Transforming the Future

Transforming the Future: a design perspective
Monday 30th March to Saturday 4th April

Partners: Transition Town Totnes (TTT), Glasgow School of Art, HDK Gothenburg, Les Atelier Paris, University of Plymouth, Dartington College of Arts, Sustainable Makers and ReFurnish

pdf to print post-pilot-reflection
post-pilot-reflection-design

A reflection from Transition Town Totnes

This last week has been fantastic. There was a reciprocity of exchange and generosity of time and energy that characterizes much of TTT’s community.  There was a sense for me of adding value to the two projects Sustainable Makers and ReFurnish, to TTT, but also to each other and as individuals. Just five days has generated an enormous amount of work, and ideas that have been synthesized into two twenty minute presentations.

The presentations took place on Saturday 4th April at 6pm in Birdwood House in the Centre of Totnes, with a good audience and wine flowing.

Ideas were generated to be implemented right now and stretch into the future of Totnes facing reducing oil supplies and climate change in 2030.  The work that we have done here will contribute as case studies to TTT’s Energy Descent Action Plan, be communicated through conference presentations but most importantly can also be taken up by Sustainable Makers and ReFurnish.

The workshop itself went well, the studio at Dartington was sunny and light and a pleasure to work in and walking or driving up each day at least gave people the sense of Devon’s beautiful countryside.
The people involved were terrific, although few of us had met before hand, with both teams working well together and putting in an immense amount of work. Despite coming last in the Dartmouth Inn pub quiz, we had fun working and socializing together and still managed to come up with the ideas that evolved as a part of our process of learning that were both grounded and visionary.
The projects themselves, Sustainable Makers and ReFurnish were really interesting and very different from each other, and challenging because they required us to put aside our preconceptions once we had heard their presentations and start from the ground again.  But they also allowed us to stretch our visions of a sustainable future.

The design aims were to investigate the role for design in an emerging ecological aware society and seek to understand how such a society would value and use design?  This was undertaken not in a spirit of imposition but through reciprocal learning and exchange.   Quite quickly it became clear to the teams’ surprise that the number of people involved in TTT is about 10% of the population of Totnes, although there are many other active environmental groups in the town. This required a readjustment of expectation not only of Totnes, but also what might be achieved within the teams.  What also came through the presentations of the first day was a TTT structure of a loose network based on volunteers and limited funding, encompassing diverse interest groups and where the international profile is much bigger than it is within Totnes’ own community. This repainted the picture of a utopian community re-organising itself in isolation to the turmoil in the rest of the world, to a real-world community with dissention, discussion, diversity and difficulties, in fact the same as most other communities in Britain.  It is this similarity that makes TTT’s work in Totnes so interesting and able to offer its experience as springboard for other communities.

One of my aims for this workshop aside from the design agenda, was to work with TTT projects, but also to link into other existing sustainable initiatives within Totnes.  Of the original 8 projects and businesses, which I had contacted, we were only able to undertake 2 projects during this pilot.   These demonstrated aspects of ecological awareness, TTT’s ethos and addressed different aspects of the local community and different areas of the economy.  They encompassed the environmental, social and economic basis of the future vision that TTT is trying to create through the Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP).  It was the EDAP visioning of the future in 2030 that we attempted with each project.  That then allowed us to plan backwards using our project’s vision of 2030 as the goal through backcasting.

The Sustainable Makers group (Carl Johan, Will, Andy, John, Alex and Richenda) took some time to understand a mix of creativity, skills, ecological awareness and engagement, and practice, which was made more complex by diversity of practice and location. After their site visits, the team came back with a far deeper understanding of the current situation and a different approach to the future vision, which was aided by Richenda Macgregor working with the team throughout the week.  They developed 3 ideas/themes, which were explored through the presentation:
1.    Re-Skilling, through education, professional practice, home, leisure
2.    The Hub, where space was explored as physical, digital, mobile and knowing nature
3.    Local time, a chiming bell tied into local events during the day like school starting and finishing, the baker’s getting the bread out of the oven.

David Bank’s presentation of ReFurnish also presented a complex picture.  Underpined by three core principles of alleviating poverty, reducing landfill, providing skills and employment, the business focuses on the activity of selling second hand furniture and re-conditioned white goods in a number of sites in south Devon.  However the need to raise additional funds to support the business, which came from related activity such as recycling banks and constant funding applications made the business very complex.

This team’s (Liz, Keith, Ben, Janey and David Banks) approach was to develop:
1.    Quick Fix approach including
a.    Clear identity and promotion and quality of experience as an immediate priority.
b.    Changing show room displays
c.    Specialist sections eg vinyl records
d.    High Street shop window displays
2.    Mid term towards 2020
a.    Kids competition for posters, images
b.    Adding value programme with local craftspeople and designers working with the educational apsect to alter and upgrade the goods, perhaps with workshops and tool facilities as exchange
c.    Delivery van/shuttle bus to take people around sites.
3.    Visions for 2030
Unable in the time to develop this aspect, this remained as a mind map of questions and ideas.  Focused on the importance of white goods servicing and refurbishment

I personally take away from this experience through working on the Refurnish team a vision of adding value to people, to goods, to our environment, through experience, generosity and reciprocity.  This vision could create a sustainable business for ReFurnish that will be here to support us in 2030.

Part of what we would like to do is to enable the implementation of the ideas if desired by the two projects and follow-up on their effectiveness.  But this is for another project and more fund-raising. In a pilot workshop of only 5 days and with a limited team, we had to be clear about the limits of what could be offered, but nevertheless the outcomes are impressive. This pilot has been extremely effective in challenging preconceptions from both the designers and the projects, it has looked at two projects that are essential to support Energy Descent in Totnes and come up with ideas to support and enable those projects both in the short and longer term.

A huge thanks to Richenda Macgregor (Sustainable Makers) and David Banks, (ReFurnish) who gave generously of their time, which made a great deal of difference to the outcome of the workshop.   Thank you also to Alice Tyler who patiently worked on getting the web site and daily blog and images uploaded each day.

I should also say thank you to Will Foster both for his contribution to the Sustainable Makers team, but also for organizing the studio at Dartington.  Thanks to Alastair Fuad-Luke for jumping in at the deep end on Friday afternoon and providing a very useful outside overview to keep us on track when we were buried in the detail.  Also thanks to Toni Spencer for her wild food lunch, Doug Kingsmith and the community at Bowden House for also being generous with their time, and Viv Gooding for his always fascinating contribution.  I’d also like to thank the charity shops in Totnes, who were happy to talk to Liz and I and the people of Totnes who were interviewed by Keith and Ben. And finally thanks also to Jacqi Hodgson, Energy Descent Co-ordinator, TTT and Fiona Ward, Economics and Livelihoods and Project Support Co-ordinator, TTT for their informative presentations which assisted the teams understanding of Transition Towns and Totnes.

Janey Hunt

Transforming the Future: a design perspective
A reflection from the design side.

That was a lot to do in a week. It’s worth remembering that this was just a pilot project with the objective of learning better how to value design in respect of an emerging ecologically aware society. That we were a multidisciplinary group; art, craft, business and design was a challenging dynamic. That we were multi cultural; Swedish, French, Scottish, English and Cornish added further potential for exciting interaction. That we kept sane was a testament to a deep passion concerning our collective future and our responsibility in making that both sustainable and joyful.

It was a privilege to be able to spend this time in Totnes. We purposefully wanted to be there because to know a thing you have to become that thing, as Ghandi has said, “You have to become the change you wish to see”. We wanted to, primarily, do something not just think about doing something. We wanted to put ourselves on the line.

There is a sense, with these kinds of activities, of parachuting in and then running away. What we tried to do was to ensure that we left as much behind as we took away with us together with an open door for future collaboration beyond this pilot project. To see one of the Students, Ben, actively engaging with David Banks of Re-Furnish to ensure that he had the templates for the reworked leaflets and Graphic Identity and that he would be willing to develop them further was a joy.

That we have learnt a lot is without dispute, what that will turn into in time we have yet to see. How it differed from the normal design process is yet to be fully understood. It did differ, fundamentally. Some of this was predictable and some surprising. It would have been easy to bring the all knowing, all solving, designer knows best perspective to bear – but we were after something more meaningful. We tried not to come with assumptions, but of course we did. That Transition Town Totnes and the project champions came with assumptions is also true, so from both sides we had to work hard to find an open dialogue from which to collectively move forwards. I would say that we did and we did that well. This perhaps is the greatest achievement of the project.

This project has produced compassionate tools. Those which work across disciplines, cultures and that are sensitive to varying amounts of time input and personal needs both in giving to the project and also taking from it. These tools come from trust, openness and willingness to engage even when the outcome was not entirely clear. So in this it may be that the journey is more important than the destination. Certainly the journey was the thing and the destination although assumed to some extent at the outset was not the destination at the conclusion. I would maintain that this is what produced such a richness of material and potential. It resides in the qualitative experience not the quantitative analysis. Much of this still has to surface, be made manifest. It is much more here than two twenty minute presentations could give justice to.

Another thing is that this project is not reproducible. Nor should it be. In this it’s a bit like live music. In this arena there can be no clearly defined format. Each project will and should be a function of the participants’ commitment and the context in which it is enacted. This cannot start with assumption, only with trust and a willingness to find what is needed, what is already there waiting to be made clear. Perhaps this is where design can be of value.

All this is difficult to formulate but is, without doubt powerful in working towards how we may better understand new and useful roles for design. What really remains from this pilot project is what continues in the hearts and minds of those who participated and what that will cause to happen as we build upon it in new contacts, situations and contexts.

What I have learnt through this is a greater humility as a designer (if that’s what I believe I should call myself) to listen, engage with and reflect upon what unfolds as it unfolds and also a great deal of empathy with and for the people for which, hopefully, this kind of activity serves a multitude of meaningful purposes.

Many thanks are due; to all involved, to Pete Davis of Plymouth University for his support and especially to Janey Hunt of Transition Town Totnes not least because she kept the project from crashing more times than I would care to admit to. Finally to Richenda Macgregor who gave me the term empathic reflection which this small piece of writing tries to be my first attempt at. Ah yes, life is indeed for learning.

Ian Grout, The Glasgow School of Art and HDK Göteborg.