, photos, art and artefacts to contribute to a Dudley People’s Archive.
When lockdown restricted this, Dave swiftly took the project online. Through the remainder of 2020 he has been extending invitations, sensing opportunities and weaving relationships with numerous people whose hearts and memories live in Dudley, no matter where in the world life has taken them.
For a gentle feed of ephemera, art and photographs, follow @DudleyPeoplesArchive on Facebook or @dudley_peoples_archive on Instagram. See the Dudley People’s Archive website for longer stories, videos and more.
Dave is now also working up a new project within the Dudley People’s Archive; Growing Up in Dudley. In 2021 young people will be invited to find stories and images of their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Visual and oral histories will be gathered by local people and families for exhibiting, publishing and archiving. Artists will create responses and host talks.
Lab principles which are guiding Dave’s explorations are:
- Connections matter;
- Create the conditions for curiosity and experimentation;
- Learn and test through doing and prototyping;
- Design and build creative spaces and experiences together;
- Encourage abundance thinking.
Louise Bloomfield
Co-creating safe spaces and experimenting with participatory and site specific theatre for social change in non-traditional spaces, such as the High Street
In 2019 Louise Bloomfield approached Dudley CVS and UnLtd for support to set up a social enterprise, now established as Bloom Creative Wellbeing CIC. At that time Adam Hall was a lab team member, and connected Louise to us. It very quickly became apparent that as well as CoLab Dudley supporting Louise with access to spaces and our networks, Louise could bring a lot to the work of the lab. Bloom Creative Wellbeing CIC joined the lab as a Creative Partner in October 2019, and Louise committed herself to network weaving explorations with the team and wider collective of doers and creatives, and was developing plans for a craftivism inspired experiment just before lockdown was imposed in March.
Before the first lockdown and in October, Louise led co-design activities with local doers in relation to a Retreat space in the lab. She has also written about the importance of retreat, rest and safe space in our work… a theme which is echoed in the Imagination Sundial (see below).
Au we approached Autumn 2020 and there seemed to be a little potential for careful convening, Louise developed and began implementing a plan to explore and experiment with site-specific and participatory theatre on Dudley High Street. Increased restrictions in response to the second wave of COVID-19 created challenging limits to this work, in response Louise adjusted expectations and generated alternative possibilities:
Our context is loud right now.
Now is not the time.
We need to pause.
Take a collective breath.
And then find another way.
Louise has been courageously working out loud, sharing her plans, process, findings and changes in course in this series of lab notes:
Louise is paying attention to all of our lab principles in her explorations, and may focus in on a few as her experiments unfold in 2021.
Holly Doron
Experimenting with the role of participatory public life studies and prototyping interventions to inform a more regenerative Dudley High Street
In 2018 Holly Doron said she had “what I suspect was a life-changing conversation about building platforms of trust with the CoLab Dudley team” during her Learning Marathon with Enrol Yourself.
She subsequently joined CoLab Dudley’s Collective of doers, makers and creatives, offering her ideas and skills to a workshop mapping a creative, kinder, and connected Dudley High Street during Do Fest in July 2019:
Holly joined the lab team as an Associate in spring 2020, following ideas and time she invested into weaving Public Life Studies (from the work of Jan Gehl) into CoLab Dudley’s detectorism toolkit. She designed a series of Public Life Studies workshops which we had programmed to involve local people in over the spring, and had to postponed due to lockdown. However as lockdown restrictions eased in June using these tools became a critical lab activity.
Holly supported lab team members to undertake public life observations and created conversation prompts to help inform short term potential pandemic response and recovery on Dudley High Street, leading to a renewal of the High Street over a longer time frame. Observations were represented visually by Holly and shared with Dudley Council in the first of series of Safe and Friendly High Street documents.
As our conversations with Dudley Council developed and the lab was bought into work on Reopening High Streets Safely, Holly helped to shape a co-design process including a set of parklet prototype possibilities and parklet co-design resources which lab team members used in conversation with local people on the High Street.
In Autumn 2020 Holly connected Matthew Jones, author of Transforming Towns published by RIBA, to CoLab Dudley. He will be supporting a cohort of Birmingham School of Architecture and Design students collaborating in an interdisciplinary project focused on Dudley High Street thoughtfully designed around CoLab Dudley’s work on imagination, creative use of public spaces and regenerative design approaches.
Lab principles which Holly is using to guide her explorations are:
- Connections matter;
- Be good ancestors;
- Create the conditions for curiosity and experimentation;
- Learn and test through doing and prototyping;
- Encourage abundance thinking and practice;
- Celebrate gifts & skills.
Marlene Fortes
Experimenting with dance as a medium for social activism; workshops exploring cultural heritage, identity and belonging; arts based social research; embodied experiences of being together in nature
Marlene Fortes’ introduction to CoLab Dudley was Do Fest in March 2017, and 3 months later she performed a work in progress at Share Fest, another celebration of local doing curated by CoLab Dudley. The piece, called Freedom, was a collaboration with Marlene Da Costa; the two first met at Do Fest 2017.
Marlene Fortes went on to found a social enterprise based on Dudley High Street, CreHeart CIC, supported by UnLtd, then a delivery partner in CoLab Dudley. She became an active member of the CoLab Dudley Collective, and joined the lab team in summer 2020 when CreHeart CIC became a Creative Partner. She has generously shared her work through lab notes detailing post-lockdown walks in Wrens Nest Nature Reserve with Black community members, and builds on this in a lab note tracing her journey from Cape Verde to Dudley:
Through August and September, Marlene invested time researching the work of Black dancer and activist Pearl Primus. This was inspiration for choreography of a powerful and moving solo piece, The Journey I, performed by Marlene, recorded on Dudley High Street and shared in video form for Black History Month:
Again Marlene documented and shared her process in a lab note, in which she asks:
How do we create dialogue for social change in order to conceive new future possibilities for the black community to thrive?
Lab principles Marlene is using in her explorations are:
- Connections matter;
- Be good ancestors;
- Create conditions for curiosity and experimentation.
Kerry O’Coy
Experimenting with creative public space interventions including visual arts installations and experiences on the High Street, and tactical urbanism such as parklets
Kerry O'Coy joined the lab team in October 2019 along with Dave. Through autumn 2019 she work on Paint Dudley proposals, including research of festivals and street art. Having worked on workshop ideas and reached out to artists, when the UK went into lockdown in March 2020 Kerry swiftly and bravely created an online programme of weekly talks with artists, called Creative Conversations.
We were almost ready to start to invite people to ‘drop in’ and join us at lunchtimes on the actual High Street space and we’d started to have a think about what those conversations might be about…
This was our first delve in to bringing people outside of our team in to the world of Zoom meetings — so beyond the obvious nervous tech issues and hosting in a virtual space — I wanted to find out how others were feeling, their thoughts on what was about to happen and how they might change their projects to reflect the situation.
As an easing of restrictions from the first lockdown approached and non-essential shops prepared to re-open, Kerry had been reading and reflecting on Playing for Time by Lucy Neal. The book explores the pivotal role artists play in rethinking the future; reinventing and reimagining our world at a time of systematic change and uncertainty. In her lab note Kerry wondered:
Will our local council allow the streets outside our space to be widened and the cars bays (that greedily take up our now much-needed social distancing space) to be closed off or better still repurposed?
Once we could safely return to Dudley and undertake observations of post-lockdown public life on the High Street, Kerry was there… taking photos around the town centre and observing from our large lab window. She soon started experimenting with turning the lab windows into a giant pinboard, and then asked Paint Dudley signwriter Dan to come over for a day and recreate what people said about the High Street as visuals on our window. She openly shared her learning in this lab note:
As our conversations with Dudley Council developed, prompted by the observations we made and shared, Kerry took the lead in efforts to experiment with a parklet, to be co-designed with people who use the High Street. It took a long time to negotiate, but finally two parking bays were designated for the experiment.
Parklet co-design conversations and building began in earnest. Kerry used the large exhibition boards commissioned for the lab space as canvases to invite and record ideas from people passing by on the High Street. She made up chalkboards to sit in the parking bays to explain what was happening and invite ideas. People certainly stop and pay attention when something new catches their eye on Dudley High Street!
Kerry has been bringing artists and creatives towards our work through the year, and plays a vital role in growing the web of relationships that makes more possible. She launched the Black Country Collage Club two weeks ago, building on last year’s Creative Conversation with artist Mark Murphy, and said she was excited to step into 2021 with our High Street plans, introducing more creatives to help us connect with communities, to spark more curiosity and to engage more:
Kerry is paying attention to the following lab principles through her experiments:
- Connections matter;
- Create the conditions for curiosity and experimentation;
- Learn and test through doing and prototyping;
- Design and build creative spaces
Jo Orchard-Webb
Embracing our diversity of knowledge making and ways of knowing; socialising research for collective sense making and action
Jo Orchard-Webb has been a lab team member since December 2016. She supports people in our ecosystem to contribute and share observations, experiences, insights and learning in ways which help us all to see much more than we could alone. She encourages us all to get curious about what we see, hear, feel, think and learn, and pay attention to patterns in data from all kinds of sources. She came up with detectorism as the name for a mindset for shared learning that we use in the lab, and swiftly invites anyone she meets to become a detectorist on our shared learning journey!
Detectorism is a people-friendly, creative way of us involving anyone in processes of gathering and interpreting data. Through our detectorism we explore ways to reveal and respect our collective insights to help inform our experiment designs and actions for a kinder, more creative and connected High Street. It is our manifestation of Developmental Evaluation, an evaluation approach used to guide adaptation to emergent and dynamic realities in complex environments. To deepen this approach, Jo has helped the lab team to develop and iterate GUIDEing Principles, which Guide our direction and behaviours, are Useful and easily doable, Inspire us, are sensitive to context and complexity (Developmental) and Evaluable.
Jo’s guidance helps us to close the loop on learning-informing-doing-informing-learning. She helps the lab to turn collective learning from experiments into design questions for the next phases of experimentation. She brings all kinds of inspiration, ideas and research approaches to the lab, with bounding enthusiasm that helps us all to get excited about collecting all kinds of evidence which demonstrate adherence (or lack of adherence) to our GUIDEing Principles.
At the very beginning of 2020 Jo shared plans to relocate to the south coast, so she and I started digging into ‘Detectorism in the Wild’, bringing forward intentions to really embed detectorism skills across the lab team and Collective. After 3 months of the whole team convening by Zoom from their homes during lockdown it became apparent that we didn’t need to loose Jo’s knowledge and creative talents when she moved. Happily she has continued as a lab team member, and has successfully supported all team members to take responsibility for how detectorism is designed into their actions and experiments on the High St, weaving together a wider range of perspectives, ways of knowing, traditions and voices that inform the learning, doing AND being in this work.
Jo explains that CoLab Dudley has always recognised a need to design shared learning approaches and experiences better suited to encouraging a town wide culture of curiosity and experimentation. The learning, imagining and the action are interdependent.
Detectorism in the Wild helps with decentering our research lens (and so shared learning) away from the dominant white, anglo-european, academic research traditions and biases. Using multiple creative methods the team detectorism in the wild weaves different times, different landscapes, different people, different scales, uses different senses, and different ways of knowing.
This year Jo has supported each lab member to design their own learning approach around their creative practice and preferred ways of knowing while using their favoured lab principles to ground them in a shared set of values. This multi-method, multi-discipline, and multiple-worldview approach seeks to make the lab insights more reflective of our complexity and diversity as natural beings. In being more reflective we hope they will be more relatable, meaningful, and therefore more actionable.
One of Jo’s super-powers is desk research, which was invaluable as we embarked on our Public Life Studies on the High Street and wanted to locate them in a wider context of pandemic response, recovery and renewal. In this lab note Jo describes why we initiated this work, how we went about it and what we found:
During summer 2020 we reached out to participants of Connect Dudley, an online creative writing experiment initiated by CoLab Dudley Collective member Rick Sanders during the first lockdown. Most of the participants were keen to connect with Jo to participate in CoLab Dudley learning which informs how we create the conditions for the development of new exciting projects and experiments as a creative community.
Jo interviewed participants and the two poets involved in Connect Dudley, asking participants about their motivations for taking part in Connect Dudley and reflections on taking part. The one-to-one conversations also explored
thoughts on the value of developing collective creative spaces/ experiences like this and appetite for being part of future creative experiences if a group convened regularly to write / reflect and connect on their writing? The feelings, insights, learnings and desires of people involved in Connect Dudley have been bought together by Jo in this lab note and linked slide deck:
In addition, through participation in Civic Square’s Department of Dreams Re_ Festival in June 2020, Jo spotted a new tool that offered a graspable, practical way to bring work on social imaginaries into the lab. Jo had written about spatial imaginaries in her post on Re-imagining Dudley High Street in 2019, and at the Re_Festival she honed in on Rob Hopkins mention of the Imagination Sundial (below), created by Rob Shorter. Recognising this is as navigational gold for our work, she tucked it away safely, occasionally reminding us of it through the summer, then asked us to take part in a thought experiment. We each considered the sundial and chatted with Jo about where we thought our work was most intentionally located, with a view to also considering other places we might want to locate it which could be considered in future designs.
The Imagination Sundial has gone on to become a valued navigation aid by our team, alongside our GUIDEing Principles — we’ll be sharing a lot more about it in 2021.
Lorna Prescott
Experimenting with social infrastructure and conditions needed to foster regenerative cultures
This is me :) I’m a Senior Development Officer for Dudley CVS. I instigated CoLab Dudley in early 2014, and have been supported by my colleagues and Board of Trustees to experiment with and grow the lab. Below is a simple graphic I used to launch CoLab Dudley online in July 2014.
The lab is a new kind of infrastructure which compliments existing forms of support for people leading change in communities which my colleagues in Dudley CVS offer. As I sought to convey in the visual above, the lab was prompted by an appreciation of the abundance of skills, knowledge and resources which could be freely shared between organisational boundaries and communities. I wanted to extend an invitation to collaborate to people keen to use their imagination and creativity to help communities adapt to new challenges.
Our work and learning in 2019 and 2020 really bought home to us that imagination is a function of privilege, which is why we’ll be spending 2021 really digging into the Imagination Sundial (featured above) to experiment with ways to create the conditions for imagination in Dudley.
However 2020 hadn’t begun in a particularly imaginative place for me! My goal in January 2020 was to get lease negotiations completed so that we could move in to a unit on Dudley High Street that would become CoLab Dudley’s first dedicated home. Having achieved that goal, we burst into a flurry of planning, co-design and invitation extended, summed up in this lab notes, which also links to learning from our first few weeks of lockdown in spring 2020:
As instigator-convenor of our lab team and Collective, and Fellow Travellers network I quickly started experimenting with online convening in lockdown. Through weekly informal virtual coffee sessions we supported each other and Collective members to begin experimenting with online projects - a huge hurdle to overcome for people who thrive on face to face interaction and collaboration, and weren’t familiar with using online platforms for meeting or collaborating. We have hugely benefited as a team from shifting to online working, we’ve been able to come together much more frequently, which has led to an incredible deepening of our relationships with each other, hugely increased our knowledge and understanding of each other’s strengths, skills and projects, and helped our collective learning to grow and thrive.
A month into the first lockdown I reached out to nearby Trade School Organisers and Fellow Travellers to test the appetite for collaborating in experimenting with Trade School online. This led to 14 Trade School classes with local and global learners being taught in Summer 2020. This collaboration is continuing in 2021 as we prepare for a Spring Season of online Trade School classes.
Another challenge which presented itself in early 2020 was the early end to UnLtd’s Resilient Communities programme, leading to UnLtd withdrawing as a delivery partner in CoLab Dudley. Our work is currently funded through the National Lottery Community Fund’s Partnerships programme, and while we had bought Creative Partners into the lab team, I was eager to follow up a suggestion made at the beginning of 2020 by Adam Hall, then our UnLtd team member, to draw in some of our Fellow Travellers for strategic guidance.
In the summer I reached out to Naomi Fisher, Director of APEC, a studio of creative architects and designers, and Immy Kaur, co-founder and Director of Civic Square, a neighbourhood economics lab and creative + participatory ecosystem. I’m delighted that we are now working together as strategic partners around one of CoLab Dudley’s goals; to find ways to sustain the work and platforms which support participatory ecosystems and self-organising activity in Dudley. (It is through this partnership that in 2020 that Daniel J. Blyden moved from being a CoLab Dudley team member to strategic partner in his role as Director of Design with Civic Square. Daniel has shared his strategic and visual design skills through CoLab Dudley experiments since early 2016. He designed the Activate Pack and collaborative branding for an early CoLab Dudley collaboration with Dudley Police. As the lab team began to form Daniel led on visual design for Do Fest in 2017 and continued to support visual design for the lab, brining design jams to Dudley and injecting tactical urbanism inspiration into lab plans.)
I found the slowdown in 2020 rich in learning opportunities, which I leaned into. I extended myself beyond my comfort zone, which I believe has helped me to find courage and confidence in suggesting and developing some new, bolder ways of working as a lab on Dudley High Street. This lab note describes some of the learning:
Partly as a result of this learning in Autumn 2020 I worked with lab team members to develop a framework for 4 seasons of activity that we would pro-actively invite artists, creatives and doers from our network to help lead. An aspiration is that through this work we will find out more about the dreams and desires of local people in relation to their town and High Street, and therefore be better placed to understand what social infrastructure might helpfully be shaped like to support such futures to be realised. Within a matter of weeks we had drawn together a crew of people we’re calling Time Rebels and started introducing to them to the lab and key themes for our journey together; unleashing imagination and nurturing long-term thinking.
Lab principles I am paying particular attention to around social infrastructure and regenerative cultures are:
- Be a good ancestor
- Use nature’s guidebook
- Create the conditions for curiosity and experimentation
I wish to end this lab note with a stand out moment of 2020 for me, which I feel speaks to the team we become during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of a challenging year, Jo Orchard-Webb and Kerry O'Coy created the most beautifully designed and convened lab team session focused around winter solstice reflection, celebration and hands-on making. (See thread from tweet below for the whole story).
Our hopes for coming months were considered and written down (privately) during the evening. I wish so much for these hopes to be realised, and for the seeds sown and collected through the experiments described in this lab note to blossom abundantly in 2021.
