Tools for navigating uncertainty: exploring the Imagination Sundial & how it weaves into our GUIDEing principles
Lab notes on navigation tools shared by Jo and Holly.
In uncertain times the navigation tools we use as a social lab — things that guide us towards our North Star — have grown in importance. We have brought these aides to navigation (Like our GUIDEing principles) ever closer to our thinking and doing as we intentionally have them to hand when we design and experiment during the pandemic. We have found common ground as we have shared them with fellow travellers and local creatives and makers.
Navigating uncertainty is easier when you are rooted in values and principles that accommodate that uncertainty while still gently guiding you. Using our navigation tools to surface the patterns in our shifting context and relationships helps us feel less at sea and more situated within a much longer story of change.
As a species we have always used navigation tools or waymarkers to guide our journeys. Whether fables woven with wisdom handed down through generations, or wayfinders marked in the landscape we learnt to read and maintain in our journeys. We have long used navigation tools handed down by ancestors that give just enough guidance without being overly prescriptive as to be unusable in shifting contexts.
PART 1 in navigating uncertainty — being rooted by GUIDEing principles
It is for this reason we have been using guiding lab principles at the core of our doing and learning as our primary navigation tool for the last two years. We have spoken here before about the value of having guiding principles that are useful in dynamic contexts; having guidance that keeps us grounded in our values and so doing things the right way, not just doing the right thing (the how is as important as the what).
We have found their openness to interpretation in the context of the pandemic reassuring as they allow us to make judgements as the High Street landscape changes without veering off course. You can read more about this navigation tool in the links and in the lovely visual below that shows them as an interconnected web:
- Here is a simple overview of our lab principles: https://www.colabdudley.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Principles.pdf
- Here is a user friendly introduction to why we decided principles are useful for this type of work: https://medium.com/colab-dudley/sharing-lessons-resources-how-to-develop-a-principles-focused-evaluation-approach-ba3bfa4b5e5b
PART 2 in navigating uncertainty — The Imagination Sundial gets added to the toolbox
As we continue our journey with local makers, artists and creatives in nurturing new urban imaginaries for Dudley High Street we have begun to test 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 as part of his dissertation while at Schumacher College and triggered by the core What if? question Rob Hopkins asks as he invites us to imagine a different future (more here in the book From What is to What if by Rob Hopkins).
The Imagination Sundial helps us to be even more intentional about the conditions we might need to rebuild, or reveal and animate our collective imaginative capacity.
Underpinning the Sundial is the shocking and saddening fact that we are living in a time of imaginative decline. Most worryingly we are experiencing this decline just at the moment when we most need our imaginations in order to respond to major challenges, such as the climate emergency, systemic racism and extractive economies.
The need to nurture the conditions for our collective imagination has never been so urgent.
Given this urgency, we have over the last 6 months used the Imagination Sundial in a range of spaces in our lab work.
Firstly, we used it as the catalyst of a really chewy thought experiment and reflective sense making exercise. As a lab team we reflected upon and mapped on the dial which area of the sundial most resonates with our different practices and work? The intention here was to more clearly understand how our works relates to:
- Creating conditions for new urban imaginaries
- How our practice relates to others in the team through the lens of imagination.
- How this might help us proactively and intentionally link projects and collaborate.
- How this might enable us to carve out a stronger narrative of collective purpose that is relatable to others
- How this might help us to engage our network weaving proactively with the aid of the sundial to nurture more of the conditions for imagination?
- How we might map our projects around the sundial to illustrate which aspects of the conditions for imaginative capacity of the people of Dudley the project animates and areas where we might focus future experiments.
From zooming into ourselves as a lab we then wanted to zoom out a little to introduce the sundial to our Time Rebel Pilots who will be travelling to the Year 2031 to collect Memories of the Future where everything turned out OK!
The Time Rebel responses to the Sundial in our navigation training sessions together showed how instinctively this design tool nudges us towards a more holistic view of our world and the work of cultural change. Just as we understand our GUIDEing principles (our core navigation tool) as an interconnected web, the Sundial similarly does not direct us in a linear route from A to B. Instead it invites us to journey in a more relational fashion — it encourages us to see the many layers of conditions needed to nurture imagination, seeing different timescales, listening to and involving many different ways of knowing (different navigators if you will!).
The Sundial as a heuristic or design tool celebrates our interconnectedness and in this way it helps us walk the walk of our lab principle join the dots. It also invites us to collaborate — across space, time, generations and with the more-than-human — again supporting our lab principles of be a good ancestor and use nature’s guidebook.
Below you can see how the four different segments of the Sundial — Place, Space (mental and emotional), Practices and Pacts - has acted as a catalyst for a range of both practical everyday design questions for our experiments, as well as more strategic and long term questions that might inform our work on emergent cultures.
Design questions drawn from the Imagination Sundial
Reading through the introduction to the Sundial in the blog by Rob Hopkins we began to ask ourselves design questions that this tool challenges and invites. In the section below we have popped both helpful framing words from the blog and the design questions this triggered. We wonder what different design questions the framing of the conditions for imagination might inspire in your life and work?
The urgency of healing our collective imaginative capacity
- What does this mean in terms of the framing and lifting up of the purpose of the Retreat space in the lab on the High St?
- Public life Studies show The High Street to be a place of stress — how do we design for healing and so greater capacity for imagining?
SPACE — Paying attention to and enabling the mental and emotional space for imagination
- Our convening is rooted in creating safe and welcoming spaces to connect — how do we thoughtfully convene in relation to a collective capacity to imagine?
- And how do we do this in ongoing Covid uncertainty and physical distancing?
- Is there something in lifting up and explicitly modelling our principles that will help with this?
This need to pay attention to care, healing and trauma in our work was recognised early on as people described feelings of being unsafe, anxious and unwelcome on the High Street. Being intentional about designing work with this understanding was a the heart of The Retreat space.
Who gets to imagine this new future?
- Spatial injustice scars our future High Street as long as who gets to imagine and shape the future is a function of existing privilege.
- Decolonising the future means designing our experiments in a way that enables the imaginative agency for everyone on the High Street. How do we/ others do that? How might we generate conversations, awareness, imaginaries and action around this?
This essential focus upon who gets to imagine the future of the High Street comes up again and again in almost every aspect of our work. Our High Streets are often the result of a concentration of power and social structures that mean the vision of our High Street is one dimensional and caught in a dystopian ground hog day of extractive economy perpetuating regeneration cycles. This needs to change. Being intentional in designing safe spaces for everyone to imagine an alternative High Street is the platform responsibility.
PACTS — Which partnerships enable us to move from imagination to action?
- Lab principles that encourage us to nurture Doing and Prototyping,and ‘Show don’t tell’ are often enabled by pacts. Might this be our pact with the people who play, work and live on the High St?
- In some ways working through our project co-design canvas is a pact. As a process it is a way to meet imagination half way in order to make that thing a reality. By surfacing an abundance of existing resources of all kinds the journey from dreaming to doing is more possible.
- Do we frame our wider partnerships in this way? Does this shift it away from unhealthy project commissioning/ prescriptive delivery dynamics which would help us walk the walk of our principle “Move at the speed of trust”
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 of 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.
PLACE — As we design and build creative places together is this a form of commoning or creating commons to enable the collective imagination of Dudley?
- The High Street is an important and old civic space or commons — with that in mind what aspects of our work begin to reclaim and rebuild the commons — a space where all can create, share and contribute?
- What aspects of our work reject enclosure via private ownership and hold space for commoning?
- What signals, rituals and narratives of commons do we intentionally communicate or enact? How might we do that in a way that is meaningful for lots of folk on the High Street?
- Can the commons be a space filled with a temporary community of strangers?
Our lab principles to build creative spaces and experiences together and create the conditions for curiosity and experimentation are perhaps the two principles that most naturally resonate with the Imagination Sundial. The many ways we do this as a team and as a community of makers and creatives often leans into the essence of commoning. For example, the spaces are often outside, open to all to participate, designed with an intention around safe spaces for connection (with people and more than humans); around a common right to beauty, right to openly share and build upon the work and learnings of the community. Our creativity isn’t hidden behind closed doors that only for open for some folk. Instead it is open to the world, free to enjoy and add to, inviting us to think differently about ownership, sharing, our own agency and the future possibilities of the High Street. As we convene Time Rebel pilots to create and imagine alongside other local folk in building memories of the future our attention has been drawn to the idea that might begin to see this intentional act of communal dreaming (inspired by the work of Annika Hnasteen-Izora) as an act of commoning*.
PRACTICES — that reveal, animate, enable the re-framing of an alternative future Dudley High Street
- Is this intention “to connect us and change our frame of possibility” at the core of the design of our practices?
- How might we support each other to do this or lift up the connections to this intention?
- What is the balance between the world as it is and the world as we imagine it could be? How do we acknowledge this tension and navigate this transition with grace?
This element of the Imagination Sundial — to connect and change frames of possibility — talks directly to the creative practices of lab team members (Marlene, Holly, Louise, Kerry and David) as well as the nearly 30 or so Time Rebel Pilots assembling to take test flights this Spring. It weaves together theatre, story-telling, collective curating, archiving, design, dance, collage, walking, sound recording to name but a few mediums that enable this shift.
These are the practices that help bridge between the real and the imagined — between the past, the present and the future. A future of different possibilities for Dudley High Street and the people that call it home. This part of the Sundial seems to draw on all our principles highlighting the interconnectedness of their guidance and inspiration. This visual of the principles and the context of the High Street (by lab team member Holly) is a welcome reminder of the backdrop for these practices and where they now invite a greater sense of what is possible.
Building social infrastructure rooted in collective imagining on the High St
The visual of the High Street above sets the scene perfectly for the next stage of our experimenting with the Sundial. We also used the Imagination Sundial in reflecting upon our strategic partner sessions with Civic Square and APEC Architects. These learning and guiding sessions help take a birds eye view of the work on the High Street and understand how it evolves and weaves into wider work around social change rooted in imagination. Looking at these sessions through the lens of the sundial helps frame this work in Collective Imagining. For example in our first session together these Imagination Sundial themes were clearly recognisable:
1. Pacts — The power and intent of the strategic partnerships with APEC and Civic Square highlighted the focus upon authentic pacts, but also long term conversations with funders that stress deep time humility and an interconnectedness in building the field for this cultural shift.
2. Place — There is an aspiration through this work to imagine a High Street that has an entirely different civic purpose. This talks to our Sundial inspired design question of WHO gets to design the future high st? This in turn has much to do with our capacity to “control the means of production” (e.g. not to be controlled by absent landlords) and this clearly talks our design questions around commoning and regenerative design as part of our imagining.
3. Space — Two observations were lifted up in this session as regards the emotional and mental space to imagine and build this type of infrastructure. Space to imagine is gifted to us when the permission to get things wrong is embraced and there is a recognition and understanding that this is long term work.
4. Practices — This session shone a light on the energy and sustainability of social infrastructure for new urban imaginaries when it is grounded in and animated by shared values. As a team we are really clear about rooting our practices in our principles and modelling the behaviours that are linked to them. So you see, feel, hear behaviours such as, ‘show don’t tell’, ‘doing and prototyping’, ‘inviting curiosity and experimentation’, ‘embracing different ways of knowing’, ‘working out loud’ and ‘joining the dots’.
Imagination Sundial Experiments Travel!
Meanwhile, our sister lab, Wolverhampton for Everyone, also started off the year by exploring the sundial to kick off their planning for 2021.
To find our bearings, we first tried to situate ourselves on the sundial with the question: ‘What parts of the sundial resonate with you and where do you feel the space to imagine?’ We discovered we had different ways of navigating around the sundial:
How we feel at this moment in time and what we need to unlock our imagination
Needing to explore with the lens of a project rather than as an individual to avoid overwhelm
Finding the edges of our comfort zone especially where segments need nurturing
We found that the sundial:
Focused our minds
Validated our past activities
Encouraged us to think of relationships we have with people and organisations
Helped us to think holistically, and where our strengths and interests as a team lie
Inspired curiosity for how we could use it in the future as a team and broaden our horizons
Next, we want to plot our future activities on the sundial to help us find where we can shift to unlock imaginations across Wolverhampton.
Time travel with the Imagination Sundial?
We are really excited to see how the Time Rebels pilots use the Sundial — implicitly or explicitly to aid the design of their time travels. For example, the Sundial is being explored quite explicitly by our Birmingham City University Time Rebels.
From the end of January, we are collaborating with Co.LAB, a collaborative laboratory embedded within the School of Architecture & Design at Birmingham City University. Undergraduate and postgraduate students from architecture, landscape architecture, product design and interior design will be working together to explore, map and understand the depth of the High Street and life beyond the surface. In March, they will be using the Imagination Sundial to imagine urban futures across scales for Dudley High Street of 2031. They will then use regenerative design to explore design interventions and adaptations.
So you can see from our learning notes that navigating uncertainty has been a cause to embrace the intentional and critical nurturing of conditions for imagination, while holding tightly to our roots in the form of our GUIDEing principles.
We can’t wait to see what these navigation tools inspire on the High Street and look forward to sharing Time Rebel designs, imaginings and memories of the future with you later in the year. 2031 never looked so hopeful!
Finally, a BIG thank you to Rob Shorter and Rob Hopkins. We are really grateful for their ongoing inspiration, provocations and open sharing of wisdom. By adding beautiful tools like the Imagination Sundial to the knowledge commons all our imaginations are that bit more nourished!
Footnote
*A little helpful explainer on a wiggly concept!! The commons (noun) and commoning (the verb) are tricky. This description from onthecommons.org helps me grasp it more fully and I hope helps you too.
