Adam Thorpe:
Infrastructuring For Social Mobility
Weds 8th March 2019, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern
The podcast below was recorded at the Beta Society launch event at Tate Exchange, 5-10 March 2019, also see 'What is Beta Society?'
Infrastructuring For Social Mobility
Weds 8th March 2019, Tate Exchange, Tate Modern
The podcast below was recorded at the Beta Society launch event at Tate Exchange, 5-10 March 2019, also see 'What is Beta Society?'
Podcast recording in association with the Open Design and Manufacturing OD&M project, a knowledge alliance of students, professors, researchers, makers, entrepreneurs and creative practitioners distributed across Europe and China. The OD&M programme has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.
Podcast:
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What I'm going to talk about today: My understanding is that one of the themes that's been running through this week's event is the theme around social mobility. And so, one of the terms we use to describe some of the work that we do is ‘infrastructuring’. See full transcript below: | ||
Transcript: Adam Thorpe, Infrastructuring For Social Mobility
My name is Adam Thorpe. I work at Central Saint Martins where my main research interest is Social Design and Social Responsive Design, which basically means we’re looking at ways to use design to address different social challenges.
I’m located in the Design Against Crime research centre, which was started in 1999 - I’ve been working there for 15 years. To start with we were working in very multidisciplinary and collaborative ways to address different sorts of crime issues and then about 7 years ago started to realise that actually what we had to contribute in terms of design methods could be used with many different groups in different contexts. We started delivering what we call ‘Socially Responsive Design’ which is basically design that prioritises social issues in pursuit of social change.
What I'm going to talk about today:
My understanding is that one of the themes that's been running through this week's event is the theme around social mobility. And so, one of the terms we use to describe some of the work that we do is ‘infrastructuring’.
So, to start with, I thought I knew what social mobility is and I think I do, but I thought I'd better check. Social Mobility Commision talk about this idea of there being a link between a person's occupational income and the occupation or income of their parents, so looking at that change and whether that change is upward or downward in terms of the new generation versus the generation that preceded them. My thinking around this when I was reading these definitions and the rest of the literature that accompanies it resonates with what one of our colleagues here was talking about earlier, which was that it is very individualistic.
So I was thinking "ok, so where is this notion of the collective, where is the collective in these definitions of social mobility, given that our practices is around, are around co-design". And, I guess we're thinking about the aspect of inequality and the sort of condition where even though, in general, living standards are rising, actually the difference between different groups within society is rising also. So the living standards are going up, but also the inequality is going up as well. So obviously that might and seems to be having an impact on social cohesion, and that's one of the concerns.
My name is Adam Thorpe. I work at Central Saint Martins where my main research interest is Social Design and Social Responsive Design, which basically means we’re looking at ways to use design to address different social challenges.
I’m located in the Design Against Crime research centre, which was started in 1999 - I’ve been working there for 15 years. To start with we were working in very multidisciplinary and collaborative ways to address different sorts of crime issues and then about 7 years ago started to realise that actually what we had to contribute in terms of design methods could be used with many different groups in different contexts. We started delivering what we call ‘Socially Responsive Design’ which is basically design that prioritises social issues in pursuit of social change.
What I'm going to talk about today:
My understanding is that one of the themes that's been running through this week's event is the theme around social mobility. And so, one of the terms we use to describe some of the work that we do is ‘infrastructuring’.
So, to start with, I thought I knew what social mobility is and I think I do, but I thought I'd better check. Social Mobility Commision talk about this idea of there being a link between a person's occupational income and the occupation or income of their parents, so looking at that change and whether that change is upward or downward in terms of the new generation versus the generation that preceded them. My thinking around this when I was reading these definitions and the rest of the literature that accompanies it resonates with what one of our colleagues here was talking about earlier, which was that it is very individualistic.
So I was thinking "ok, so where is this notion of the collective, where is the collective in these definitions of social mobility, given that our practices is around, are around co-design". And, I guess we're thinking about the aspect of inequality and the sort of condition where even though, in general, living standards are rising, actually the difference between different groups within society is rising also. So the living standards are going up, but also the inequality is going up as well. So obviously that might and seems to be having an impact on social cohesion, and that's one of the concerns.
I like this term so I thought I'd share it - this one around 'sticky floors and sticky ceilings'. So, the idea that sticky floors, really that if within our household and our parents, if we're dealing with low income, ill health and lower levels of education then it makes it difficult for our children and that's observed through the research of this group: The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. And 'sticky ceilings' which is that if you're fortunate enough to find yourself in the situation where you've got a lot of advantages then you tend to hold on to them and you tend to hold on to them for your kids and the people that you know. So, the people that have less opportunity, hampered by that lack of opportunity, even going forward. And those with more opportunity also hamper progression because they keep hold of the opportunities that are available to them. So that's the context that we're talking about.
The term 'infrastructuring', just to talk a little bit about that. For us, I started to think about 'infrastructure'. Typically we know it to be roads, hospitals, schools, the structures and facilities that we need to operate as a society. But then what we're really interested in as well is 'social infrastructure', so connections between people and 'relational infrastructure'. And how do we build ‘social infrastructure’ or ‘relational infracture’. And then also these ideas around some people that we read XXXXX (name not audible) asked the question, "when is infrastructure?", not just "what is infrastructure?", but the idea that infrastructure depends. So a set of stairs might be infrastructure if you're able to move from one level to another, if you're able to walk up them. If you're not able to walk up them then actually that set of stairs isn't infrastructure for that person: it becomes a barrier.
So if we think about that in social terms, if we think about that in relational terms, then what does that start to mean? When is an infrastructure and the notion of infrastructure depending? And then we start to talk about the practices of 'infrastructuring', which lots of guys in the Malmo(??) school over in Sweden have done a lot of thinking around infrastucturing XXXX (Paleyenne?, Piers Helgmann? names not legible) and many of their colleagues. They talk about the fact that one of the things interesting about infrastructuring is that it’s not a quick fix. This is something that came up in conversation earlier, when we're looking for quick results, this idea of infrastructuring. It's about infrastructuring people, place and resources. It needs to be open-ended. We don't know what the outcomes are going to be at the outset. We need to be flexible to let these outcomes emerge and move in the directions that the potential is demonstrated in them where they're the direction that people want to go in.
So really in this context we're thinking about increasing people's access to opportunity and increasing people's access to resources. And this is something that within participatory design and collaborative design - the work that we do - we understand how this collaborative design contributes to increase people's access to opportunity and resources. When we're thinking about social mobility, actually if social mobility - if we've got these sticky ceilings and sticky floors - actually can some of these approaches that we're applying to social design actually help to contribute to infrastructure towards social mobility. Is that fair? Does that make sense as a logical starting point - in terms of what infrastructure relationship might be to social mobility?
And then to talk about some of the design work that we've been doing. So, over at Central Saint Martin's where myself and some of my colleagues here are based, we've been trying to work out how we can really use some of the privilege and resource that we have within the institution to be of more benefit to our neighbours. The borough in which we're located - Camden - is one of the most unequal boroughs in London. You've got - in the south of the borough you're sometimes in the top 10 percentile of the deprivation indices across a number of different measures. In the north of the borough - Hamstead, Highgate - you're at the other end of the scale. The Council's aware of that and is looking at how they can address some of those challenges and it's not easy to do when there's less and less funding available to local government - to be able to implement some of the practices that they think might make a positive contribution to addressing inequalities.
So one of the things that we did 4 years ago was we started working with Camden Council through this project that we called 'Public Collaboration Lab', which again, referencing what we were talking about earlier on about how can you change the system if the system is so dependent on efficiency that there's no slack in the system to experiment and fail. What this was about was prototyping. So we thought we would prototype a lab in which we can take some chances, start out not really knowing how it's going to go, not really knowing entirely what we're going to do together even, and see where it leads and see what benefits it might be able to contribute by aligning the operational objectives of the local government - so what the local government has to do to support its residents - and the learning objectives of the design school - so what our community of staff and students need to do to improve the outcomes of our community inside the college. So, this really is about ‘learning together by doing together’, and is the narrative we've been working with.
Over those years we've delivered about 19-20 projects, and we've identified that where the synergy is with local government and residents is around service transformation, community resilience, behaviour change and engagement and consultation: different ways of engaging and consulting that make it more accessible to people and make it more interesting for people.
What I'm going to do is share with you a couple of projects and then hone in on the project that some of the MA Industrial Design students (now graduates) have worked on on, where that's leading to and how it relates to this Open Design and Manufacturing project that we've been funding by the European Union to deliver (which Matt will talk a little more about later on and share some of the learning resources that have come out of that).
So one of the projects that Zoe and her team were working on in 2016, which is still now going on, (so we are in 2019, this is that thing about long-term, open-ended processes) was addressing the challenge of overcrowded housing. The inequalities task-force at Camden were looking at how do inequalities manifest, what do they actually look like in the borough? One of the manifestations is housing and overcrowded housing. There's a points system to be able to move into larger social housing if you're overcrowded and at the moment you need about 500-600 points to get relocated. We were working with families who had quite severe challenges within their domestic setup, but they're only on about 350 points. So even though there's a lot of house building going on there, there's still not a lot of opportunity for the 37% of the population that are in social housing in Camden to be able to move out of overcrowded conditions. One of the things that the residents said would be useful was this idea of if they could have furniture that was exactly the right dimensions they wouldn't bang - so one particular person I'm thinking of said she would be smashing her hip every time she walked down her hallway, and that when that happened to her eight times a day it really started to impact on her quality of life - it was just a constant reminder and she had a callus on her hip where this kept happening. And so in the first year some tools were designed for services. In the second year Zoe and the team did a co-design project with some families to codesign a range of furniture that they thought would be useful to them that could be adapted. What was interesting about it was that by using digital manufacturing methods you could actually, on the computer screen, change the dimensions to your specific dimensions so they would exactly fit your dimensions and then you'd have the pattern for your furniture on a memory stick and then you could cut that out on a CNC machine, and the way these guys (talk to Zoe if you want to know more about it), the way these guys designed it, it didn't need any glue, it didn't need any screws, it just needed a mallet - a rubber mallet - to be able to clip this quite attractive and highly functional furniture together in exactly the size and in exactly the combination of functionality that you were after. There's also a service model that enables you to work with others to realise that. One of the things we knew though was that the CNC machine we have in the college that we use to make these prototypes was always too busy, so if we were going to scale this to the 4,500 families in Camden that could benefit from it then where's the community CNC machine that we could have access to? So, that was a conversation - "where's the community CNC?" - that started 2 years ago, and towards the end of this story I'll tell you where we are with some of that now.
Another project that was going on through the Public Collaboration Lab, with another group of students, not in Industrial Design this time, but in Narrative Environments, who look at people, place and time. They've grown out of Exhibition Design, so what they do now is they take some of the learning they've had from Exhibition Design about telling stories in spaces and start to think about if you reverse engineer some of that, how can you change spaces such that so that certain stories are more likely to happen in them? And that way of thinking about design then starts to create interventions in public space and thinking about how we can work with people in public space to create stages for different types of interactions: different types of stories to ensue.
This particular project was working with public health and looking at what were the barriers to healthy diet and active living. Some of the finds of the project were, that actually some of the older people we were working with, the main motivator for them to be walking a lot was relationships. Perhaps it's not so surprising - one lady that we went for a walk with on Saturday morning around Elephant and Castle market because she invited us to go with her, took her pedometer along, walked a mile and a half. She was 87 and walked a mile and a half chatting to different people on different stands. So that was interesting - the idea that relationships were something that motivate activity. Also another thing that came out of that were that people were saying that there was no access to fresh fruit and vegetables - the sort that they wanted for their cooking - they couldn't get it in their area and the stuff that was available to them was expensive and not necessarily the fruit and veg that they wanted for their cooking. So these were some of the barriers that we shared with public health and something that we learned.
We did another project - ‘Social Isolation and Loneliness’ - addressing some of that with different groups. And again, we understood something more about who was socially isolated and lonely - lots of younger people, not just older people which one might imagine, actually lots of younger people as well. And thinking about how then can more people come together?
We've been working for many many years with Somers Town Community Association who have themselves been working and representing residents in Somers Town for 30 years. With that group and with their colleagues who have been working together with New Horizons Youth Centre and with Origin Housing and others, they'd already started to crowdfund to reinvigorate Charlton Street Market, which is a market street that runs through the heart of Somers Town. It's got a licence for 100 years to be a market. It's got a licence to operate on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, but it's only ever open on a Friday. There's pitches for 47 stalls, but there's only ever maximum 6 stalls - so, there's lots of potential! Given that we know that there's this social isolation - you can chat to people on a market, healthy diet - you can get fruit and veg on a market (you can't on this one, but you could), socialising - motivates active living and walking around. Ok so if we had some stands where people exchanged conversation as well as the exchange in money, or instead of the exchange of money (if there's no money in the area), then how could that contribute. So we started working together on this idea around the market. It was a open design project which basically means that the process was open so anybody could get involved in the process, anyone could join the project not just the students, and the products, the outputs of the project would be open. So the outputs of the project would be open and available to others to share, so any designs that came out of it (as long as they credit where they came from if they changed them, and they would have to share them in a similar way), these designs were open to anyone to use.
The process that the students went through was one of:
Discovering: so, going onto the market itself, setting up market stalls to find out what people valued, needed, wanted. Defining: the typical mapping out and setting priorities, but then taking those priorities back to the street. Sets of briefs that they then engaged with residents, again out in the market. Codesigning what the market stalls might be like, which briefs they wanted to address. [Referring to slide] Some of these guys you might recognise in that work if you want to talk to them about it. And then codefining. Here's some of the early propositions, what do people think of them, what do people think of the service propositions around them? Codeveloping services around some of those market stalls - if one of them was going to be for fruit and veg, which the residents required, then how would the fruit and veg come onto the market? What would the service proposition be around it? Delivering the stalls, so making using the same techniques that were being learnt through the furniture. So, if there was a community CNC machine at some point, it could make the furniture, it could also make the stalls.
[Shows slide] That was an event that was in the gallery area of Central Saint Martins and open to residents and all of the people in the local area to come and use it. It was a popup version of a local makerspace to try and prototype whether people would be interested in what you might do in a space like that.
And then eventually delivering the market stalls, so this one's the fruit and veg stall. This guy's the guy that now runs it. These guys are volunteers that have been engaged in the project by Troy, and it's trading. We'll talk a little bit more about how that works very briefly in a minute.
And then reflecting, so reflecting on the learning in the project. And this is what Matt's going to talk more about and share in a workshop later on. If we're going to do this open project where anyone can get involved in the project - and some of the guys from New Horizons were involved in some of the codesigning activities - then actually they can also reflect on their learning alongside the students using these learning reflection tools, and then some of that learning can be recognised, so this idea around digital badging ('Mozilla's Open Backpack'). So the idea is a bit turning these projects inside out, action learning outside of the college and all the people being involved that are involved in that learning, to be able to have that learning recognised.
This was funded by the Open Design and Manufacture project, which is about exploring how open curriculum can be developed and trying to leverage Open Design and Manufacture in challenge driven learning, making links between makerspaces, Universities, businesses and communities.
And then where we are now is that there's a bunch of market stalls that are out there that are there for loan to the community, so anyone can come to the keyhold(?) of the living centre, borrow the market stall to have a go with whatever it is they want to do: the History club are using it at the moment, the fruit and veg stall is running, there's a kit swap that goes on that's been planned down there.
Where we are at the minute is now, having prototyped the popup, we're now working with Global Generation and others to try and create a space for collaborative action-learning in the Mxxxxx space behind the British Library. So, there'll be a bunch of shipping containers that will go in there towards the end of March and then anyone is welcome to come in. Our students will be down there some of the time, Somers Town Community Association will be using it with their group some of the time, the Council will be using it with their group some of the time and we're trying to find ways that we can work together and also Lendlease(??) who are about to do a huge development around that area; they're also looking to get involved some of the time, which then gives us the opportunity of working together with the four different sectors - what the EU calls 'Open Innovation 2.0', talked about a lot , but doesn't happen very much, where you get the four different sectors truly collaborating to address local challenges and to ‘learn together by doing together’. So that's where we are at the minute.
Some reflections around the infrastructuring activities we're talking about (and then I'll be quiet and we can have a conversation, if people would like to?). One of the reflections is that there's different kinds of infrastructuring that are taking place. There's this 'relational infrastructuring' so building trust and value connections between people and the actors involved. There's 'operational infrastructuring' that happens through this project, so they are actually working out how you get access to assets and resources, and also through the project, through trying to do things, you recognise where the gaps are in the assets and resources that are available. So the gaps that need to be filled if you want to be able to address some of these challenges. And also this idea of 'strategic infrastructuring', so breaking silos. Quite often you find that - I'm sure you do in your own practices - that organisations and stakeholders that you would absolutely assume are working together and talking to each other every day, aren't. And it's through these sorts of projects that we've found that that sort of strategic infrastructuring - people recognising their strategic alignment working together - can happen, towards the system infrastructure by which we can then start to change things.
Finally the different ways , so if we were going to do some projects, some infrastructuring projects: how do we make sure (an infrastructure can be used for good or ill, depending on what your definitions of good or ill are), so how do you have an infrastructure that's going to contribute more positively to social mobility, rather than an infrastructure that denies social mobility? How do we design a project such that it delivers social mobilising infrastructure? We could consider the bridging that that project does, so the manner in which it connects different kinds of people from different backgrounds, and also the manner in which it connects different spaces and resources. So, how do our projects bridge? We could consider 'commoning', so the way in which our projects create new spaces or new opportunities to care for shared space, these third spaces, and also this idea around commoning around value and definitions of public good as our colleague was talking about earlier. We could consider making sure that there's collaboration going on, so this collaboration for us is about agency and power. So, it's about agency to act and power to decide, so are we really ensuring that there is agency to act and power to decide on the project that we're working on such that there is real collaboration going on? And democratising: so supporting active participation and decision making. Are the projects delivering contributing to a fostering of a democratic ecosystem within the places that we're working in?
Just some propositions, from some conversations that we've having with one of our colleagues, chair professor at xxx Manzini(?) recently around how these projects can contribute to place making or indeed how these projects can contribute to social mobility. What our proposition is at the end of the day is: we think that through some of the experiments that we've been doing, that there is an opportunity for design education particularly (but perhaps other sorts of higher education as well) to be able to go inside-out, for us to be able to learn together with our neighbours, and for the learning that we are all experiencing - as we exchange our experiences and knowledge in practice, making improvements to our local areas and how we live together in them - that learning could be recognised, using some of these learning frameworks that Matt will share, so we genuinely are ‘learning together by doing together’.
So, when we were talking about imagining a different kind of open education - this is one experiment that we've been conducting over a number of years: 'what might a more open element of design education and how could it be socially constructed in its means (how it's delivered), as well as in its end (what it seeks to deliver)’. And that's what we had to share.
The term 'infrastructuring', just to talk a little bit about that. For us, I started to think about 'infrastructure'. Typically we know it to be roads, hospitals, schools, the structures and facilities that we need to operate as a society. But then what we're really interested in as well is 'social infrastructure', so connections between people and 'relational infrastructure'. And how do we build ‘social infrastructure’ or ‘relational infracture’. And then also these ideas around some people that we read XXXXX (name not audible) asked the question, "when is infrastructure?", not just "what is infrastructure?", but the idea that infrastructure depends. So a set of stairs might be infrastructure if you're able to move from one level to another, if you're able to walk up them. If you're not able to walk up them then actually that set of stairs isn't infrastructure for that person: it becomes a barrier.
So if we think about that in social terms, if we think about that in relational terms, then what does that start to mean? When is an infrastructure and the notion of infrastructure depending? And then we start to talk about the practices of 'infrastructuring', which lots of guys in the Malmo(??) school over in Sweden have done a lot of thinking around infrastucturing XXXX (Paleyenne?, Piers Helgmann? names not legible) and many of their colleagues. They talk about the fact that one of the things interesting about infrastructuring is that it’s not a quick fix. This is something that came up in conversation earlier, when we're looking for quick results, this idea of infrastructuring. It's about infrastructuring people, place and resources. It needs to be open-ended. We don't know what the outcomes are going to be at the outset. We need to be flexible to let these outcomes emerge and move in the directions that the potential is demonstrated in them where they're the direction that people want to go in.
So really in this context we're thinking about increasing people's access to opportunity and increasing people's access to resources. And this is something that within participatory design and collaborative design - the work that we do - we understand how this collaborative design contributes to increase people's access to opportunity and resources. When we're thinking about social mobility, actually if social mobility - if we've got these sticky ceilings and sticky floors - actually can some of these approaches that we're applying to social design actually help to contribute to infrastructure towards social mobility. Is that fair? Does that make sense as a logical starting point - in terms of what infrastructure relationship might be to social mobility?
And then to talk about some of the design work that we've been doing. So, over at Central Saint Martin's where myself and some of my colleagues here are based, we've been trying to work out how we can really use some of the privilege and resource that we have within the institution to be of more benefit to our neighbours. The borough in which we're located - Camden - is one of the most unequal boroughs in London. You've got - in the south of the borough you're sometimes in the top 10 percentile of the deprivation indices across a number of different measures. In the north of the borough - Hamstead, Highgate - you're at the other end of the scale. The Council's aware of that and is looking at how they can address some of those challenges and it's not easy to do when there's less and less funding available to local government - to be able to implement some of the practices that they think might make a positive contribution to addressing inequalities.
So one of the things that we did 4 years ago was we started working with Camden Council through this project that we called 'Public Collaboration Lab', which again, referencing what we were talking about earlier on about how can you change the system if the system is so dependent on efficiency that there's no slack in the system to experiment and fail. What this was about was prototyping. So we thought we would prototype a lab in which we can take some chances, start out not really knowing how it's going to go, not really knowing entirely what we're going to do together even, and see where it leads and see what benefits it might be able to contribute by aligning the operational objectives of the local government - so what the local government has to do to support its residents - and the learning objectives of the design school - so what our community of staff and students need to do to improve the outcomes of our community inside the college. So, this really is about ‘learning together by doing together’, and is the narrative we've been working with.
Over those years we've delivered about 19-20 projects, and we've identified that where the synergy is with local government and residents is around service transformation, community resilience, behaviour change and engagement and consultation: different ways of engaging and consulting that make it more accessible to people and make it more interesting for people.
What I'm going to do is share with you a couple of projects and then hone in on the project that some of the MA Industrial Design students (now graduates) have worked on on, where that's leading to and how it relates to this Open Design and Manufacturing project that we've been funding by the European Union to deliver (which Matt will talk a little more about later on and share some of the learning resources that have come out of that).
So one of the projects that Zoe and her team were working on in 2016, which is still now going on, (so we are in 2019, this is that thing about long-term, open-ended processes) was addressing the challenge of overcrowded housing. The inequalities task-force at Camden were looking at how do inequalities manifest, what do they actually look like in the borough? One of the manifestations is housing and overcrowded housing. There's a points system to be able to move into larger social housing if you're overcrowded and at the moment you need about 500-600 points to get relocated. We were working with families who had quite severe challenges within their domestic setup, but they're only on about 350 points. So even though there's a lot of house building going on there, there's still not a lot of opportunity for the 37% of the population that are in social housing in Camden to be able to move out of overcrowded conditions. One of the things that the residents said would be useful was this idea of if they could have furniture that was exactly the right dimensions they wouldn't bang - so one particular person I'm thinking of said she would be smashing her hip every time she walked down her hallway, and that when that happened to her eight times a day it really started to impact on her quality of life - it was just a constant reminder and she had a callus on her hip where this kept happening. And so in the first year some tools were designed for services. In the second year Zoe and the team did a co-design project with some families to codesign a range of furniture that they thought would be useful to them that could be adapted. What was interesting about it was that by using digital manufacturing methods you could actually, on the computer screen, change the dimensions to your specific dimensions so they would exactly fit your dimensions and then you'd have the pattern for your furniture on a memory stick and then you could cut that out on a CNC machine, and the way these guys (talk to Zoe if you want to know more about it), the way these guys designed it, it didn't need any glue, it didn't need any screws, it just needed a mallet - a rubber mallet - to be able to clip this quite attractive and highly functional furniture together in exactly the size and in exactly the combination of functionality that you were after. There's also a service model that enables you to work with others to realise that. One of the things we knew though was that the CNC machine we have in the college that we use to make these prototypes was always too busy, so if we were going to scale this to the 4,500 families in Camden that could benefit from it then where's the community CNC machine that we could have access to? So, that was a conversation - "where's the community CNC?" - that started 2 years ago, and towards the end of this story I'll tell you where we are with some of that now.
Another project that was going on through the Public Collaboration Lab, with another group of students, not in Industrial Design this time, but in Narrative Environments, who look at people, place and time. They've grown out of Exhibition Design, so what they do now is they take some of the learning they've had from Exhibition Design about telling stories in spaces and start to think about if you reverse engineer some of that, how can you change spaces such that so that certain stories are more likely to happen in them? And that way of thinking about design then starts to create interventions in public space and thinking about how we can work with people in public space to create stages for different types of interactions: different types of stories to ensue.
This particular project was working with public health and looking at what were the barriers to healthy diet and active living. Some of the finds of the project were, that actually some of the older people we were working with, the main motivator for them to be walking a lot was relationships. Perhaps it's not so surprising - one lady that we went for a walk with on Saturday morning around Elephant and Castle market because she invited us to go with her, took her pedometer along, walked a mile and a half. She was 87 and walked a mile and a half chatting to different people on different stands. So that was interesting - the idea that relationships were something that motivate activity. Also another thing that came out of that were that people were saying that there was no access to fresh fruit and vegetables - the sort that they wanted for their cooking - they couldn't get it in their area and the stuff that was available to them was expensive and not necessarily the fruit and veg that they wanted for their cooking. So these were some of the barriers that we shared with public health and something that we learned.
We did another project - ‘Social Isolation and Loneliness’ - addressing some of that with different groups. And again, we understood something more about who was socially isolated and lonely - lots of younger people, not just older people which one might imagine, actually lots of younger people as well. And thinking about how then can more people come together?
We've been working for many many years with Somers Town Community Association who have themselves been working and representing residents in Somers Town for 30 years. With that group and with their colleagues who have been working together with New Horizons Youth Centre and with Origin Housing and others, they'd already started to crowdfund to reinvigorate Charlton Street Market, which is a market street that runs through the heart of Somers Town. It's got a licence for 100 years to be a market. It's got a licence to operate on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, but it's only ever open on a Friday. There's pitches for 47 stalls, but there's only ever maximum 6 stalls - so, there's lots of potential! Given that we know that there's this social isolation - you can chat to people on a market, healthy diet - you can get fruit and veg on a market (you can't on this one, but you could), socialising - motivates active living and walking around. Ok so if we had some stands where people exchanged conversation as well as the exchange in money, or instead of the exchange of money (if there's no money in the area), then how could that contribute. So we started working together on this idea around the market. It was a open design project which basically means that the process was open so anybody could get involved in the process, anyone could join the project not just the students, and the products, the outputs of the project would be open. So the outputs of the project would be open and available to others to share, so any designs that came out of it (as long as they credit where they came from if they changed them, and they would have to share them in a similar way), these designs were open to anyone to use.
The process that the students went through was one of:
Discovering: so, going onto the market itself, setting up market stalls to find out what people valued, needed, wanted. Defining: the typical mapping out and setting priorities, but then taking those priorities back to the street. Sets of briefs that they then engaged with residents, again out in the market. Codesigning what the market stalls might be like, which briefs they wanted to address. [Referring to slide] Some of these guys you might recognise in that work if you want to talk to them about it. And then codefining. Here's some of the early propositions, what do people think of them, what do people think of the service propositions around them? Codeveloping services around some of those market stalls - if one of them was going to be for fruit and veg, which the residents required, then how would the fruit and veg come onto the market? What would the service proposition be around it? Delivering the stalls, so making using the same techniques that were being learnt through the furniture. So, if there was a community CNC machine at some point, it could make the furniture, it could also make the stalls.
[Shows slide] That was an event that was in the gallery area of Central Saint Martins and open to residents and all of the people in the local area to come and use it. It was a popup version of a local makerspace to try and prototype whether people would be interested in what you might do in a space like that.
And then eventually delivering the market stalls, so this one's the fruit and veg stall. This guy's the guy that now runs it. These guys are volunteers that have been engaged in the project by Troy, and it's trading. We'll talk a little bit more about how that works very briefly in a minute.
And then reflecting, so reflecting on the learning in the project. And this is what Matt's going to talk more about and share in a workshop later on. If we're going to do this open project where anyone can get involved in the project - and some of the guys from New Horizons were involved in some of the codesigning activities - then actually they can also reflect on their learning alongside the students using these learning reflection tools, and then some of that learning can be recognised, so this idea around digital badging ('Mozilla's Open Backpack'). So the idea is a bit turning these projects inside out, action learning outside of the college and all the people being involved that are involved in that learning, to be able to have that learning recognised.
This was funded by the Open Design and Manufacture project, which is about exploring how open curriculum can be developed and trying to leverage Open Design and Manufacture in challenge driven learning, making links between makerspaces, Universities, businesses and communities.
And then where we are now is that there's a bunch of market stalls that are out there that are there for loan to the community, so anyone can come to the keyhold(?) of the living centre, borrow the market stall to have a go with whatever it is they want to do: the History club are using it at the moment, the fruit and veg stall is running, there's a kit swap that goes on that's been planned down there.
Where we are at the minute is now, having prototyped the popup, we're now working with Global Generation and others to try and create a space for collaborative action-learning in the Mxxxxx space behind the British Library. So, there'll be a bunch of shipping containers that will go in there towards the end of March and then anyone is welcome to come in. Our students will be down there some of the time, Somers Town Community Association will be using it with their group some of the time, the Council will be using it with their group some of the time and we're trying to find ways that we can work together and also Lendlease(??) who are about to do a huge development around that area; they're also looking to get involved some of the time, which then gives us the opportunity of working together with the four different sectors - what the EU calls 'Open Innovation 2.0', talked about a lot , but doesn't happen very much, where you get the four different sectors truly collaborating to address local challenges and to ‘learn together by doing together’. So that's where we are at the minute.
Some reflections around the infrastructuring activities we're talking about (and then I'll be quiet and we can have a conversation, if people would like to?). One of the reflections is that there's different kinds of infrastructuring that are taking place. There's this 'relational infrastructuring' so building trust and value connections between people and the actors involved. There's 'operational infrastructuring' that happens through this project, so they are actually working out how you get access to assets and resources, and also through the project, through trying to do things, you recognise where the gaps are in the assets and resources that are available. So the gaps that need to be filled if you want to be able to address some of these challenges. And also this idea of 'strategic infrastructuring', so breaking silos. Quite often you find that - I'm sure you do in your own practices - that organisations and stakeholders that you would absolutely assume are working together and talking to each other every day, aren't. And it's through these sorts of projects that we've found that that sort of strategic infrastructuring - people recognising their strategic alignment working together - can happen, towards the system infrastructure by which we can then start to change things.
Finally the different ways , so if we were going to do some projects, some infrastructuring projects: how do we make sure (an infrastructure can be used for good or ill, depending on what your definitions of good or ill are), so how do you have an infrastructure that's going to contribute more positively to social mobility, rather than an infrastructure that denies social mobility? How do we design a project such that it delivers social mobilising infrastructure? We could consider the bridging that that project does, so the manner in which it connects different kinds of people from different backgrounds, and also the manner in which it connects different spaces and resources. So, how do our projects bridge? We could consider 'commoning', so the way in which our projects create new spaces or new opportunities to care for shared space, these third spaces, and also this idea around commoning around value and definitions of public good as our colleague was talking about earlier. We could consider making sure that there's collaboration going on, so this collaboration for us is about agency and power. So, it's about agency to act and power to decide, so are we really ensuring that there is agency to act and power to decide on the project that we're working on such that there is real collaboration going on? And democratising: so supporting active participation and decision making. Are the projects delivering contributing to a fostering of a democratic ecosystem within the places that we're working in?
Just some propositions, from some conversations that we've having with one of our colleagues, chair professor at xxx Manzini(?) recently around how these projects can contribute to place making or indeed how these projects can contribute to social mobility. What our proposition is at the end of the day is: we think that through some of the experiments that we've been doing, that there is an opportunity for design education particularly (but perhaps other sorts of higher education as well) to be able to go inside-out, for us to be able to learn together with our neighbours, and for the learning that we are all experiencing - as we exchange our experiences and knowledge in practice, making improvements to our local areas and how we live together in them - that learning could be recognised, using some of these learning frameworks that Matt will share, so we genuinely are ‘learning together by doing together’.
So, when we were talking about imagining a different kind of open education - this is one experiment that we've been conducting over a number of years: 'what might a more open element of design education and how could it be socially constructed in its means (how it's delivered), as well as in its end (what it seeks to deliver)’. And that's what we had to share.
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