I attended an Active Hope workshop yesterday run by Linda Aspey. It’s a theory I had not encountered before. I was looking for a clearly communicable story of positive hope. ‘Better stories’ is often mentioned when people worry about the current preponderance of doom or authoritarian narratives. What they mean by ‘better’ can be a […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
Sensory Maps – exploring accessibility together
A one or two day walking workshop around a museum, transport hub or visitor attraction with staff is a good way to develop a map of what is known to be problematic and what solutions are currently offered. Maps show value. The sensory map is a start. It provides a sense of place as perceived […]
One map is never enough
Thankfully I just lost a bid for some museum work. It was for a tactile map of a museum that opened a few months ago in London. The bid documentation was filled with red flags as a project. What it did remind me of was how important it is to tell organisations that one map […]
Resilience in crises and actively asking for help
I was reading a research paper on social identities during crises: Facilitating Collective Psychosocial Resilience this week. It makes interesting point about Active Bystanders. People who are present in the place and the time and activated to take action either because they perceive how their capacities become communal capabilities then or because they are asked […]
Presentology
Conversations lately about projects that are trying to build hopeful futures (one from a massive new infrastructure sense and one from a local community mutuality sense) has led back to some ideas from civic assembly and design in the climate crisis workshops. What concerns me is the Futurology bias of the processes. How the chosen […]
Boundaries and Welcomes: Designing for Human Connection
Designers often focus on creating visually appealing solutions and invitations but overlook some critical human needs: the desires for clear boundaries and meaningful welcomes. Humans are boundary-seekers. We all need to understand the edges of our environment to feel safe and oriented. Without clear boundaries, people become disoriented. Remember Doomscrolling: that endless social media scrolling, […]
Nobody wants to know the Theory of Change
Making expert competency explicit is good but that does not mean people want to know the specifics. Meeting today about climate collapse and community responses. The volunteers have created a system-based response to both loss of environment and of political structures. It’s very good. However, when trying to invite and involve new people, it’s too […]
Ask Questions clearly in Civic Assemblies
The hard work of Civic Assembly projects is getting institutions to actually think about questions that are answerable and actionable. There is no point starting out on a project that will provide no additional clarity or which will never have any actual consequences. In setting the question(s), the institution must ask itself how it will […]
The Commons – Naming but not Owning
Since the Festival of Commoning in Stroud, I’ve been to events about community land ownership in the town and used community asset spaces for parties and group meetings, and yet I still can’t quite communicate the idea of Commons. The Stroud event still left a hole in my understanding. I understand corporate/community ownership. There is […]
Human Denying Design
These words from a talk by Marc Andreessen seem to summarise something about Silicon Valley and its core ideas of design. That he thinks that reality is a failure, that lived and embodied reality is privileged. It’s ghastly. It’s Human Denying Design (HDD). It’s ignores or obliterates the history of humanity. Humanity that has used […]