June 21, 2022

Artefact 232

Emerging, blinking into the light

We creep out of the home-comfort hovels we cocooned ourselves in. And we were the lucky ones. Now, we stumble punch-drunk through our weeks, simultaneously dazed by the half-formed memories of our enforced retreat, and our disbeliveing reengagement with the strange working practices we once submissively accepted...

And so on and so forth. In short; it's all still a bit weird, and the weirdness isn't going anywhere. The weirdness has moved in, it's occupying the spare room, but at least it makes a mean chilli and empties the dishwasher from time-to-time.

Meanwhile, the summer seems to be giving me some much needed space to enjoy the act of making things again.

It's especially rewarding when these things aren't just the materials for 2D world-building on remote digital whiteboards. It's back to working with people – actual people – in rooms, across tables, pointing at ideas, noticing reactions. And never more has the physicality of things seemed to matter, especially when it becomes a treat.

With all that in mind, this is Artefacts #232, and here's a collection of related things I hope you might find interesting.

Back to the future in Barcelona

It's been 1,060 days since I last left Barcelona after the Innovation and Future Thinking course at the IED design school ended in summer 2019. And yet, all of a sudden, it's only 20 days until I go over to start this year's course.

I am mostly trying to remember how to do this.

As before, there needs to be a theme for the students to work on whilst they're learning about different methodologies and the shared thinking processes between them. Previously, it's often been a singular theme - the futures of Food, Payments, Transport, Identity etc.

But this year I think we should use the latest steps in the Superilles project in the city as our theme; wide-scale street transformation of the city streets into green hubs and connecting passages, and the future implications thereof.

It's been trialled for years in Poblenou, and we've been on field trips there in the past on the course. But this is a step-change, where experiments become systemic change. To see a city begin to transform itself at this sort of scale, with this sort of urgency, is really inspiring, and so necessary too (e.g. the city has also recently had to create a Climate Shelters initiative to help people deal with the extreme heat).

What's useful about using a theme as broad as this one is that, depending on the aptitudes and interests of the students who turn up (usually professionals from a mix of backgrounds, 21-55 years olds, from a variety of different countries), we can steer the course into areas which operate across different layers of the environment.

What would public transport for a commuter look like? Or a convenience store counter? Or a toiletries subscription service?

Anyway, it's brilliant to be headed back once again to my favourite city, with some new ideas and some reworked tools to deploy across the two-week course. And after it's done, I have plans for a UK version... or even a high-intensity, shorter client-friendly one.

A useful disposition

In preparation, I've been reading many things, amongst them Keller Eastering's Medium Design, which snuck past me last year on initial release.

In it, there's a most useful concept of thinking about the disposition of something – that is, how it is likely to behave within a given arrangement of everything else around it – and therefore how to think about working to change the disposition of something without necessarily having to change the thing itself.

Therefore, that has implications for someone's role in that process:

So I started sketching out this week an example of how I might go about teaching this as a concept in terms of the Barcelona course.

I want to shape a method that demonstrates how you could take the same object in the centre of one assemblage, and change its disposition if you drop it into the centre of a different set of relationships.

For instance, take Bicing, the residents only bicycle network that's been in place since 2007 (it's recently been upgraded to offer more electric bikes too).

Just from looking at them on the street, you can start to shape a rough assemblage of the visible relationships directly and indirectly related.

This can serve as a first sketch of a relationship matrix. More desk research can then help you understand some of the less visible things going on (e.g. the company running of the scheme for the city changed in 2019).

But then perhaps comes the interesting question; what changes in the relationship matrix would change the disposition of a Bicing bike? To make it more used, or less so? To make it more likely to be vandalised, or stolen? To make it more cherished by residents, or more understood by tourists?

I'll play around a bit more with that, but yeah, Medium Design is good, you should read it.

The Implication Game

The last time I was teaching at IED, I'd prototyped a pair of dice to help people stretch their imaginations a little when it comes to thinking about the implications of what they were beginning to see in the world.

Last week, the latest version arrived, so nicely in time to take out with me.

I also thought it might be a good addition to the Artefact shop, so I put it up on LinkedIn and... people kind of went a bit mad. So that's cool, but I'm definitely going to have to get on with the workshop set to sell when I get back.

How do they work?

One of the dice is based on STEEPV (Sociological, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Values), to explore implications in different factors given an event. The other one is based on six articulations inspired by the classic improv 'Yes, and...'.

One way to use them is to make a statement about the future (e.g. "80% of all cars will be electric by 2030"), and then the dice point you in the direction of an implication to think of.

*"Yes, but the increased pressure on charging requirements causes social tension in cities"*

*"No, because oil companies continue to lobby politicians to miss targets"*

By pairing these dice, it creates ways of randomly promoting different ideas about what you think you know about the future.

If you're at the beginning of your research, it might prompt you to explore areas you hadn't thought about researching. If you're sitting on a large collection of research, it helps you think about different angles and connections through it.

If you're interested, comment on the post here, or keep an eye on this newsletter.

The Community Power Compass

Right then, to a thing that's not specifically for Barcelona, but might be useful depending on what comes up.

This is the (first, early version) of The Community Power Compass. I found myself puzzling through a lot of Web3 / Crypto stuff, continually wondering how you differentiate between a good, well meaning community ethos and a... less good one, let's say.

So, having been deep into The Dawn of Everything by Davd Graeber and David Wengrow, I pulled out their three 'freedoms' and 'controls' – which they used to study the history of civilizations all across the world, based on latest evidence – and turn them into a way of looking at communities to understand what's really going on. There's a two-part blog post on it starting here, if that sounds like your bag.

Since writing it, there's been some good discussions and comments on how to evolve it, which has been useful because I'm only getting under the skin of the thing myself. For instance, are the titles of each segment right? I slightly tweaked them from the original Graeber/Wengrow ones, but I think after a period of use I'll get to a better final set.

What it is doing is helping me read stories like this – the shady tale of a whale who took 'decentralised lending platform' Solana's money and vanished with it – and think about the controls and freedoms as they existed within a particular community, and how they might have been set up otherwise to avoid such an event.

And maybe, thinking as I type, it also allows you to generate an assemblage of relationships to understand a particular item, idea, initiative or object within a community too, to understand what its disposition is for one particular social setup versus another.

That would probably be a nice, circular, intentional place to end.

Oh, ok, some other quick things then...

Three Cardish Matters...

1. I recently received my copy of Grotesque Tables II by Noah Wall - anagrams of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategy cards, with little musical scoring prompts pulled out of each too. Deal yourself two of three cards, and you have an instant start for a song. Great for grabbing an instrument for 20 minutes and randomly making something up. Super fun.

2. Nick Kellet is working on a new Card Deck app called Deckible, and he has a quick survey for you if you're a card deck collector or creator.

3. Cardstock is a monthly online community for those who work, play, make, explore and more using cards. This link should let you drop it into your diary on a recurring basis, and turn up whenever you are able. Would be lovely to see you there.

And that's it for now. Enjoy your summer, folks. And write back, if you like.

John V Willshire

21st June 2022