The evolution of Do Fest Dudley (and our lab work)
How stimulating collective, creative, hands-on projects in 2017 led to urban acupuncture, and now collaborative work on intergenerational justice, consideration of the more-than-human, and long-term thinking rooted in place.
In advance of Do Fest Dudley 2021 and the release of lab notes about experiments designed to unlock imagination which come together during Do Fest, I wanted to take a canter through the ways in which our work has evolved over the last 4 years. It struck me that this is easy to see when reflecting on the previous Do Fest events we have curated, in March 2017 and July 2019.
Glancing back at the intentions and processes of each Do Fest in Dudley, and the ways our experimentation as a lab evolved in response to the insights and learning in these two year frames tells a story of people learning to read the (urban) land, experimenting with modifications, and exploring ways to rebuild the imaginative capacity of those who live, work and play in Dudley town centre. From everyday doing on a High Street… to growing out from those projects to bring public spaces on the High Street to life… to responding to the pandemic by inviting people to contribute ideas and dreams for a future High Street.
An accidental creation!
Do Fest Dudley was kind of an accidental creation, which originated in a desire to ‘show not tell’. It was going to be small programme of activities over a morning, providing opportunities for people from local organisations likely to attend an afternoon conference about health initiatives being planned in Dudley to meet and connect with people unlikely to attend such a conference. And to invite the people attending the conference to connect with their hands and their hearts, as well as their heads.
This seed of an idea which was formed in November 2016 coincided with the early stage formation of CoLab Dudley’s first team, and so within a couple of months the idea had grown into an intention to co-design a 3 day open festival of programmed and co-curated events, activities and creative content which would introduce and actively involve people in participatory culture projects in Dudley borough. The programme would be shaped to inspire people with ideas and activities from other places and provide practical tools and tactics for people to start catalysing participatory projects where they live or work.
Do Fest Dudley 2017: Inspiring by doing
Inspiration is a feeling of enthusiasm you get from someone or something, which gives you new and creative ideas. ~ Collins dictionary
A group of people to lead the co-design of Do Fest Dudley, including the CoLab Dudley team I has just begun convening and now had a 12 week sprint to get their teeth into. Colleagues from Dudley CVS, Healthwatch Dudley and the NHS in Dudley were also members of the group bringing Do Fest Dudley to life. Beyond this group, we drew on our networks, both in Dudley and beyond, to generate a programme with a diverse array of opportunities to make, learn, share and connect.
Through Do Fest Dudley we wanted to do two things:
- demonstrate ways that people can and are becoming creators of the places in which they live, becoming collaborators and co-producers,
- invite participants to explore the roles we each have to nurture and support a new culture of community kindness and participation which creates vibrant places that leave no-one behind.
We hoped this might inspire local people to start or join practical, hands-on projects, and help local stakeholders to understand more about how to support activities which grow social capital and community resilience.
We drew hugely on work in West Norwood, Lambeth, which had been led by TessyBritton and Laura Billings, and open festivals that they had co-designed with residents. We built on work Dudley CVS had been leading for a number of years with residents of Wrens Nest estate in Dudley, which we had been testing in other places. In 2017 our approach was informed significantly by:
Key ingredients of our mindset for shared learning, which we call detectorism, in 2017 were:
- Ethnography (including drop in informal focus groups, semi-structured interviews and participant observation)
- Being open to all — participatory methods and ethics
- Working out loud and contributing to the knowledge commons
- Celebrating of shared learning
- Systems mapping
We thought about the kinds of activities we wanted Do Fest Dudley to include, and ways to make it easy for local people to offer their skills and talents:
- Hands-on making and doing: for this we invited local people to teach Trade School classes, a friend offered to lead a mini wki-house build on Dudley High Street, and we scheduled a time when people could come together and co-create a garden space on land that had been recently cleared behind premises on the High Street. Healthwatch colleagues organised a making day in advance of Do Fest Dudley, where bunting, seed bombs and more were made for use during the festival.
- Learning about doing: we asked local people to give 5 minute Lightning Talks on their community projects people and we invited in our networks to offer Learning Labs on themes that related to people becoming creators of the places they live, such as leadership and storytelling.
- Designing for doing: we asked people in our networks to run practical design sessions based on their experiences, such as Grow Your Own Orchard and Design Tips for Participation.
- Inviting sharing: a member of the new lab team curated an exhibition of art made by both local people and his contacts around the world, and the Dudley SOUP team we had catalysed held a micro-funding event so that local people could invest in an idea.
- Encouraging connecting: we revived a previous CoLab Dudley activity; Serendipitea, which simply involves pairing people up randomly to have a cuppa together for 45 minutes. People really love this kind of opportunity to slow down and connect with a stranger.
Learning from the doing
When you’ve been part of organising an event or festival of some kind, afterwards people ask: “How did it go? Did many people come?”
Well, it was wonderful, buzzing, beautiful and hopeful. We have some numerical data, for example Do Fest Dudley 2017 took place over 3 days in March 2017, was co-created by 72 people in 12 weeks, and the programme featured 31 sessions which 214 people took part in. There’s more in this great infographic. AND there were so many more kinds of data to discover during and following Do Fest Dudley, and we involved anyone interested in being part of those discoveries.
As a social lab we are incredibly intentional about learning, and we really dug into what participants had experienced, observed, felt, noticed and thought during Do Fest Dudley and the subsequent activities it stimulated, supported by the ongoing presence of our social lab on the High Street in 2017. We had captured learning on the move by inviting Do Fest participants to be detectorists and complete detectorism journals. 31 semi- structured interviews with participants and partners were carried out following Do Fest. This and more learning was drawn together in Detectorism Insights #1 and informed our subsequent work around holistic goals; the theories, processes and practices we draw on; and pulled us deeply to focus on the places and spaces that people told us about.
The detectorism insights, which we checked back with people in a Celebration of Doing event in winter 2017, really lifted up the importance of place (the High Street and the town centre) in the lives of people we had met. The summary notes in Detectorism Insights #1 open as follows:
The findings discuss conditions for place based social change in Dudley in terms of animating and re-purposing latent assets, both physical (e.g. creative spaces); and human (e.g. skills, connectivity, capabilities). A striking element throughout these findings is the context of the de-generation of Dudley town centre, and how this has impacted upon citizens in terms of their sense of place and their capacity to access unrealised assets and underemployed skills and capabilities.
and go on to say:
Our discussion of physical capital is framed in terms of dimensions of place as this dominates our findings. This includes consideration of place based attachment; sense of belonging; identities; civic pride; and heritage. The experience of complex societal challenges in Dudley is situated by participants within an urgent aspiration to be part of and witness place based social change.
Informed by this learning, we have since been working towards the following goals which speak to place, cultures and support:
- To catalyse a diverse range of linked creative spaces, places and happenings across Dudley town centre.
- To generate more spaces and reasons for interaction and connection amongst strangers in Dudley town centre.
- To cultivate a culture of curiosity across the town.
- To nurture a shift in how local people view and treat public spaces, such that they feel co-ownership and responsibility.
- To explore ways to sustain the work and platforms which support ecosystems and self-organising activity [in Dudley town centre].
- To steward healthy, co-operative relationships with people from groups, projects, organisations and institutions in the town, borough and beyond.
Do Fest Dudley 2019 + Paint Dudley: interventions on the High Street
Following the formation of our goals, a team session with a big map of Dudley Town Centre and some explorations on foot resulted in a decision to focus on Dudley High Street, the part of the town centre where CoLab Dudley was located, and which people had told us a lot about. Do Fest Dudley 2019 was therefore shaped around the idea of re-imagining public spaces on and around the High Street. Lab team member Jo Orchard-Webb shared thinking on this in the run up to Do Fest that year:
Having sketched out a map of our networks and identified key doers, creatives and makers, we generated a list of people to invite to the first of a series of monthly gatherings which would lead to the co-curation of Do Fest Dudley in 2019. We wanted Do Fest to offer a taste of what a creative and kind High Street might look and feel like, through all kinds of street experiments and interventions developed in collaboration.
In 2019 our approach was becoming more informed by:
- Permaculture design (place based and regnerative)
- Network weaving
- Tactical urbanism
- Spatial imaginaries
- Commoning strategies (in addition to participatory platform design)
Key ingredients of our detectorism by 2019 had grown to embrace
- Values grounded developmental evaluation (specifically Principles-Focused Evaluation)
- Social Permaculture principles
- Expanded conceptions of scaling including scaling for initial conditions, scaling deep for cultural change and scree scaling, and use of the systems iceberg analysis tool
- Sharing wisdom and learning through a creative collaboration between Collective members: The Doers and The Curious of Dudley This marked the start of a shift to what we now call Detectorism in the Wild (more about this below). [Edit: this was added a day after this lab note was published]
The first of our monthly gatherings brought together 18 people who cared about the future of Dudley and were eager to make connections and create together. They were invited to suggest more people to invite to the second dinner. There was a warm response to a suggestion that we might grow a Collective of doers and creatives, so over a series of dinners, conversations and co-design sessions our Collective emerged.
We took time together through a detectorism session at the second dinner to draw together wisdom and experiences of festivals to inform the co-design of Do Fest in 2019, as shared by Jo Orchard-Webb in this lab note:
Lab team member Daniel J. Blyden introduced us to Tactical Urbanism, and Phillippa Banister of Street Space. We invited Phillipa to Dudley, and made a call out to anyone interested to join us to learn from her.
Tactical Urbanism is all about action. Also known as DIY Urbanism, Planning-by-Doing, Urban Acupuncture, or Urban Prototyping, this approach refers to a city, organizational, and/or citizen-led approach to neighborhood building using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions to catalyze long-term change. ~ http://tacticalurbanismguide.com/about/
At the very first gathering Kerry O'Coy and Dave O’Coy came along with an idea for some urban acupuncture which they sought feedback and contributions to; a sign-writing project called Paint Dudley. Everyone was really excited about it, and it launched a month before Do Fest in 2019 with a series of activities including photo walks from Dudley High Street, sign writing workshops on the High Street, and a pop-up exhibition in a day through an alternative use of stalls in the market so that local people could create art.
The Paint Dudley photo walks led by Tom Hicks in June 2019 were the first invitation through members of our Collective to observe and explore the High Street and surrounding area. We were delighted that a mini experiment we had developed in 2018, Finding Dudley, was likely to be built on.
The final phase of Paint Dudley 2019 was the production of large works on Dudley High Street by sign writers Jim and Dan. These remain now, and small act of vandalism to them have been removed by kind persons unknown!
Another act of urban acupuncture during Do Fest Dudley, though much more temporary, was the creation of Dudley’s first ever parklet.
Lab team member Jo Orchard-Webb has drawn together learning from these and other street experiments and hands-on activities which made up the programme for Do Fest Dudley in 2019.
I’ve brought attention here to the physical interventions and the acts of intentional observation which disrupted public spaces in different ways, and have remained, or grown as we approach Do Fest Dudley 2021.
Do Fest Dudley 2021: Unlocking imagination
While we were eager to develop more experiments informed by the learning from Do Fest Dudley 2019, we faced a major challenge immediately afterwards of needing to find premises on the High Street for the lab to be based. This process took 6 months from searching to having a lease signed and keys in our hands. We swiftly moved into action… and 6 weeks later the UK was in lockdown.
As we all felt our way into a significantly altered existence the Collective we had been convening, who had come together to co-design and co-create the new lab space on the High Street, dispersed to some extent. However between autumn 2019 and summer 2020 we were able to bring five of the Collective members into the lab team, and support others to access support to develop online creative projects. Some of the ideas we had been developing pre-pandemic were adapted and we found ourselves well located to catalyse some new work around High Street pandemic response and recovery.
As we reached autumn 2020 we wanted to start rebuilding a Collective, one which would be able to respond to new challenges and the increased visibility of challenges which have been tangling together over centuries. We decided to make very explicit invitations through our networks, for people to join us as Time Rebels, a term coined by author of The Good Ancestor, Roman Krznaric to describe people dedicated to intergenerational justice and long-term thinking. We’ve documented some of the thinking which got us to here in the following lab notes:
We became much more intentional about network weaving and collaboration. The shift to online working created better conditions for us to encourage a Collective of Time Rebels to communicate and co-design through tools such as Slack and Miro, as well as coming together for regular sessions convened using Zoom. We encouraged co-design of experiments which we thought might be live prototyped by spring 2021, however with COVID restrictions still in place we decided to use Do Fest in the summer as a date to aim for.
14 of Dudley’s Time Rebels have generated the experiments and activties in the programme for Do Fest Dudley 2021. They have been involving each other in thier early stage ideas and co-design over the last 9 months. Many of them are inviting curiosity through creative experiments and new conversations in public spaces on and around Dudley High Street. They are bringing forgotten and unloved spaces and places to life, sharing stories and mementos which reveal hidden histories of Dudley and being super-curious about where we might find and generate dreams. Their focus is on unlocking imagination so that lots and lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds contribute ideas and dreams for Dudley High Street in the future, 10 years or more from now. We have retained the important low-fi doing element of Do Fest. This year during Do Fest Dudley we are inviting local people to join us on an adventure to discover new kinds of doing, creating and making that unlock our imaginations.
We continue to draw on approaches which have informed our work over the last four years, and have deepened and added layers to these by paying attention to:
- Imagination; in particular Rob Hopkin’s work and Rob Shorter’s Imagination Sundial
- David Abram’s concept of the more-than-human, which Time Rebels Helen and Bill have introduced
- Intergenerational trauma, which Time Rebels Marlene and Dionne have undertaken work around
- Intergenerational justice
And our approach to detectorism has evolved event further. Since early 2020 we have been developing Detectorism in the Wild, which involves
- A focus upon creative documentation and urban imaginary — part representation, part narrative enquiry, part provocation, part convening with purpose, part creative intervention. Achieved through greater use of creative/arts-based mediums (e.g. theatre, visual art, photography, narrative) in order to nurture and build alternative urban imaginaries for Dudley High Street.
- Closer alignment with Street Wisdom and Gehl public space study approaches.
- Curiosity in relation to Nora Bateson’s work on Warm Data
This has led to the development of Street Detectorism by lab team member Holly Doron — this will be prototyped during Do Fest Dudley 2021.
Over the coming week our Time Rebels will be sharing their first lab notes, describing the why and the what of their experiments which local people are invited to take part in during Do Fest Dudley 2021. (We’ll add links below as they are published.) We are curious about ways that our learning from this will inform the next evolution of our work. Watch this space!
