What is more possible now #5
Note 5 of 5 in a mini series of findings from a shared enquiry: Navigating Challenges
As described in our previous lab notes in this mini series (links below), during the Spring and Summer of 2022 the CoLab Dudley team and a constellation of Time Rebels have engaged in a shared enquiry through a range of joyful and searching collective reflection and sensemaking moments. In June 2022 we reached the end of four years of Reaching Communities National Lottery investment in lab work on Dudley High Street, and we wanted to mark this milestone in our journey so far by asking ‘What is more possible now?’
Not only was this process co-designed with the intention of surfacing, weaving together and celebrating ‘What is more possible now?’ insights, critically, it was also designed to create spaces for Time Rebel collaboration and collective dreaming about the practical next steps for their What If experiments. The whole shared enquiry period has been intentionally framed in active hope.
In this brief series of lab notes are sharing straight forward summaries drawn from this collective sensemaking process as follows:
- Revisiting our Why and What Next?
- Revealing potential
- Network vital signs
- Learning and doing ripples
- Navigating challenges (below)
Lab Note 5 of 5: Navigating Challenges
“To think in terms of systems requires a shift from examining individual parts to thinking in wholes. We move from thinking about what things are made of to exploring what they are part of, and what connections and relationships they have.” ~ Looby Macnamara, 7 Ways to Think Differently
In our proposal to the National Lottery Community Fund for our work on Emergent Cultures we outlined some new approaches we would be testing through the work, one of which was systems practice. We drew attention to four mindset shifts ‘which propel a systems practice’, as outlined in the Omidyar Group Systems Practice course that the lab team had convened a learning journey around. The four mindsets are:
- Seek system health, not “mission accomplished”.
- See patterns, not just problems.
- Unlock change. Don’t impose it.
- Plan to adapt. Don’t stay the course.
The video below illustrates the four mindsets. In relation to plan to adpat, the metaphor of being like sailors with a map having to ‘adjust course according to winds, currents, and obstacles that may lie above, or below the surface… while still keeping an eye on the horizon” is one which has stuck with me from this learning.
This lab note details 8 examples of ways in which we have been putting the fourth of these mindsets into practice in response to operational challenges we have faced in this work to date.
NB. Note #1 of this mini series outlines systemic challenges we’re working on, such as deep imbalances of opportunity to realise potential, at a personal, community and place based level arising from unjust systems shaped by mechanistic, colonial and extractive worldviews. Associated systemic challenges pertinent to our focus include who owns Dudley High Street, who owns and stewards public spaces, and how plans for the town are developed; they limit who has the permission to shape the High Street, who feels welcome there, and who / what will thrive there in the future. Another systemic challenge in work like ours is short-termism; for example of funding and visions, which contributes to a plethora of funding for projects and a comparatively minuscule amount of support for platforms and movements. (For more challenges around funding see this great work on New Frontiers led by Jospeph Rowntree Foundation.
On the images below I’ve outlined 8 key operational challenges our lab team has faced over the last 4 years, and how we navigated — the strategies, approaches and practices we adopted, tested and/or created to adapt. I’ve also summarised lasting changes and ripples which have resulted from those adaptations and shifts in course, because these aren’t quickly grasped or short-lived solutions. We take care and time to explore and find relevant, helpful and appropriate strategies, approaches and practices. They alter and deeply shape our work; from the design of experiments and interventions we take onto Dudley High Street, to the shaping of governance and the sharing of approaches and tools with others we work with and alongside. These are strategies, approaches and practices which help to illuminate the potent myths which maintain the status quo and associated unravelling of systems, and help us to generate alternatives and navigate a hopeful course towards flourishing futures in Dudley.
If you are curious to know a bit more about any of our navigation solutions, read on for further detail and links to some of our other lab notes which bring each example to life.
Challenge #1: How would we design and plan Emergent Cultures work?
Navigation solutions: Regenerative design approaches, such as permaculture design, convening a collective, and co-design canvases.
Lasting change and ripples: we continue to learn about, experiment with and deepen regenerative design practices, in our team and wider network. We introduce regenerative design approaches to others, and continue to iterate tools to support such work.
CoLab Dudley was introduced in 2014 as a way of inviting people in Dudley to see abundance and work with what already exists within and around them. Many kinds of creativity, skills, resources, knowledge and imaginations are overlooked by institutions and traditional ways of working, yet are vital to improving the places and spaces that matter to communities.
Since investing in a lab team working in Dudley town centre from late 2016, Dudley CVS catalysed the creation of many more possibilities for local people to come into relationship with each other, to share, make and learn together. Emergent Cultures, our proposal to the National Lottery Community Fund built on this, along with some initial explorations of complex systems at play in Dudley Town Centre by attending to the social infrastructure which stimulates and nourishes such possibilities. It invites collective imagining and co-creation of a resilient place.
Many of us have been socialised to understand that constant growth, violent
competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But emergence shows us that adaptation and evolution depend more on critical, deep and authentic connections,a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. The quality of connection between the nodes and the patterns.
~ adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
In considering the lab as a new form of social infrastructure our team recognised the need for the lab to employ a design and planning process which embraced complexity, emergence and appreciation of ways in which wider systems might be harnessed to support change, or might present problems which would require mitigating. The systems practice course we had embarked on had proved too cumbersome and resource heavy, and the design processes we had been using didn’t pay particular attention to wider systems or to the natural world, which we were becoming increasingly cognisant of needing to be in regenerative relationship with.
In early 2018 I had started to tentatively explore permaculture design and thinking around cultural emergence being developed by permaculture elders around the world. Sensing potential use for CoLab Dudley development, I embarked on an online Permaculture Design and Advanced Social Systems Design course in summer 2018, and began introducing permaculture ethics, mindsets, design strategies and principles to the lab team around the time our Emergent Cultures work began in Autumn 2018.
Permaculture design is a whole systems approach, and is proving to be a much gentler, adaptable and accessible way for the lab to apply whole systems design than previous methods we had grappled with. Permaculture design takes nature as a guide, and has an ethic around Earth Care, so also addresses the concerns we had around design approaches which didn’t encourage us take wider living and natural systems into account.
The lab notes below expand on how we started using this approach to design and planning, and why a regenerative design approach seemed to be a good fit for our work.
This led to iterations of project and experiment co-design canvases that I had been using in participatory platform work in Dudley since 2014. You can see various iterations on the Tools Table in our What Is More Possible Now online exhibition in Miro. Our canvas for Do Fest Dudley 2019 was the first time we’d made design principles explicit to local doers who we were co-designing with.
There’s perhaps a whole lab note waiting to be written on the evolution of our co-design canvases. Suffice to say that they are a key tool that we use to design and plan our work with a wider collective of creatives and connectors, doers and designers.
Challenge #2: How would we evaluate Emergent Cultures work?
Navigation / governance solution: Principles-Focused Evaluation, an emerging new Developmental Evaluation approach (we think we were the first in the UK to have started using it, in 2018).
Lasting change and ripples: Principles-Focused Evaluation is at the heart of how we make sense of change. We have introduced and support others to use this approach, including APEC architecture studio, Healthwatch Dudley, and Integrated Plus (a social prescribing service in Dudley).
Another early challenge we had to address was a requirement for a robust approach to evaluating our work. How could we begin to understand what effect the lab had in relation to complex challenges experienced by people in Dudley town centre? Our funder had asked for this (understandably), and we were keen to evolve the Developmental Evaluation approaches we had been using.
When funders use the term evaluation they tend to be talking about outcome and impact evaluation, which is about the effects of an intervention. We were also interested in an evaluation approach which would encourage us to consider and improve the nature and quality of how we worked, or process evaluation. (If you want to geek out on evaluation approaches, this is a fantastic video in which 101 (and counting) different evaluation approaches are identified: Why so damn many options? The 10 competing values that explain the panoramic evaluation landscape.)
Since late 2016 we’d been involving anyone involved in our work to be part of an evaluation process which generated real time, user-friendly feedback and helped to nurture learning in our team and across our network and projects. We call it detectorism, a word we made up to encourage people to do the learning side of doing without being scared or switching off from research. Detectorism is a form of continuous learning.
Thanks to TessyBritton introducing me to Developmental Evaluation in work which led to CoLab Dudley, we’d been paying attention to books and talks by evaluator pioneer Michael Quinn Patton. In 2018 he published Principles-Focused Evaluation which you can get a great overview of in this webinar recording:
In the book, Michael Quinn Patton calls attention to the fact that principles are the primary way of navigating complex dynamic systems and engaging in strategic initiatives.
There are many ways to evaluate social change work in communities. Most of the time we are asked by funders to monitor using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound) fixed goals. The trouble is that this approach doesn’t really tell us enough about the dynamic nature of change, or the emerging and sometimes unanticipated impact of the work. And it certainly doesn’t help us improve work on the go in a situation where the context is changing, timescales are shifting, and any number of new variables are revealed along the way.
So in autumn 2018 we started researching principles-driven work in our field, drawing inspiration from Impact Hub Birmingham’s Maker Manifesto, Place Lab’s Ethical Redevelopment work, Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help, and Participatory City’s design principles. Jo Orchard-Webb has documented our exploration of Principles-Focused Evaluation during our social lab design phase, including an introduction to the 8 principles we first developed. In spring 2019 she shared an update of their use in practice, and by summer 2019 we were finding the approach so helpful that we produced a short guide with our top tips on using Principles-Focused Evaluation to help anyone else considering it. We think we were the only people in the UK using the approach at this time. We revisited and revised our GUIDEing Principles in winter 2019, because the principles are rooted in the values of people leading the work, and our team had changed significantly so the principles needed to reflect our shared values.
We reviewed and revised our principles again in winter 2021, following yet another shift in team members during 2021. Our current principles will be shared in our next lab note, with lots of learning around ways in which adopting a Principles-Focused Evaluation approach has become critical to how we make sense of change. Lab team member Holly Doron has introduced this approach to our fellow travellers at Wolverhampton for Everyone and to her colleagues at APEC Architects. We’re also supporting Healthwatch Dudley and Integrated Plus (a social prescribing service in Dudley) to try out Principles-Focused Evaluation.
Challenge #3: How could we reduce reliance on the lab team?
Navigation / governance solution: Network weaving, including growing an intentional network of people taking action in relationship to each other.
Lasting change and ripples: We’ve nurtured a multi-hub network, so many relationships and projects could continue and evolve without the lab or lab team.
Through 2017 and 2018 we had connected and co-designed a diverse array of projects, activities and happenings with local people on Dudley High Street. People took the lead in projects they were passionate about, and continue to do so. However they weren’t collectively imagining, exploring or intentionally working together towards a wider shared aspiration or vision.
We navigated this challenge by drawing on Network Weaving approaches we had been learning about and applying as a lab team since early 2018, and practices of convening with purpose. We think that actions we developed in 2019 around this were a function of time and building relationships of trust — they perhaps wouldn’t have been so possible in the first phase of our work on the High Street.
Our What is more possible now lab note on Network Vital Signs shares the stages in our weaving of a network which has reduced reliance on the lab team as a hub at the centre:
Challenge #4: How would we intentionally / proactively adapt to changing relationships with partners?
Navigation / governance solution: permeable boundaries between the team and wider collective.
Lasting change and ripples: Dudley CVS now brings in Creative Partners to the lab team, having grown relationships and trust through collaborative work across a collective.
In 2019, as we developed goals focused on public spaces and more creative places, embarked on collaborations with creative producers and grew a collective of changemakers designing High Street based experiments, the work of the lab became less relevant to organisations we had been working in partnership with during 2017 and 2018. We were also struggling to understand some of the storytelling function of the lab. It was apparent that we needed to re-think the role of storytelling through lab team make up, drawing people from our wider network into the team to support this function.
People and organisations may come and go from our teams and networks, depending on the specific problem we’re trying to solve and the stakeholders to whom it’s relevant. The flexibility to call on different parts of a lab’s network and ecosystem is critical.
~ from Labcraft, edited by Hendrikt Tiesinga and Remko Berkhout
By June 2019 a new structure for the lab team was being shaped, both to incorporate more people working on documentation and storytelling and reduce the burden of lab work on partner organisations who were struggling to contribute. However while were designing the new structure two partners announced intentions to step out of lab work, opening up potential for a rethink in our partnership arrangements. (Our Reaching Communities funding from the National Lottery Community Fund was through a Partnerships programme, and our Funding Manager was incredibly supportive as Dudley CVS transitioned into completely new partnership arrangements for CoLab Dudley work.)
We realised that the work that was emerging needed particular kinds of partners; Creative Partners who could bring curation, creative production, design and creative practices into the heart of the lab. During 2019 Fused and Bloom Creative Wellbeing CIC became Creative Partners, then in 2020 CreHeart CIC, with architect and researcher Holly Doron joining the lab team as a Dudley CVS Associate in spring 2020.
We now grow relationships with potential future lab partners through our collective of Time Rebels. It’s a way for creatives to come closer to the lab team and lab practices, and for us to find out if we’re a good fit for each other.
Helen and Bill of Workshop 24 generously shared the following on their website during their call out for Radio Public, following their More-Than-Human High Street experiment with us as Time Rebels:
We have found common ground with CoLab Dudley, an experimental form of social infrastructure, aimed at creating places and experiences on the High St that are open to everyone.
In October 2021 we were invited to become Creative Partners with CoLab. We acknowledge the many years of social research and experimentation that has gone before us, which we now build upon. We recognise the context of Dudley High St., its multiple stories and realities, its people, history, identity and culture. Let’s make some new stories.
Challenge #5: How would we embrace a much wider diversity of knowledge making and ways of knowing in our shared learning?
Navigation / governance solution: Detectorism in the Wild; our continuous learning approach.
Lasting change and ripples: Intentional rhythms of convening shared learning, sense making and working out loud across the network including making all learning and data insights available to all.
Detectorism is the thinking about, collection of, mapping, analysis and sharing of CoLab Dudley data relating to lab projects, processes, experiences and impact. Detectorism is underpinned by an open invitation to everyone to join in this shared learning.
Detectorism draws on 3 methodologies or traditions of research:
- Developmental Evaluation; a method suited to support the learning in the context of social innovation and complex challenges.
- Ethnography; as a way to explore the complex social processes and meanings in an emergent culture.
- Participatory research; using participatory methods as part of an ongoing commitment to shared learning, learning cultures and self efficacy.In the context of CoLab Dudley there are no set of final recommendations, rather an ongoing relationship of working collectively to use our findings to inform emergent sharing cultures in Dudley. Learning in detectorism is ongoing, integrated into action, and supports changes of direction.
As a lens on the world detectorism is driven by empathy, curiosity, creativity, and focusses on ongoing shared learning with doers, encouragers, fellow travellers and lab team members. Detectorism celebrates all knowledges and believes we all have detectorism super powers.
~ an explainer by Jo Orchard-Webb
In January 2019 lab team member Jo Orchard-Webb and I began to carve out dedicated time each week to focus on detectorism (our approach to learning through doing) through 3 lenses:
- as a deeply relevant, multi-layered approach we can grow and share across boundaries and beyond the lab;
- in relation to our lab practices, work and impact; and
- in relationship with our network of Fellow Travellers.
In January 2020, Jo told us about an intention to relocate to the south coast in the summer, so these sessions developed a renewed focus on finding ways for detectorism to be a collectively led activity. We started to call this Detectorism in the Wild, bringing with it a recognition that to be collectively led it would need to more effectively embrace different ways of learning and knowing from people with different methods, disciplines, world-views and lived experiences.
Lockdowns which started in spring 2020, and the shift to online working meant that, most happily, we didn't need to say farewell to Jo when she did move house, and we had more time to begin experimenting with Detectorism in the Wild as a lab team. Jo shared 2 key reasons for developing Detectorism in the Wild with the team:
1. Embracing our diversity of knowledge making and ways of knowing
As the whole lab team take responsibility for how detectorism is designed into their actions and experiments on the High Street it weaves together a wider range of perspectives, ways of knowing, traditions and voices that inform the learning, doing and being in this work. 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.
Jo asked lab team members to each select a few of our GUIDEing principles that resonated most with our particulat work, to increase critical engagement and ownership of the principles across the team. This was intended to help with ‘walking the walk’ of our principles as well bringing them to life, in unexpected/under-explored ways, for a much wider network of doers and encouragers in the work.
2. Socialising research for collective sense making and action
We have 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.
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! It zooms in to the personal and proximate, as well as zooming out to global interdependencies and future generations. A range of creative practices from story-telling, communal walking, theatre, dance, design and visual arts are at the heart of this learning. Each lab member has designed 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.
Each lab team member made a research plan detailing: What I am experimenting with | Principles I will focus on | Imagination Sundial navigation areas guiding me | Tools and methods I will use | Data types and sources | Ideas for socialising the data | Intentions for sharing the learning | Joining the Dots e.g. other projects to link to, network weaving needed following learning and themes emerging.
This work with lab team members went on to inform our design and detectorism processes with Time Rebels, with all of the above research plan elements featuring in the Time Rebel co-design canvases used in advance of Do Fest Dudley 2021; thus spreading Detectorism in the Wild into our collective of Time Rebels. Holly Doron then developed a branch of Detectorism in the Wild that she called Street Detectorism, which lots of local doers have participated in.
Street detectorism is another way detectorism in the wild tries to socialise research for collective sense making and action. It is experiential; rooted in the space, place and people; it requires observation, listening and slowing down; and ultimately reimagining the purpose of the High Street.
~ from Holly’s lab note on Street Detectorism
Detectorism in the Wild led to a multiplicity of sensing and sensemaking mediums being adopted during Do Fest in 2021, leading to the lessons and insights shared in this lab note:
Stories of Place has grown from Street Detectorism, inviting even more layers of creativity, ways of knowing and knowledge making:
Our What is more possible now lab note on Learning and Doing Ripples summarises ways in which we have brought learning into the heart of our lab governance and practice over the last four years:
As Jo Orchard-Webb highlights in the above lab note:
We are passionate advocates of the agency of shared or social learning capability across transformative networks. We believe this is critical to systems change for regenerative futures.
Through our governance, practices, and ways of being in the world as lab team and Time Rebels we try to nurture a social learning capability in our networks in all sorts of creative ways, across many geographical, organisational, discipline and sector boundaries.
Through intentional rhythms of convening shared learning, sense making and working out loud across the network we:
- invest in Time Rebel time for shared learning and reflection as a valued part of the creative, collaborative and experimental process;
- make all the learning and data insights available to all;
- actively design/collect a treasure chest of tools for shared learning and discovery that are rooted in this place.
Challenge #6: How would we respond to Covid-19 lockdowns?
Navigation / governance solutions: The Virtual High Street, Public Life Studies, Time Rebels of Dudley High Street, online tools and the Imagination Sundial.
Lasting change and ripples: Ongoing online and hybrid working, and consistent use of Zoom, Miro and Slack. This has enabled us to retain a lab team member who relocated, and to be more flexible around people’s lives; both Time Rebels in our collective and local people who participate in Time Rebel experiments. We support others to work online and use the tools which help us.
Before the first lockdown restrictions were announced we had prepared to move activity online, and invited local doers to use and convene on our Virtual High Street. This was a Zoom Pro account which we gave members of our Collective free and open access to, along with associated groups and organisations and projects we connected with who were unsure of using Zoom. Colleagues leading a project tackling isolation and loneliness in Coseley trialled a coffee morning using our Zoom account and soon found ways to get devices to people they supported who didn’t have them and gave lessons on using Zoom from front gardens! Top Church Dudley used our Zoom account through spring 2020 for informal and group sessions with congregation members.
Through weekly informal virtual coffee sessions we supported Collective members to begin experimenting with online doing, which was 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 thought carefully about ways to convene online which were really gentle, offered regular opportunities for connection in strange lockdown times, and took account of challenges people would be experiencing. Sometimes people joined with cameras off, just for a sense of connection.
Lab team members played a critical role in supporting people leading projects with the tech, including being present at sessions as technology stewards. This enabled doers to focus on hosting, content and group processes, as they would have done in a physical gathering. Projects and convenings on the Virtual High Street open to local doers included:
Plans to launch Dudley People’s Archive in the CoLab Dudley space on Dudley High Street in March 2020 were prevented by lockdowns, but lab team member David adeptly took the project online.
The objective was to create and curate a collection of pictures, stories and objects that encouraged and stimulated conversations around Dudley’s past, present and future — as well as offering a warm invitation to enter our space on the High Street.
The original idea (in 2019) was to open our High Street space to create an ever-growing, evolving and changing living exhibition, where the public could pop in with a photograph, sketch or object and add it to the project. This, we hoped, might help us begin to generate conversations in a space that is a little more unusual than our neighbours.
But then lockdown arrived and so the project offshoot: ‘Growing Up In Dudley,’ was created as an experimental social engagement tool using online platforms…
We used the lockdowns as a call to action and an opportunity for people to dig out old photographs, to look through their photo albums and share their memories.
This was done by gentle calls to actions, using social media and online conversations as well as features in the local press. This became more fluid and easily done as more people joined the online communities (1,216 instagram followers and 1,200 members of the Growing Up In Dudley Facebook group).
~ Lab team member David O’Coy, in his lab note on Creating a People’s Archive in Dudley
So while possibilities to meet and convene people on the High Street in 2020 had reduced, these multiple touch points and range of opportunities for people to get involved in different ways helped us to reach people we may not have done in the ways we were working before.
Between the first lockdown in March 2020 and restrictions lifting in spring 2021, other than when we co-designed and built a parklet, only 4 lab team members used our new lovely new lab space on Dudley High Street (that we got the keys to on 4 February 2020 😔). During summer and into autumn 2020 we used the windows and an area of pavement outside in creative ways to engage people who live, work and socialise on the High Street.
We intentionally collected observations on ways that the High Street was being used, and shared these along with conversations with people and local businesses, and design ideas with Dudley Council in a series of reports.
A significant change in our work prompted by shifts in thinking and the learning opportunities that became available during the first 6 months of the pandemic was a much clearer convening call around our work. We decided to revitalise our collective of doers through invitations across our network for people to join us as Time Rebels. We also developed a process that invited a cohort of Time Rebels to come together (initially online only) in autumn 2020 around a shared mission, orienting everyone in our work and introducing navigation and design tools that we would all use, such as the Imagination Sundial developed by Rob Shorter, and online tools such as Miro and Slack.
Challenge #7: How could we authentically communicate and invite many kinds of relationships in ways which feel welcoming and respectful of a wide array of different needs and expectations that people have?
Navigation / governance solutions: A dedicated lab space on the High Street with huge window. Creative Partners and a wider collective. Lo-fi and experimental work with creatives. Generating a friendly guide to collaboration with CoLab Dudley. Communicating in a range of languages (inward, outward and upward).
Lasting change and ripples: Nurturing of a diversity of relationships.
Sharing the language and ideas of the lab, and the complexities of the work is challenging in a context of business-as-usual which generates overwhelm and busy-ness. We’ve learned to extend invitations to year long enquiries, and carefully craft time to give those people who respond (our Time Rebels) some tools to orient themselves and navigate this work together. As a visible presence on the High Street, we’ve had fun and learned a lot through introducing a space and platform to people who are not used to having something different on the High Street.
The lab space
Securing a dedicated lab space on Dudley High Street has made a huge difference to our ability to clearly communicate and invite local people into relationship with creative experiments and projects that the lab catalyses supports. Getting the keys to the unit only 6 weeks before the UK went into lockdown due to a global pandemic imposed rather a delay on the lab space being used as we hoped, but we had managed to do a lot of thinking, co-design and painting by mid March 2020, as detailed in this lab note:
In summer 2020 we outlined ways in which different areas in the lab space would generate invitations, and support and communicate lab work in posts about the Imaginarium, the Workshop and the Observatory. We don’t offer the space as a venue for hire — instead we work with Time Rebels to design projects and experiences using our GUIDEing principles to help shape activities that can take place in and around the space. Time Rebels have used the Imaginarium and it’s fantastic floor to ceiling windows facing onto Dudley High Street for a diversity of open exhibitions and events, inviting and leading to an array of conversations about local people’s families, memories, aspirations and hopes.
Creative Partners and a wider collective of Time Rebels
Bringing Creative Partners into the lab team (a response to challenge #4, see above) dramatically improved and diversified the ways we communicated and invited people into relationship with lab supported experiments and work. Creative Partners are helping to grow our collective of Time Rebels and active participation in projects and experiments. They do this by creating and supporting opportunities for local creatives to lead convening; for example Jan bringing together Stitchers in Time as part of Dudley People’s Archive project in 2021 around Growing Up In Dudley, Becky being asked to lead Brierley Hill Collage Club following a year of Collage Club activity in collaboration with Dudley People’s Archive, and Bill and Helen introducing local creatives to social art practice and creating space for them to experiment through Radio Public.
Through our invitations to join us on year long collective adventures through which they can follow their own curiosity and lines of enquiry, Time Rebels have implemented a plethora of methods to communicate with and invite local people to make, do and dream. These range from inviting passers-by to write a poem or create prints with textures collected on the High Street, to pro-actively approaching Black business owners to collect their histories. An array of creative techniques have been utilised, most of them lo-fi and experimental, with iterations and evolutions emerging in response to live testing and learning. Each of these creative interventions have significantly helped to introduce a space and platform to an area that is not used to anything like this on the High Street. By inviting curiosity in gentle, lo-fi, sensory and unusual ways, Time Rebels have helped local people to feel comfortable coming into the lab space, asking questions and sharing stories. By far the most effective conversation starters have been exhibitions featuring photos of local people in the past. They create immediate connection and story sharing.
A friendly guide to collaboration
As well as relationships with our partners, collective and local people, we have sought to learn about what makes for a great relationship in collaborations with CoLab Dudley. Following a fantastic experience of collaboration with Mat Jones and students of BCU’s School of Architecture and Design in 2020/2021 we produced a friendly guide to collaboration with CoLab Dudley. It makes explicit that our interest is in tending relationships that help to catalyse imagination into action. We outline what we expect in collaborative relationships in order to:
- create the mental and emotional space to expand our collective capacity to imagine new futures;
- nurture practices that connect us and change our frame of possibility; and
- prioritise gathering places that provide platforms for collective imagining and the place based knowledge that underpins this.
Communicating in a range of languages
In this very insightful post by Dougald Hine (h/t Lloyd Davis), three languages likely to be needed by activities located in the logic of the commons (which I would place CoLab Dudley in) are shared.
Dougald differentiates between:
- The Inward language: the way that those at the heart of a project make sense of what they are doing, the way of seeing the world that makes it possible… It is a creative, living language…
- The Outward language: the language in which people who meet your project at ground level, in the course of their everyday lives, start to talk about it. It’s the language in which you can explain it to your mum, or to someone you just met in the pub, and realise that they get it — not that they have understood everything about what you’re doing, but that something here makes sense and sounds good. This is not about how your project works, it’s about what it does…
Our inward language evolves through our lab team, partly learned from Fellow Travellers and people whose work we are inspired by. Our Creative Partners and Time Rebels adopt and adapt our inward language to varing degrees. We pay deep attention to this language when we are doing things like articulating our GUIDEing principles. Over lab notes in this publication infused with our inward language, as we test out how words and concepts taste, land and help to communicate the new ways of working that we are experimenting with.
Our outward language is facilitated by the interventions of our Creative Partners and Time Rebels, and their experiments are what we talk about when we are in outward language mode. Our outward language takes many forms, in harmony with our Detectorism in the Wild approach. We communicate visually, through sound, dance, music, poetry and more.
The third language Dougald explains is:
- The Upward language: the language of power and resources: the language of funding applications, the language of those who are in a position to intepret regulations and impose or remove obstacles. It is not a reflective or a curious language, it is a language of busy people who make decisions without having time to immerse themselves in the realities their decisions will affect. It is an impoverished language and when you have to describe what you are doing in its terms, you will feel that something is missing…
… When you have to describe what you are doing in its terms, you will feel that something is missing. This is exactly how this language feels to me. We spend much more time that is desirable trying to translate how we work from our inward language to an upward language when we write funding applications and reports to funders. This sense of something missing which Dougald so perceptively points to is what makes communicating in this language so challenging. It’s very easy to communicate work in simple or complicated domains in this language. But not work located in and responding to complexity (ref. the cynefin framework). Especially, as Dougald also helpfully calls attention to, when the work is drawing on the logic of the commons. This sub-challenge we don’t have any honed strategies to navigate around yet.
Challenge #8: How can we generate and share pluralistic and long term visions in ways which are inviting and inspire action?
Navigation solutions: Collaborations with architecture students, Do Fest Dudley 2021 designed around What If questions, a Digital Allotment for Cultural Strategy work.
Ripples: Cultural Collaborators and work with Time Rebels on Cultural Strategy.
In this lab note on rethinking what it means to have a vision I outlined why we seek many, varied visions, and ways in which they are being generated by Time Rebels and through our collaborations with Birmingham City University’s School of Architecture and Design.
What If… we brought together the talents, experience and knowledge of creatives, community connectors, doers and designers in Dudley borough to collectively craft irresistible invitations to local people to rehearse the futures they want in the places they love?
With investment from Arts Council England for Cultural Compact work, we are now nurturing an open network of Cultural Collaborators across Dudley Borough, with a diverse, highly connected group of Time Rebels at the core. We are calling attention to three interconnected challenges which impact the futures of our local communities:
- the role of culture in responding to the climate emergency and restoring our relationship with the rest of nature;
- barriers to everyday creativity in communities (and related cultural democracy deficit); and
- uneven cultural engagement across Dudley borough.
Each year, starting in autumn, we embark on Time Rebel missions. In 2020 we convened Time Rebels around our first mission: experimenting with ways to rebuild and release the imaginative capacity of people in Dudley. We built on this in our second mission in which we explored culture, to create cultural ripples, waves and swells. Our third Time Rebel mission is to deepen our awareness of the future, shape and share some simple practices and experiment ideas that can help us to transform the potential of the present moment through collaborative everyday creativity and collective learning.
To help weave a wider network of Cultural Collaborators and encourage resource flows across it we aim to have conversations with 100 people this year over coffee, or tea, or simply on a walk. We want to chat to creative practitioners, guardians of local cultural assets, educators, creative producers, community connectors, and colleagues from the council, NHS and other institutions who support people in our borough. To date we’ve had coffees with regeneration and planning officers, local artists, social entrepreneurs, and voluntary sector workers.
We’re convening monthly meet-ups for connectors who weave people and resources together so that creative or cultural activities can start, sustain or evolve in places where local people can get involved. The meet-ups are designed to support sharing of knowledge and ideas, and to introduce some tools to aid thinking about legacy of creative community projects and cultural programmes in the places that connectors live, volunteer or work in. They are tools that Dudley’s Time Rebels are using to help shape cultural strategy in Dudley borough.
We’re experimenting with a digital allotment for Time Rebels to tend together:
These are ripples from CoLab Dudley’s cumulative responses to operational challenges. They use regenerative design approaches, are informed by our GUIDEing principles, employ network weaving tactics, and bring new Time Rebels into the work thanks to relationship building by our Creative Partners. Detectorism in the Wild will continue to help us to invite a diversity of knowledge making and ways of knowing, and we will use online tools which we embraced during lockdowns to complement in person collaboration. We will continue to make use of our lab space on Dudley High Street, and support all kinds of ways growing relationships and participation.
Some of the above are extracts from progress reports to our funder. If you’d like to chat to us about any of the challenges or the navigation solutions we’ve found, please do drop us a line. My email address is Lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk
