Reading about the EU’s Preparedness advice and it’s interesting how it links to some work I’m helping out with on community LifeHouses. There has been a shift in reactions to the climate crisis to collapse awareness. That prepping is necessary at political and communal levels. This diagram came out of talking to activists in Oxfordshire […]
Wayfinding: Beyond Maps, Towards Community
In the complex world of navigation and exploration, we often get caught up in the intricacies of maps and detailed plans. But what if the true essence of finding our way lies not in meticulously drawn routes, but in the power of human connection? The ABCD of Wayfinding: Rethinking Navigation Traditional wayfinding theory focuses on […]
Surviving historic skills and folklore in modern life?
I am just back from Leeds. I was there for a 2 day Storytelling Lab for organisations working with refugees. It was very good and the power of people who had been thru deep horrors was extraordinary. However, this post is not about that. It’s about some of the things I saw and some ideas […]
Intersecting Impact
I’m doing some volunteer work on a local climate crisis project. The project wants to build a Lifehouse. A place where people can come together and share resources during climate collapse-related loss of civic society and services. What we talked about this week was Impact Mapping. How to start a project and try and understand […]
Seeking a new way of talking of Resilience
Just looking for synonyms for Resilience for a community project. Resilience as a lost word The word Resilience has been lost to the corporate training idea of providing skills to individuals to cope with the problems they encounter. This is a terrible meaning. Resilience should be more about systemic and organisational change to eliminate those […]
The narrative of rage in The Light
Rather than avoiding the people pressing copies of The Light onto Saturday shoppers in Stroud, I decided to go up and take one. The Light is a conspiracy theory newspaper which is known to be funded by right wingers. It’s in the same cognitive twist zone as yoga/natural food fanatics who became right wingers during […]
A talk about being Serious
I noticed a design conference had an open call for talks this week and this is what I wrote as an application. Let’s Get Serious For the last decade, ideas of play and gamification have been prevalent in the design of services and workshops. That playfulness and fun were the methods of engaging and enabling […]
Inefficiency as civic protection in government
Building a new country based on data After WW2, as the country rebuilt itself from war damage and built the new social security and health systems promised to citizens, the British civil servants did something that seems odd. They decided to replicate databases rather than built a single centralised database. Thus there was a database […]
Conversations with care
This is a post about a possible public event in Stroud. I was talking to Madeleine Bunting today about Civic Assemblies and community conversations. We discussed how hard this is and what barriers there are to meeting and talking about subjects of shared interest. The problems of both finding a stable foundation of reality and […]
Talking about memory isn’t just about old age
I am going to run a few free workshops locally on memory consolidation and sharing. This is based on some 2018 work in dementia support and memorability. I have left the topic alone for a while but realised I want to do some more work on it. DIVE DIVE was a workshop methodology that came […]