WE NEED COURSES THAT LAST FOR A HUNDRED YEARS

Benjamin Bratton’s presentation was (quite appropriately) titled ‘Ambivalent Remarks on Computation, Political Geography, Pedagogy’. He referred to an interview of philosopher Bernard Stiegler and his concepts of short and long circuits in education.

“The problem of long circuits turning into short circuits is a fundamental condition which we have to grasp – that is – the time of digital technologies is too short – what we need in very very long classes, not very very short classes.”

“The condition of education… is to train the attention of next generation, to train them to have attention, to pay attention, to comprehend their own attentiveness – it is to train them to have a memory, to train them to have a conception of time that is appropriate.”

Benjamin proposes that we need courses that can be located within long arcs of time:

“I think 500 years is a reasonable span for a course to try to locate for the students, so that they can locate themselves in this arc. Courses that don’t have a 500 year arc, that aren’t teaching what it is that they are teaching in terms of a 500 year context are probably too shallow. And I think this can be just as true for very practical courses – you know, is there a way to teach a ‘how to hack a website’ workshop, or how to build an android app, with a 500 year arc of understanding what that means. How did we arrive at the possibility of asking this question and even proposing this skill.”

We also need very long courses:

“Instead of a course that goes on for 10 weeks, or even for one year, prefer courses that go on for 10 years, or perhaps a 100 years, a faculty handing off one to another, like architects of medieval churches.”

IN ORDER TO LEARN, STUDENTS NEED TO BREAK THE LAW

On the flight to the conference Benjamin happened to sit next to a Israeli cryptographer who had two arguments about education that Benjamin wanted to pass on to the conference audience:

“Students have to understand that we are currently building a legacy codebase at a planetary level which will exist and endure for generations.”

“In order to be successful in the design of this legacy codebase for the generations to come we have to be willing to assign students things that are as of today illegal – with the presumption that it is the things that exits outside the legal structures will form the base of the constitutional structures to come”

“What happens if we don’t believe the only way of giving credit is the way we have inherited?”

Cathy Davidson’s presentation was related to her book ’Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn’. The presentation included two amazing historical anecdotes:

ABCD GRADING NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR MEAT:

Mount Holyoke College was the first university in America to give ABCD grades, in year 1897. The second institution to start using this system was the American Meatpackers Association – for grading the quality of meat. Soon afterwards the association gave up the system, since they found it too inflexible to grade the quality of meat.

THE INVENTOR OF MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST:

Frederick J. Kelly was the person who proposed using multiple choice tests for large scale assessment in education. This happened in 1914, during wartime when hundreds of thousands of immigrants were arriving in the country. A new law was passed that required 2 years of secondary education for everyone and this created a crisis: the existing education system could not cope with this. Mr. Kelly proposed multiple choice tests to deal with this emergency, but he thought that this would only be a temporary solution. After the war he was hired as the director of University of Idaho where he established an education programme which emphasised general, critical thinking (“College is a place to learn how to educate oneself rather than a place in which to be educated”). He was fired from the job after only two years – the university faculty protested against his reforms, they had not expected such from the guy who invented the multiple choice test. (A longer article about this can be found here)

Cathy (as well as many others at Mobilityshifts) mentioned Mozilla Open Badges as a promising initiative to change the way learning is evaluated (more information here: http://openbadges.org/en-US/faq.html).

‘We need to refuse anonymous peer review’

Geert Lovink gave a presentation about the different publication methods that Institute of Network Cultures has been using so far (Studies in Network Culture, INC Readers, Network Notebooks and Theory on Demand. He also made some general remarks about ‘Do-It-Together Publishing’. I especially appreciate the idea that one of the aims of the publishing process is to further radicalize both the content and style.

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INC Principles of Do-It-Together Publishing

• Collective decision making over the choice of format, length and deadline
• Promotion of the concept/essay style
• Regular support, both content-based and emotional assistance in writing process
• Intense copy editing, in particular in the case of non-native English writers, with the aim to further radicalize both the content and style
• Dealing together with the digital delivery

Larger Agenda of D.i.T Publishing

• Refuse peer review and disassociate from IP-driven publishers (common exodus)
• Conversion to a system of mutual aid
• Critical engagement with open access standards (incl. software and typography)
• Engagement in dialogue, discussion, comment cultures (social reading)
• Networks to share experiences how best to distribute titles through multiple platforms

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Video recording of Geert’s presentation can be found online: http://vimeo.com/32725309

Here are a couple of quotes (at approx 25:00 in the presentation):

‘The peer review system as it exists in the academic world is  is corrupt to its core’ -

‘In particular of course anonymous peer reviewing, which is so largely used to bring down the self-esteem of many many people, it’s a very humiliating form of discussion’ – ‘it’s the most nasty form of contemporary debate we have’

Related links:

• The Unbound Book conference
• Out of Ink project

WE CAN TEACH WHAT WE DON’T KNOW

The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (a book by Jacques Rancière) tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French teacher and educational philosopher (born in 1770).

A key experience for Jacotot was the occasion when he had to teach French language to students who only understood Dutch, a language he could not speak himself. He gave the students a book with the same text in two languages (French and Dutch) and asked them to compare the texts in order to learn. To his surprise, the students learned French in a similar pace as the students that he was able to teach in a conventional way. He had to admit that his ability to teach was not based on knowledge, but on something else.

The key elements of Jacotot’s teaching manifesto are:

1. All men have equal intelligence;
2. Every man has received from God the faculty of being able to instruct himself;
3. We can teach what we don’t know;
4. Everything is in everything.

(Related to ‘Rancière: Ignorance Will Have Learned’ presentation by Jairo Moreno, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Music: http://soundcloud.com/thenewschoolnyc/ranci-re-ignorance-will-have)

Last week I visited Ghent, Belgium to moderate the Ghent – Alternative Design City? discussion which was organised as a part of Timelab Springcafe events.

‘Speed dating’ in Ghent.

PRESENTATIONS: SUSTAINABILITY & RECYCLING

The evening’s programme featured 5 guests from around Belgium who work on design projects with a strong focus on sustainability and/or recycling.

The City of Helsinki might have something to learn from the Flagbag project presented by Erwin Hermans. Flagbag is based in Hasselt, a small city of ~70 000 people that is branded as the ‘City of Taste’. The city uses big flags as their main advertising medium and this creates waste – old flags that cannot by used any longer (they either become worn out by the weather or their visual design goes out of ‘taste’). The Flagbag project has given jobs for several people who had been unemployed for a long time, now turning these old flags to unique bags and other accessories.

A Flagbag bag

We have similar recycling projects here in Helsinki (such as Plan B at Kierrätyskeskus) but I wonder how much these will benefit from the massive advertising campaigns by Helsinki WDC? Flags are not in fashion in Helsinki, most advertising is realised by using stickers / paper / cardboard / etc. How big share of this material can be recycled in a reasonable way? A topic that needs to be explored!

Erwin & co have also initiated a new project – they organised a campaign to gather discarded material from various companies and donated this to creative use. During one day, anyone could show up and pick up material for free, with the requirement that it’s used for a creative / artistic purpose. One year later an event will be organised to show the results of the work. Erwin & co very curious to see the results!

Artist/designer William Phillips – solar lamps for Togo

Designer Ben Joossen spoke about the dichotomy between ‘sexy’ and sustainable design.

Oliver Dewolf presented the Design for Impact project (designers working with NGOs in developing countries) and Eline Persyn spoke about the challenges of recycling plastics (sorting different types of plastic, unstable availability of material etc) and some possible solutions (diversifying the activities by collaborating with very different organisations, establishing special concept stores, etc)

ALTERNATIVE DESIGN IN GHENT?

The participants of the event were given a task – to come up with ideas for Ghent Alternative Design City (or Capital). These ideas were written on post-it notes and gathered on a wall during the evening and in the end organised into a thematic map.
The 4 main clusters of ideas were:

1. ‘A repair/craftsman cafe/workshop’: a place where household appliances etc could be repaired
2. Ideas related to waste / trash / rubbish
3. Art/design projects that take over the whole city
4. Meeting points/events for local artists/designers

Below you can find a selection of 16 elaborate ideas. Hopefully some of these are going to be realised someday – in Ghent or elsewhere!

Alastair is currently based in Helsinki as Professor of Practice in Emerging Design Practices at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (that’s a long title!). Alastair will stay in Finland until December 2014 (at least) and is dividing his time between Aalto University in Helsinki and City of Lahti / Lahti University of Applied Sciences.

Alastair – could you introduce yourself briefly?

I was trained as an inter-disciplinarian and graduated as an environmental scientist in late 70s. I then started my doctoral research in applied biology in Cambridge, but this research was never completed since I set up a consultancy on ecological design – to repair industrial environments. I specialised in ecology and systems thinking and was working with planners, geologists, computer scientists, municipalities, etc. The consultancy soon evolved into an ecological landscape design and build company which is still functioning today, although I have not personally been involved since 1990.

I started to teach design in late 90s, I gave my first lecture on ‘eco-design’ in 1998.

Your most recent book is titled ‘Design activism’. How would you define design activism?

The preliminary definition can be found from the page 27 (this was written in 2009):

Design activism is ‘design thinking, imagination and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing positive social, institutional, environmental and/or economic change’.

Design activism is closely connected to the idea that we need to do design together. In the book I wrote about co-design:

The purpose of (co-)design is the creation of new societal values to balance human happiness with ecological truths. In doing so, design contests the notion of material and economic progress, and its inherent ecological untruths.

Design can propose alternative stories to default paradigms, like economic growth. For example, if the economic growth over two quarters is negative, then that’s called a recession… this is naive. This is ecologically, socially and even economically naïve, because we should frame these short-term fluctuations in a longer-term perspective.

When thinking about the future, we have to look at other indicators than just the values in the stock exchange..The opinions of shareholders represent only a small minority of people. The stock exchange is an abstraction gone crazy, as it doesn’t reflect “true cost” economics which includes real social and ecological ‘costs’.

Could you give an example of a counter-narrative?

This week at Aalto University we had a workshop about smoke free environments. Smoking is a social issue, but also an economic issue (taxes), an environmental issue (tobacco growing around the world), etc.

The students used the co-design loop approach I have developed which you can find on the front page of my website (www.fuad-luke.com).

The students made 9 different proposals – some are based on products (electronic cigarettes), some are more performative (The ‘Funeral’ of the Cigarette). The solutions are inclusive, smokers are not excluded from the community.

Establishing the problem space is really important – gaining understanding about the deep underlying meta-problems together with all the stakeholders and the people involved.

The student’s proposals were exhibited in a public corridor in Arabia building next to Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, between 23-30 March 2012.

More information about ‘Smoke Free Environments’ on 365wellbeing site and in Alastair’s presentation slides (from a presentation at the Design Museum, 27 March 2012).

Is this design activism?

Not yet – so far these are counter-narratives that have the potential to become activism – to activate a a change in society. In activism it is important to have an idea of a purpose – we need to focus on a specific issue, to know what is the target group and try to measure the change that the impact makes (quantitatively and/or qualitatively).

We need to balance different ‘capitals’ – if we want to grow economic capital, we need to make sure that we don’t damage social, natural and other capitals.

With Aalto University doctoral students I’m currently developing an open source model / framework called ‘Design Capitalia’, which currently includes 34 forms of capital, one of which is economic. When we design we need to think of how we influence these different forms of capital. We need to understand which ‘capitals’ we are trying to grow, nourish (give potential to grow), maintain or diminish. We hope to publish the first draft of the model later this year.

Measuring the impact of activism is often not easy. A good example of this is a project by Louis Le Roy’s ‘Ecocathedral’, a hand-built monument that he has been working on for 30 years – but this is just the very beginning of this 1000 year long project. How can you measure the impact of something that is supposed to last for a 1000 years?

Thanks a lot for the interview!

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I proposed to Alastair that the draft of the Design Capitalia framework could be presented in Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki in September and he agreed that this would probably be a good occasion for it… so hopefully we can see the first version then!

On this occasion time I did not have time to ask about the intriguing subtitle of Alastair’s Design Activism book – ‘beautiful strangeness for a sustainable world’. Next time!

(>> also posted on Alternative Design Capital blog)

Carpe diem! Fishermen on Baltic sea, 29 Feb 2012

A snapshot of the grassroot arts, culture and democracy action in Helsinki – if I could clone myself, I could participate in all these events today, on 29 February 2012:

# 9:30 am – workshop & code-camp day of Avoin ministeriö
Avoin ministeriö (‘open ministry’) is a grassroot project that aims to offer help for Finnish citizens to make proposals for changes in Finnish legislation (starting on 1 March 2012, any proposal that can gather 50 000 supporters will be taken into consideration)
http://www.facebook.com/events/363561413673265/
http://www.avoinministerio.fi

# 2 pm – Launch of a new independent think-tank & online media Laitos
http://www.facebook.com/events/304400132951110/
http://www.laitos.fi

# 4 pm – Opening event of ‘Sosiaalinen Hub’
A temporary, open, collective workspace in central Helsinki for grassroot actors – an experiment that will last for a couple of weeks:
http://www.facebook.com/events/189735227799714/

# 6 pm – Mushrooming studio network
Brainstorming ideas for how independent artist / designer / cultural worker studios could collaborate:
http://adc2012.org/events/brainstorming-the-activities-of-mushrooming-network-of-small-studios-in-hki/

# 6 pm -Brainstorming neighbourhood democracy
http://www.facebook.com/events/179733068796308/

# 5:30 pm (-until late) – The afterparty of Avoin ministeriö + celebration of the new citizen initiative law
https://www.facebook.com/events/110861292370871/

# 6 pm – Utopian realities
Performing arts collective Todellisuuden tutkimuskeskus (‘Reality research center’) will kick off ‘Utopian realities’, their main project for next two years:
http://www.facebook.com/events/366834780002157/
http://www.todellisuus.fi/

# 7 pm – Maailmanpoliittiset Diplo-iltamat
Celebrating the latest issue of the translated Finnish version of Le Monde Diplomatique, thinktank Laitos, the day of social rights, etc.:
http://www.facebook.com/events/305049742891900/

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…and these are just the events that I happen to be aware of, there are probably many other related events going on as well.

It’s great to be here and participate in all this flourishing energy!

Omaan ehdotukseeni liittyy joitakin ristiriitaisuuksia ja kysymyksiä, joihin itselläni ei ole selkeää vastausta:

Jos kansalaisaktivismia tuetaan taloudellisesti, niin onko silloin enää kyse kansalaisaktivismista? Saisiko taloudellinen tuki oikeasti enemmän asioita tapahtumaan, vai tulisiko siitä enemminkin este? Jäisivätkö kaikki aktivistit odottamaan tukien myöntämistä ennenkuin käyvät toimeen – kuten tällä hetkellä esim. monet taiteilijat tekevät? Olisiko parempi jos kansalaisaktivismin tuki löytyisi vertaistuen avulla? Pitäisikö julkisia tahoja lobata antamaan tukea muissa muodoissa kuin rahana?

Tässä laatimani ehdotus:

JOUSTAVA TUKIRAHASTO KANSALAISAKTIVISMILLE?

Voisiko osan nykyisestä taiteen ja kulttuurin kehittämiseen suunnatusta julkisesta rahoituksesta suunnata kansalaisaktivismin tukemiseen?

Hyvä esimerkki uudenlaisesta kansalaisaktivismista ovat Apps4Finland-kilpailun synnyttämät palveluiden prototyypit ja ideat. Jotkut prototyypeistä ovat jo nyt kehittyneet valmiiksi palveluiksi asti, mutta monet ovat jääneet puolitiehen resurssipulan takia. Monia hyviä ideoista ei saada kehitetyksi edes prototyypeiksi, koska minkäänlaista taloudellista tukea ei ole tähän saatavissa.

Opetusministeriön Digidemo-tuki on suunnattu digitaalisten palveluiden prototyyppien kehittämiseen, mutta tukea saavat ainoastaan hankkeet joilla on selkeä liiketoimintasuunnitelma. Tästä syystä Digidemo-tuen suurin hyödyntäjä on tähän asti ollut suomalainen peliteollisuus, koska peleille on olemassa hyvin selkeitä ansaintamalleja – jos niistä sattuu tulemaan hittituotteita. Sama liiketoiminnallisen tuottavuuden vaatimus koskee uutta Creademo-tukea, jonka tavoitteena on tukea kulttuurialan palveluiden prototyyppien toteuttamista. Yhteensä näistä ohjelmista tullaan jakamaan vuoden 2012 aikana yli miljoona euroa tukea.

Opetusministeriölle voisi ehdottaa, että kokeiluluontoisesti osa tästä tuesta käytettäisiin ei-kaupallisten julkisten palveluiden ja muiden yhteiskuntaa kehittävien palveluiden prototyyppeihin.

Vastaavalla ehdotuksella voisi lähestyä Taiteen Keskustoimikuntaa, Kulttuurirahastoa, Helsingin kaupunkia ja monia muita kulttuurin rahoittajia. Nämä tahot tukevat ei-kaupallisia projekteja, mutta lähtökohtaisena vaatimuksena on että hakija on ammattimainen taiteilija tai tutkija. Kansalaisaktivismi rinnastetaan usein harrastustoimintaan, jota harvoin pidetään tukemisen arvoisena. Käytännön elämässä ammattilaiset/harrastajat -jaottelulla on yhä vähemmän merkitystä, mutta rahastojen toiminnassa tämä muutos ei ole vielä näkynyt. Tästä syystä on tällä hetkellä erittäin haastavaa löytää minkäänlaista tukea vaikkapa kaupunkiviljely-projektin tai aikapankki-kokeilun toteuttamiseen.

Suomeen tarvitaan lisää joustavia tukimuotoja kansalaisaktivismille!

Juha Huuskonen, 31.1.2012

If you are not familiar with the term ‘odious debt’ then I would recommend for you to watch the Debtocracy documentary film. The first part of the film gives a general introduction to the credit-driven global economy and the accumulation of Greek debt. Things get more interesting at approx 33:00 when the concept of odious debt is introduced, followed by examples of how countries like Equador have been able to write down most of their national debt.

The story of why and how the film was made highlights some of the problems we are facing right now in Europe regarding democratic decision-making about financial issues. Some time ago journalists Katerina Kitidi & Aris Chatzistefanou posted a short video on Youtube which explained how Equador was able to eliminate most of its debt since it was based on illegitimate contracts. This short clip gained interest in Greece and it was soon clear that it was essential for Greek people to get a better understanding of this example. The budget for making Debtocracy (approx 16 000 euros) was gathered via online donations and many professional people volunteered to help in making the film. So far the film has been viewed approx 2 million times but it has been completely ignored by the mainstream Greek media. It is clear that democracy cannot properly function in this kind of situation.

The makers of Debtocracy are currently gathering donations for their next documentary Catastroika.

Aris Chatzistefanou & Teppo Eskelinen

Debtocracy screening and discussion (featuring Aris Chatzistefanou and researcher Teppo Eskelinen) was organised by Pixelache, Lens Politica and HIAP.

Also posted on >> Pixelache blog