Shifts that have inspired us
Paying tribute to the work that has paved the way for us
Earlier this year, we shared our new commitments to how we approach social change and our learnings and unlearnings that have shaped our vision and purpose. We developed this strategy collectively (as we try to do across all organisational decisions), shaped by our team’s experience and practice, and heavily influenced by the pioneering work of people we admire.
In this blog, we pay tribute to some of those people and the shifts that they have built. These sources span across social justice movements, rights-based approaches from indigenous communities, the wider social and built environment design space, alongside grassroots community building within both the Global North and South. We won’t ever truly know to what extent all of these efforts are present in our own work, but at the minimum, we fully acknowledge that we wouldn’t exist without them.
Shifting towards people-led change
Globally, a participatory movement attempting to dismantle the decision-making and governance structures that dominate the post-colonial world has been growing for decades. This includes the changing tide of city budget decision-making by residents in thousands of cities around the world to people setting policy recommendations through local and national assemblies. In the world of design, we’ve also seen practice shift towards more participatory approaches, from designing for, to with and ultimately by the people whose lives are impacted by the spaces, services and everything in-between that ‘experts’ currently design.
We believe in people-led change at all levels, from the product to the policy, and draw hope from the communities and practitioners we collaborate with. More broadly, we get inspired by movements that take on power directly, including larger political changes such as the Sunflower Movement in Taiwan and the continued evolution of democracy with g0v led by Audrey Tang, the Rojava Revolution in Syria, and the decentralised governance movement that ran alongside the 15M Movement in Spain. Of course, as Tyson Yunkaporta writes in Sand Talk and David Weber and David Wengrow cite in The Dawn of Everything, the indigenous practice of non-hierarchical decision-making and justice was common place pre-colonisation. For us, distributed decision-making is both a means for more impactful work and a necessity for a fairer society.
“People mobilize in social movements because the pace at which the government is changing direction is not fast enough to tackle new problems.”
Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister
Shifting through demonstrators
We’ve seen our best work when we develop demonstrators of change, a sandbox away from the current system and the dark matter that limits meaningful transformation. Localised demonstrations of new societal models are a well-trodden approach to innovation. Behind each demonstrator, there will be hundreds more, whether that be the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham in the ’40s, the work of Dan Hill, Bryan Boyer and others at the Helsinki Design Lab, Tessy Britton and the Participatory City team in Barking and Dagenham, Mariana Mazzucato’s localised mission-driven economy taking hold in Camden, or the ever-evolving work of Imandeep Kaur, Daniel Blyden and the Civic Square team whose organisational refounding provides a much deeper exploration and inspiration to neighbourhood-scale demonstrators of change. While we are not a place-based organisation, nor does community necessarily mean a local area in our practice, the tireless work of all those before us continues to refine and stretch our thinking.
Our fairer funding work explores new mechanisms, products, collective models, and community relationships to funding and place. Our emerging practice is inspired by indigenous community-giving approaches such as susu or tanda networks, early credit union models such as Ninomiya Sontoku’s gojoukou model, alongside more recent demonstrators of non-extractive finance models, from the likes of Boston Ujima, Common Future, and Seed Commons in the US.
Demonstrating what is possible through things you can touch and feel is fundamental to our approach to systems change. We lean on various models that help us to understand and illustrate these system transitions — whether that be the work of ‘illuminating a new way of being’ from the Berkana Institute’s two loops model. Or operating in the second horizon of three horizons thinking. Or prototyping towards systems demonstrators for mission-oriented innovation.
“I don’t think there are cheap tickets to system change … You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analysing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms. In the end, it seems that leverage has less to do with pushing levers than it does with disciplined thinking combined with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.”
Donella Meadows, Author
By learning from and building on our own expertise in some of these practices and approaches to change, we recognise how much of our practice is still deeply steeped in patriarchal, colonial, and Western norms. We have no intention to (but recognise we still may) extract knowledge, resources (including funding), or credit from those who inspire and inform our work. We intend to hold ourselves accountable for finding ways to dismantle rather than perpetuate existing dominant systems and narratives towards change. But we’ll still make mistakes, so please do reach out to us if you have some feedback about how we’re talking about and making this change.
