“Co-Design” is an abbreviation for:

Community design
Collaborative design
Cooperative design

What it can do:

• A new way for businesses to innovate and create competitive advantage
• A way for the public sector to make sure their services deliver what the public wants and needs
• A more effective solution to a problem by working with the intended project audience
• A more authentic, holistic result

And here’s the definition:

• A set of tools used by designers to engage non-designers by asking, listening, learning, communicating and creating solutions collaboratively
• A community centred methodology that designers use to enable people who will be served by a designed outcome to participate in designing solutions to their problems
• A way to design a solution for a community with that community
• The process of designing with people that will use or deliver a product or service
• A partnership between designer, client and the wider community on a design project
• Collaboration on a design project between client, end-user, deliverer and designer
• The shift of design power from the client, via the designer, to the end-user
• Collective thinking and designing that addresses a community’s issues
• Products or services that have been developed by the people who will use them in partnership with a designer
• Democratic design: A designer facilitating outcomes instigated by a community
• Research based design: A designer taking decisions and delivering solutions based on ideas / feedback from a community

Description:

The end-to-end principles of the Internet and its shared protocols constitute a vital infrastructure for creating countless online commons.  This lecture gives a brief overview of this history, with readings by Lawrence Lessig, Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, David Bollier, Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess.

As articulated by Michel Bauwens, peer production / peer to peer is a counter-hegemonic discourse that rests on the ancient and re-emerging philosophy of the global / human commons. As such it is squarely aligned with the aims and aspirations of OWS.

And from the audio interview:

“when production is community based [as opposed to closed, hoarded, and centralized], sustainability is almost a given”

through more than 18 hours of conference-talk, I think many people came to realize that the commons can help Occupy expand from its stance of resistance and protest to one of building positive, constructive alternatives.

Conventional politics and nonprofit advocacy remain on the cool, legalistic plane of policy.  The Occupy world and commoners, by contrast, assert a larger, more integrated vision of human development.  They seek to blend the personal, intersubjective, moral and cultural in ways that don’t divide neatly into the pigeonholes of “economics,” “politics” and “policy.”  For us, identity, spirituality, aesthetics, moral and the quality of everyday life lie at the heart of an alternative worldview.  The framework of so-called “democratic capitalism” (as corrupted) simply cannot accommodate the new world struggling to be born.

I feel certain that the spring will bring forth new shoots of Occupy activism and innovation, much of it commons-oriented.  Here’s hoping for a glorious reawakening.

Here’s a fun video from a new peer-to-peer car sharing startup. This is a model that could replace Zipcar and this kind of peer-to-peer model can encompass a huge spectrum services and material needs that we have — especially in the theatre:

Open education is about sharing, reducing barriers and increasing access in education.  It includes free and open access to platforms, tools and resources in education (such as learning materials, course materials, videos of lectures, assessment tools, research, study groups, textbooks, etc.).  Open education seeks to create a world in which the desire to learn is fully met by the opportunity to do so, where everyone, everywhere is able to access affordable, educationally and culturally appropriate opportunities to gain whatever knowledge or training they desire.

Open Education Week is taking place from 5-10 March 2012 online and in locally hosted events around the world.  The purpose of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources is free an open to anyone.

Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don’t hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.

– Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

As the Occupy movement considers how to expand the influence and energy of last fall’s uprising into the next wave of work, it is looking at strategies for social transformation that combine a commitment to deep democracy, equitable economics, life-sustaining interdependence with the natural world and a liberatory remaking of social relationships. It is not surprising then that the commons, as both a worldview and practical approach for sharing resources, would provide fertile ground for strategies and solutions.

And here’s a great theme that emerged from the forum:

Throughout the discussion speakers noted that commons of all kinds are defined by a type of social relationship in which the users of a given shared resource are also the co-creators, producers, protectors, stewards and decision makers. As Marcela Olivera, a Bolivian activist on the staff of Food & Water Watch, stated, “the commons is a social construction, not a thing. The commons will come from the doing and living of them.”

So here’s the challenge: A global information, communication infrastructure is strengthening and growing because of this program – reaching places and people who have yet to have access. This is arguably a positive, empowering benefit for everyone (minus the ecological impact of manufacturing, distributing, operating a ‘billion’ handsets).  Currently, that information infrastructure is serving the financial interests of Nokia and its partners. The impact on the lives of the farmers or the agricultural system is not yet known – but we can guess that it’s not making them any more prosperous since this program is not really designed to do that.

With a small pivot however, a small change in the local community behaviors around the use of this technology — the ability to communicate and share information peer-to-peer instead of with the corporations that sold them the technology could be greatly empowering and transformative. Having these handsets and the ability to send SMS to their peers in a coordinated way and for specific needs could be the infrastructure needed to remake and re-imagine their local food systems like the FoodHub project.

I have a feeling there’s already something like that happening via SMS – if you know of one, please let me know!

Some highlights:

Las Indias is the manifestation of a unique socio-economic philosophy that synthesizes many strains of thinking and culture including cyberpunk, anarchism, and cooperative logic – all with a Spanish twist . It’s important because it points to a possible future for those who desire or need to take control of their own economic destiny, one that takes the centuries old logic of cooperatives and remixes it for the urban-centered, global network society we live in today.

Now, we define ourselves around five main values:

• Distributed network architectures as a way of generating abundance, empowerment, and to ensure the widest plurarchy
• The maximum of individual liberties – for the members of our community. Transnationality (which means a rejection of national identities as well as universalism) as a consequence of putting the real community of persons who live and work in Las Indias at the center of our work
• Economic democracy as the way to build personal and community autonomy through the market
• Hacker ethics as a way to foster community knowledge generation, common deliberation, personal passion, and a collective pleasure in learning
• Devolutionism: all our production of knowledge – books, software, contents, even recipes – is returned to the commons, generating more abundance

Fuller said this decades ago. For our theatre world now, I’d say we have a crisis of denial about the issues above and every other issue happening right now – or at least we haven’t figured out on a large scale what our role is in interfacing with these crises in a way that makes a real difference. Addressing them may not be through the art form at the moment since we are struggling so much with our institutional structures – but they may be addressed through the design and collective actions of our emerging online community that is able to evolve quickly and grow daily.

Time banking is a pattern of reciprocal service exchange that uses units of time as currency. It is an example of an alternative monetary system. A time bank, also known as a service exchange, is a community that practices time banking. The unit of currency, always valued at an hour’s worth of any person’s labor, used by these groups has various names, but is generally known as a time dollar in the U.S. and a time credit in the U.K. Time banking is primarily used to provide incentives and rewards for work such as mentoring children, caring for the elderly, being neighborly—work usually done on a volunteer basis—which a pure market system devalues. Essentially, the “time” one spends providing these types of community services earns “time” that one can spend to receive services. As well as gaining credits, participating individuals, particularly those more used to being recipients in other parts of their lives, can potentially gain confidence,social contact and skills through giving to others. Communities therefore use time banking as a tool to forge stronger intra-community connections, a process known as “building social capital”. Time banking had its intellectual genesis in the U.S. in the early 1980s.  By 1990, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation had invested US $1.2 million to pilot time banking in the context of senior care. Today, 26 countries have active Time Banks. There are 108 Time Banks active in the U.K. and 53 officially recognized Time Banks in the U.S.

And here’s it’s values:

As a philosophy, time banking also known as Time Trade^[11] is founded upon five principles, known as Time Banking’s Core Values:^[12]

• Everyone is an asset,
• Some work is beyond a monetary price,
• Reciprocity in helping,
• Social networks are necessary,
• A respect for all human beings.

Ideally, time banking builds community. Time Bank members sometimes refer to this as a return to simpler times when the community was there for its individuals. An interview at a time bank in the Gorbals neighborhood of Glasgow revealed the following sentiment:

[the time bank] involves everybody coming together as a community . . . the Gorbals has never—not for a long time—had a lot of community spirit. A way back, years ago, it had a lot of community spirit, but now you see that in some areas, people won’t even go to the chap next door for a some sugar . . . that’s what I think the project’s doing, trying to bring that back, that community sense . . .

It’s alot of effort and resources spent for a machine that functions, yet remains nonsensical.

Coliibri.com is a new platform for creation that allows you to:

• Offer a spark of an innovative idea or artistic creation or
• Ask for a creative solution / invention / creation from others and
• Watch as other expand on your contribution in numerous, sometimes unpredictable ways.
• See your contribution become part of a larger creation.
• Engage by participating in real-world, cutting-edge projects.
• Contribute an idea that does not expire. So, what may seem like a silly idea today, may spark an amazing idea two years in the future.

You may take any part of a creation and freely re-use it and benefit from it. All user contributions are licensed as Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC BY-SA 3.0). This licensing model allows you to copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work; and to make commercial use of the work. For details about this license, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

With Coliibri.com, you play a game that eliminates many of the traditional rules behind new creation and invention. You play on a leveled field with talents from all over the world.

What I love about the concept:

• It uses the medium of the web as a non-hierarchical, all-access platform for unlimited participation from anyone who can get to the site. It uses that potential access to enable unrestricted collaboration.
• It frees up ideas and allows them to exist for the commons

The rights of use and licensing are also unique:

Unless otherwise stated, the contents of this site can be used under the term of the CC-By-SA license. The text of Sharing is licensed under the terms of the CC-By-NC-ND license. Our data analysis and modelling software is licensed under the terms of GNU GPL version 3. For datasets, see applicable terms of use. The COMT free software that provides the functionality of the co-ment Web service is licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero GPL license with a trademark additional clause. co-ment is a registered trademark of Philippe Aigrain (see trademark use regulation).

Here’s the book’s synopsis:

In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world.

Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learnt about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context.

An in-depth exploration of digital culture and its dissemination, Sharing offers a counterpoint to the dominant view that file sharing is piracy. Instead, Philippe Aigrain looks at the benefits of file sharing, which allows unknown writers and artists to be appreciated more easily. Concentrating not only on the cultural enrichment caused by widely shared digital media, Sharing also discusses new financing models that would allow works to be shared freely by individuals without aim at profit. Aigrain carefully balances the needs to support and reward creative activity with a suitable respect for the cultural common good and proposes a new interpretation of the digital landscape.

The following principles guide W3C’s work.

Web for All

The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. One of W3C’s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.

W3C’s vision for the Web involves participation, sharing knowledge, and thereby building trust on a global scale.

Web of Trust

The Web has transformed the way we communicate with each other. In doing so, it has also modified the nature of our social relationships. People now “meet on the Web” and carry out commercial and personal relationships, in some cases without ever meeting in person. W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence. As more activity moves on-line, it will become even more important to support complex interactions among parties around the globe.

• “To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.”

• “Design is a plan for arranging elements in such a way as best to accomplish a particular purpose.”

• “Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”

• “The real questions are: Does it solve a problem? Is it serviceable? How is it going to look in ten years?”

This quote is for our online theatre communities, blogs, and Twitter hashtags #newplay & #2amt.

• “Ideas are cheap. Always be passionate about ideas and communicating those ideas and discoveries to others in the things you make.”

For promoting Cooperatives as a sustainable business model that supports the social and economic development of economies, communities and individuals, the United Nations has come up with three key messages that they want to communicate:

1. This scalable and successful business model legitimizes co-operatives on a global level and empowers them to be major economic forces within countries.

• The world’s largest 300 co-operatives generated revenues of USD 1.6 trillion – which is comparable to the GDP of the world’s ninth largest economy (Spain).
• This model is on track to become the fastest growing business model by 2020.

2. The diverse, values-bases business provides a sustainable source of revenue for communities and individuals which builds lasting economic strength.

• Co-operatives operate in a range of sectors – ranging from banking, credit, housing, health, retail, food, utilities and agriculture.
• Co-operatives are owned by nearly one billion people across the globe.
• Co-operatives employ nearly 100 million people – 20 percent more than multinational enterprises.

3. As member-controlled businesses co-operatives employ democratic principles that put people first.

• Co-operatives promote the fullest possible participation in the economic and social development of all people, including women, youth, older persons, persons with disabilities and indigenous peoples.
• Co-operatives innovate to meet the needs of their members, and may offer new products or services—ahead of competing businesses—because members ask for it.

First at American University in DC: I’m participating as a panelist in a colloquium on cultural innovation with Jamie Bennett of the National Endowment for the Arts, Anna Soellner of the Motion Picture Association of America, and Michael Wilkerson, Arts Management Professor at AU.

Second at Occupy Wall Street’s “Making Worlds: An OWS Forum on the Commons” which I will watch in the evening on their livestreaming channel. At 7:30pm, author David Bollier will give an update on international commons initiatives and then at 8:15pm there will be session on Arts, Culture, and Education as it relates to the Commons.

Here’s an excerpt from the European Common Goods Manifesto:

The crisis affecting the global economy and consequently the Euro during these months requires a radically different response from those actually envisaged and carried out. The way Europe and European governments and electors will handle the Greek crisis will set an important precedent for the next crises and their entailed risks of sovereign defaults.

The probable decisions by the Greek government, practically left alone as other governments in similar deficit crises, are based on the massive sale of public goods to unspecified buyers in order to raise the money necessary to guarantee the next loans.

This is not only a wrong decision in political terms, but also in practical terms. Politically we have had ample experience in the past quarter of century that deregulations and privatisations were not synonymous with efficiency, investments, modernisation and competition.

We believe strongly on ethical and political grounds and on practical experience that public policies are not just to regulate a neo-laissez-faire, nor just to support private interests in the name of a supposed national competitiveness, nor just to redistribute a dwindling income.

Public policies have to work for public interests, under democratic oversight, which means that they have the task to foster public goods and long-term investments, supported by an efficient management and by a meaningful taxation for the good of society.

Here’s an excerpt of how the NYC Commons Forum will be framed:

We are interested in understanding how groups and communities working on housing, health care, education, food, water, energy, information, communication and knowledge resources can develop a vision of these resources as commons: a third form of social organization to the state and corporate capitalism. Making Worlds has the ambitious goal of articulating a strategic vision from and for the movement as well as specific political initiatives aiming at its realization.

The Forum
The departure point of Making Worlds is to deepen our knowledge about existing forms and practices of the commons in the United States and abroad. For the purpose of this discussion, we provisionally define the commons in two ways:

1) The commons is a resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by the community of its users and producers. Examples of commons may include the air and the oceans, water sources managed by local communities, self-managed factories and agricultural lands, (squatted) community centers and houses, community gardens, free and open source software, and users-run repositories of knowledge such as Wikipedia.

2) The commons is a way of organizing social practices, living experiences, community relationships and pathways for our collective reproduction. These activities may include cooperative strategies such as reciprocal caring, self-education, and workers cooperatives.

We believe that the organizational forms developed by our movement are already functioning, in many ways, as institutions of the commons. We also think that there are plenty of existing initiatives in New York and beyond from which important lessons can be learned. Securing the commons for the collective good, protecting it from private appropriation as well as from over-use takes ingenuity, cooperation, and planning. Making Worlds will provide a common space and framework for such cooperation and planning to take place. Starting from these considerations we pose several overarching questions:

What examples of existing commons can we draw upon for inspiration? How are they governed?

How can new commons be created and expanded in our society?

How can we think of social and political relationships as a commons in its own right?

We are workers within the fields of art and knowledge. On June 14, 2011, we occupied the Teatro Valle, the oldest theater in Rome, to save it from privatization and to denounce the state of emergency of Italian culture and politics.

During these past seven months of the occupation of the Valle, we have been experimenting, pushing the limits of legality, to create an environment of participation and cultural production, which goes beyond the administrative governance and the logic of profit. The 13th of January we entered a second delicate and passionate phase: the construction of a legal, artistic, and economic instrument based on cooperation, on a participatory management and self governance, which would transform the struggle into a bottom-up and continuous act of creation. Through a widespread public shareholding campaign, we are collecting the necessary funds to realize a Foundation for the Valle Theater as a Common.

This is a unique experiment, the outcome of which is not obvious, and we will need everyone to get involved: from the artists and intellectual workers, to the individual citizens from the networks that in these recent months have supported the practices of the Commons.

The Teatro Valle is a theater with a long European historical significance and relevance: through the future Foundation we would like to preserve the theater’s international nature, which we want now to be informed by all the groups, bodies and experiences of dissent that pursue this fight at a European level.

If we win this battle, the Foundation Valle as a Common will be the first European institution to be operated on a principle of self governance. It could then serve as a model in different sectors, as a bold and risky experiment of creating a political laboratory for all.

Here’s a description:

The Triumph of the Commons is a collaborative book from fifty-five artists. It resurrects a disparaged, yet newly valuable, cultural narrative. Presented as fifty-five theses, this narrative challenges notions of prosperity: what it means and how to achieve it. Readers will find that each thesis offers practical implications for a range of concerns emerging in the 21st century.

And here’s Thesis #54 that I really like - by artist Nancy Vonk:

When one sees others as source, one can no longer see others as opponents but as peers involved in the co-creation of play.

RaspouTeam is a street art collective and their project called “Paris, Désordres Publics” embeds histories of public disorder, revolutions, dissent in their real geographic locations across the entire city. The audience interface would be their own mobile phones that decode QR codes on ceramic tiles that have been illegally glued by RaspouTeam to the various historical sites. The codes direct you to webpages that describe the specific events through images and narrative text.

Here’s the map with links to the histories that you would receive as an audience or “witness” if you decoded the QR codes at the specific sites. And here’s a video showing part of the process involved in making this project:

Check out this short video:

..a shift away from the 20th Century defined by hyper-consumption towards a 21st Century, a new era of collaborative consumption..

Throughline with Mindful Maps presents Collaborative Consumption: An RSA/Nominet Film Competition Short Film from Kate Hammer on Vimeo.

Building Resilience

We believe the future resides in resilient communities.

Resilient, because the complex economic, energy, and environmental challenges we face require not solutions to make problems go away, but responses that recognize our vulnerabilities, build our capacities, and enable us to adapt to an increasingly unpredictable future.

Communities, because the future is grounded in local relationships: among families and neighbors, respecting the ecological resources that sustain us, and through the institutions with which we govern ourselves.

Post Carbon Institute will bring the best local resilience-building ideas and models to thousands of communities. These efforts — many already underway — are tackling the complex environmental, economic, and energy challenges. Recognizing that communities are the key to effecting social change, we will help build the capacity of communities to develop effective responses to the changing conditions, and help build a collaborative network of communities, community leaders, and experts.

Persol Eyewear hinges from the 1930's

A few days ago I got caught in the rain without an umbrella and so I stepped into the nearest store to wait it out which was a high-end eyewear boutique. I started to try on different frames to pass the time. I didn’t have contact lenses to look at myself properly in the non-prescription display frames so the sales person suggested that she use my phone to snap photos of me so I could look at myself afterwards. That was amusing and so I played along, taking on the role of a finicky, fetishistic shopper of some of the most expensive frames I’ve ever handled. When I got to the Persol eyewear section, I was struck by their unique, distinctive branding/identity that is actually a functional, structural element — the easily recognizable silver arrow that acts as the frame’s hinges.

Transposing this to the way we make organizations and enterprises (yes, this is a possibly ridiculous proposition), there’s something so right in a design in which one’s identity and values are an inextricable part of the proper functioning of your organization. Identity in this context is not just a mask you wear.

The analogy with [open-source] software is interesting. In the arts, everyone wants to be the curator or the creative director. At the Fringe, we have to be the exact opposite. Our job is to get the circumstances absolutely right, to sell the whole experience, to make it as inviting as possible to anybody who could possibly contribute. We can’t curate new ideas into existence. – from the Harvard Business Review Blog

I love that: “Our job is to get the circumstances absolutely right”. The dissenting thought here is that in the theatre, or in the not-for-profit theatre system, we have a tendency to privilege and over-value the leadership’s immediate choices or taste rather than looking at the leadership’s overall, whole-system design for creative output. And most of the time there hasn’t been any conscious thought put into a whole-system design – a job that’s much harder to communicate and work for than a typical season selection. Designing the creative enterprise as a container for artistic output is an overlooked and undervalued area for powerful innovation and creativity.

“Of All The People In All The World” uses grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life.

Each grain of rice = one person and you are invited to compare the one grain that is you to the millions that are not.
Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weigh out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics

- the populations of towns and cities
- the number of doctors, the number of soldiers
- the number of people born each day, the number who die
- all the people who have walked on the moon
- deaths in the holocaust.

The statistics are arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. The statistics and their juxtapositions can be moving, shocking, celebratory, witty and thought provoking.

Visualizations and plotting of data through time and space, through three dimensional objects, and in a live performance are a powerful way to convey the meaning of abstract notions and data. Two dimensional info-graphics can be great, but there’s something about being able to hold an abstraction in your hand that makes it have even more impact and comprehensibility. Let me know in the comments of other visualizations in a performance setting that you come across.

In the U.S. theatre, the Austin Scenic Co-op is a project that’s paving the way for other theatre communities to think differently about how they use resources and collaborate with each other for producing their art. The Scenic Co-op’s aim is to enable local companies to share and recycle scenic materials – thereby reducing everyone’s costs and landfill dumping. This enterprise also has a social impact by being yet another way that the Austin theatre community can collaborate and have a stake in their own community’s work. Read about its development on the Theatre Communications Group A-ha Program Blog. And let me know of other cooperative enterprises that I may be missing in the theatre world.

Here’s a definition, a set of values, and guiding principles for co-ops from the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA) which is based in Switzerland:

Definition
A co-operative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise.

Values
Co-operatives are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In the tradition of their founders, co-operative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.

Principles
The co-operative principles are guidelines by which co-operatives put their values into practice.

1st Principle: Voluntary and Open Membership
Co-operatives are voluntary organisations, open to all persons able to use their services and willing to accept the responsibilities of membership, without gender, social, racial, political or religious discrimination.

2nd Principle: Democratic Member Control
Co-operatives are democratic organisations controlled by their members, who actively participate in setting their policies and making decisions. Men and women serving as elected representatives are accountable to the membership. In primary co-operatives members have equal voting rights (one member, one vote) and co-operatives at other levels are also organised in a democratic manner.

3rd Principle: Member Economic Participation
Members contribute equitably to, and democratically control, the capital of their co-operative. At least part of that capital is usually the common property of the co-operative. Members usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership. Members allocate surpluses for any or all of the following purposes: developing their co-operative, possibly by setting up reserves, part of which at least would be indivisible; benefiting members in proportion to their transactions with the co-operative; and supporting other activities approved by the membership.

4th Principle: Autonomy and Independence
Co-operatives are autonomous, self-help organisations controlled by their members. If they enter to agreements with other organisations, including governments, or raise capital from external sources, they do so on terms that ensure democratic control by their members and maintain their co-operative autonomy.

5th Principle: Education, Training and Information
Co-operatives provide education and training for their members, elected representatives, managers, and employees so they can contribute effectively to the development of their co-operatives. They inform the general public – particularly young people and opinion leaders – about the nature and benefits of co-operation.

6th Principle: Co-operation among Co-operatives
Co-operatives serve their members most effectively and strengthen the co-operative movement by working together through local, national, regional and international structures.

7th Principle: Concern for Community
Co-operatives work for the sustainable development of their communities through policies approved by their members.

The 7 Guiding Principles of Transition

Check out the Evergreen Project which seeks to prototype new models of health care, starting with a network of clinics in the State of Maryland. It’s taking on the encrusted reality in the health care system of exorbitant costs, rampant inefficiencies, and terrible patient care. It’s a great system-design challenge:

Maryland’s Evergreen Project will facilitate a completely new conversation on both sides of the exam table where informed and involved patients, working with their physicians, can and will improve outcomes and reduce costs in a system that responds to evidence and rewards excellence. We seek to create genuine change in the structure and methods of Health Care delivery, the cost of and access to Health Insurance and the standard practices used in determining what should be covered and under what circumstances.

Using a cooperative membership model and professional health coaches, The Evergreen Project will serve as the facilitator of new models for funding and delivering health care where the members share in the savings brought about by increased efficiencies and reduced costs. We will use a social enterprise model where the benefits of operational efficiencies will be reinvested in additional program features.

As the clinic network grows, Evergreen expects to form a legal entity that will take an increasingly direct role in the provider networks, financing and operational issues, with the ultimate aim of developing a self-sustaining ecosystem where the payor, the patient and the provider work in harmony as partners in improving outcomes and reducing costs.

For the “what” I’ve already turned completely to the wisdom of the community. I adore the crowd-sourced app Yelp and whenever I get to eat out I’m compelled to use it on my phone or on the web to choose the restaurant, or the “what” that I’m going to. What ceases to fascinate me is that it’s a tool that’s co-created by its users and that only gets better as more users participate by contributing ratings to it. It gets to constantly grow and constantly improve over time – to infinity. I don’t need the expert Zagat or Michelin (I’ve never used Michelin btw, but just saying… though I’d like to now on second thought. Who’s buying?).

For movies, I never go to one without looking at the aggregate critic score and user score on metacritic. This is probably the worst thing you can do to an arts critic. Metacritic turns their review into a number and then averages the numbers across dozens of national publications. So instead of treating and respecting their essays as “criticism”, Metacritic reduces all of them to just consumer reports and then finds the aggregate opinion for a particular movie. I don’t mind that at all and I find it extremely useful in choosing the movie I get to see.

So where does this leave the expert, the arbiter? Maybe their role in culture needs a conceptual mash up. Check out Chefs Feed on the iPhone which is my favorite app that I’ve never used. This mashes up the 20th Century with the 21st Century, making everybody happy.

Though not as comprehensive, this design borrows some of the principles of Cradle-to-Cradle design which is:

a biomimetic approach to the design of systems. It models human industry on nature’s processes in which materials are viewed as nutrients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems and nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic and synthetic materials. Put simply, it is a holistic economic, industrial and social framework that seeks to create systems that are not just efficient but essentially waste free. The model in its broadest sense is not limited to industrial design andmanufacturing; it can be applied to many different aspects of human civilization such as urban environments, buildings, economics and social systems.

I like that last sentence of the above Wikipedia quote. This approach could be applied to how we think of our arts organizations, the buildings we build for them, and the infrastructures, programs, initiatives that we create. I wonder why this isn’t the generally accepted way of thinking and planning? What is it that makes us avoid designing the entire life cycle? Why are we so focused on just one phase in the cycle? Is it self-preservation that gets in the way?

From Wikipedia:

Permaculture is a theory of ecological design which seeks to develop sustainable human settlements and agricultural systems, by attempting to model them on natural ecosystems.

Permaculture as a systematic method was developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren during the 1970s. The word “permaculture” originally referred to “permanent agriculture”, but was expanded to also stand for “permanent culture” as it was seen that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system. Mollison has described permaculture as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single project system.”

Modern permaculture is a system design tool. It is a way of:

• looking at a whole system or problem;
• observing how the parts relate;
• planning to mend inefficient systems by applying ideas learned from long-term sustainable working systems;
• seeing connections between key parts.

Holmgren’s 12 design principles

The core of permaculture has always been in supplying a design toolkit for human habitation. This toolkit helps the designer to model a final design based on an observation of how ecosystems interact.

1. Observe and interact: By taking time to engage with nature we can design solutions that suit our particular situation.
2. Catch and store energy: By developing systems that collect resources at peak abundance, we can use them in times of need.
3. Obtain a yield: Ensure that you are getting truly useful rewards as part of the work that you are doing.
4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: We need to discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems can continue to function well.
5. Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature’s abundance to reduce our consumptive behavior and dependence on non-renewable resources.
6. Produce no waste: By valuing and making use of all the resources that are available to us, nothing goes to waste.
7. Design from patterns to details: By stepping back, we can observe patterns in nature and society. These can form the backbone of our designs, with the details filled in as we go.
8. Integrate rather than segregate: By putting the right things in the right place, relationships develop between those things and they work together to support each other.
9. Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain than big ones, making better use of local resources and producing more sustainable outcomes.
10. Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces vulnerability to a variety of threats and takes advantage of the unique nature of the environment in which it resides.
11. Use edges and value the marginal: The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system.
12. Creatively use and respond to change: We can have a positive impact on inevitable change by carefully observing, and then intervening at the right time.

 

Which apps am I missing? What are your favorites? Are there any apps for iPhone or Android that are doing something different conceptually — like being a cultural concierge or crowdsourcing some kind of information? See the post on my favorite app that I’ve never used.

required to create a material positive impact on society and the environment and to meet higher standards of accountability and transparency.

The State of Maryland was the first to pass legislation in 2010 and since then 6 other States that have joined in. There are currently 517 certified B Corporations in 60 different industries.

Here’s what I really dig about it:

B Corporations address two critical problems:

1) Current corporate law makes it difficult for businesses to take employee, community, and environmental interests into consideration when making decisions

2) The lack of transparent standards makes it difficult to tell the difference between a ‘good company’ and just good marketing

There’s no way in this design that the mission and value statements that an organization has – and what it markets publicly and internally in order to differentiate the brand – can ever be independent of any decision and action that an organization takes. I love that rigor.

That’s a result of a different design than the large not-for-profit arts world I live in where sometimes the ‘saying’ has a tendency to be different from the ‘doing’. Also, how the B Corporation defines “impact” is a lot more specific, measurable – and is something that the organization is held accountable for in a real way.

This exquisite 120 second commercial was made for Honda by Wieden+Kennedy in 2003. This throws my whole pseudo-scientific “effort-to-impact ratio” under the bridge. The production took 6 months and cost almost two million U.S. dollars. So on a scale from 1-10 for “effort”, it’s a 10. And on a scale from 1-10 for “impact”, it’s probably a 20 if you define “impact” as just pure awesomeness.

In both these videos, the end is some kind of transformation that can’t  be predicted.  Aggregation or resource-pooling is a knowledge commons activity that has unforeseen and beneficial effects on everything that’s participating, or on everyone that’s opting-in.

“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” -R. Buckminster Fuller (US engineer and architect, 1895-1983)

Here’s  a quote from Todd London quoting the great “administrator” Zelda Fichandler at last year’s Theatre Communication Group conference:

She held her work—and so ours—to its own highest standards. The Regional-Resident-Repertory-Theatre Movement was, she tells us, “in its first birth cry, organizational.” I do not mean to depreciate the artistic work that is done,” she writes, when asked to consider, in 1970, the future of the regional theatre, …(Nor, on the other hand, do I mean to over-praise it), or to under-rate the hazards overleaped, or to minimize the courage, talent, and initiative of any of us, because I think that we moved mountains. Or maybe even made them and then moved them. And surely, and at any rate, organization is creation.”

She has pinpointed the special brilliance of the triple-R theatre movement, and, while she was not, in 1970, particularly sanguine about its future, she pointed the way to survival: organizational energy.

That “organizational energy” – if it ever comes back – is going to come from the people who are actually “just” administrators.

To come back to our theatre microcosm, the #2amt Twitter community has been a pioneer for us in terms of figuring out how to leverage their online presence in order to strengthen local theatre communities though in-person meet ups that always originate online from this global Twitter and blogging community. That’s a “global online to local offline” model that we need to develop further because there’s much potential in that for real transformation.

I just want to point this out because after a few days of using this service, I took it for granted and have rarely left my house in the morning without first checking when the bus will appear.  I love the simplicity and frugality of their design for this system. From the user perspective, all that really changed was that WMATA added some numbers to the already existing bus stop signs. A bigger and wasteful alternative would have been to install electronic screens on every bus stop to let the passenger know the information whether they wanted it or not.

With Agile development, you can never get away with a vague, amorphous mission or vision statement about the project (the way not-for-profit theatre institutions sometimes do.) The values and vision have to be baked into each feature that is built for the project, otherwise the project fails and doesn’t progress – wasted time, wasted money. What I love is the rigor of this methodology and that the value proposition is the thing you have made operational, the web feature that you are actually building and making public — it’s not just the thing you say to people to sound good (again, winking at my not-for-profit theatre institution world).

While I was on that Wikipedia page, I found links to the “The declaration of interdependence for modern management” (2005) which is basically an addendum to the original “manifesto” (2001) on Agile Software Development and which adapts Agile Development’s principles for the larger world of business management and organizational leadership:

“We …

• increase return on investment by making continuous flow of value our focus.
• deliver reliable results by engaging customers in frequent interactions and shared ownership.
• expect uncertainty and manage for it through iterations, anticipation and adaptation.
• unleash creativity and innovation by recognizing that individuals are the ultimate source of value, and creating an environment where they can make a difference.
• boost performance through group accountability for results and shared responsibility for team effectiveness.
• improve effectiveness and reliability through situationally specific strategies, processes and practices.”

Wouldn’t it be awesome if theatre institutions knew or adopted any of this?

The ratio is pretty simple. I’m calling it the “effort-to-impact” ratio.  On a scale from 1-10 you choose the amount of effort a particular project or task will take and then you assign on a scale from 1-10 the impact that project or task will have. You have to really define what you mean by “impact”. Defining “effort” is always easier.  The ultimate ratio would be 1 to 10 or 1/10  – The smaller the ratio, the better.

For example, if you can phone in your order to a food truck, that’s less “effort” than waiting out in the freezing cold acid rain for ten minutes.  In my example in Southwest DC, being able to phone in a food truck order is a “2″ versus the “7″  if I were to wait in line shivering off the calories even before I eat the Mumbai butter chicken.  The “impact” of my food truck food on my palate regardless of the effort I put in to acquire it is a solid 8. (the Sauca truck. Check it.) So the ratio is 2/8 versus 7/8.   2/8 is so much better.

So, you’re going to tell me that this is just a stupid, pseudo-scientific formula for “efficiency” — less resource input for the same or better outcome. Well, yes it is! But it works for me. And it can change your life as it has changed mine.

Click here for the news feed on Google.

Here are a couple of screenshots from last night of FBI.gov and Justice.gov:

One could say that Anonymous is defending an internet culture that believes in the open and free exchange of media for a common good — protecting the internet from encroachment from politically connected corporations and lobbyists who are protecting business interests (and business models). Or one could characterize them as criminals, stealing property.  The discourse on the battle is black and white. This battle has been happening since the internet became popular in the mid-90′s. To me it seems like a perpetually compounding uphill battle for the protectors of intellectual property and for the 20th century entertainment industry. This is an interesting case of what happens to industries (or people) that get radically disrupted and then don’t know how to adapt to the changing times.

As a person working to make a product, service, or work of art – my degree of being a “stakeholder” in the overall enterprise has an impact on my passion, and therefore on my ability to “transcend” my skill set or any conservative expectations of my performance. “Stakeholder” here doesn’t necessarily mean having financial ownership or equitable financial compensation, but an ability to benefit from the outcomes and the social/cultural value generated by the enterprise.

The most common model of a theatre organization that belongs to the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) is one where many of the artists such as performers, playwrights, designers, and directors are contracted, freelance positions.  They therefore have a different “stakeholder” relationship to the overall organization and to the show than a full-time salaried employee of the organization.

Which is the better or more passionate stakeholder position?  Does that typical institutional design enable an organization to be “on a mission” as opposed to just having a mission?  This can be the difference between excellence and mediocrity.

I’m asking these questions because cooperative enterprises, commons projects, and open source projects engender radically different stakeholder positions and relationships in order to succeed.  Because of the nature of these shifted relationships, the project’s mission is always at the forefront of why any kind of resource or work is being put into the enterprise, whereas in our mostly freelance theatre economy, purpose and vision are easily forgotten and can easily languish on the organization’s “about page” or in the season brochure despite best intentions.  Design often times trumps your intention or will.

Wikipedia’s gone dark today for the first time in its history to raise awareness of the SOPA bill and the PIPA bill in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively.

Click here to get more information from Wikipedia about the bills and the protest.

Here are two key Q & A’s from that page:

I keep hearing that this is a fight between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Is that true?
No. Some people are characterizing it that way, probably in an effort to imply all the participants are motivated by commercial self-interest. But it’s obviously not that simple. The proof of that is Wikipedia’s involvement. Wikipedia has no financial self-interest at play here: we do not benefit from copyright infringement, nor are we trying to monetize traffic or sell ads. We are protesting to raise awareness about SOPA and PIPA solely because we think they will hurt the Internet, and your ability to access information online. We are doing this for you, because we’re on your side.

In carrying out this protest, is Wikipedia abandoning neutrality?
We hope you continue to trust Wikipedia to be a neutral informational resource. We are staging this blackout because (as Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustee Kat Walsh said recently), although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. For over a decade, Wikipedians have spent millions of hours building the largest encyclopedia in human history. It is a tremendously useful resource. And its existence depends upon a free, open and uncensored Internet. SOPA and PIPA (and other similar laws under discussion inside and outside the United States) will hurt you, because they will make it impossible for sites you enjoy, and benefit from, to continue to exist. That’s why we’re doing this.

This last answer is really interesting and a reminder for me about the work we’re doing at the Institute / HowlRound / Center for the Theatre Commons:  Building a commons is not a politically neutral act especially in this historical moment of trying to shed some of the negative behaviors of the 20th Century.  Building a commons is in its essence political.

In my time within large, corporate-like theatre organzations, I’ve been continuously surprised by the lack of creative methodologies for getting work done or even knowledge of them which for me is  ironic because if we are going to play-act as though we are corporate, the administrative staff better be at least as creative as corporate staffs are. And it’s in that gap where I feel that the theatre field could have something wildly unique to itself in terms of process or behavior that it could contribute to the world outside of itself — it just doesn’t know what that unique attribute is yet.  And that wildly unique behavior or process is probably going to be found in an theatre company that doesn’t resemble anything like the pseudo-corporations we find in the not-for-profit arts.

We function as a clearinghouse for open/free, participatory/p2p and commons-oriented initiatives.

We aim to be a pluralist network to document, research, and promote peer to peer alternatives. Our political aims could be summarized under the following maxims:

– ending the destruction of the biosphere by abandoning the dangerous conceptions of pseudo-abundance in the natural world (i.e. based on the assumption that natural resources are infinite)

– promoting free cultural exchange by abandoning the innovation-inhibiting conceptions of pseudo-scarcity in the cultural world (i.e. based on the assumption that the free flow of culture needs to be restricted through excessive copyrights etc…).

Their collected research linked out of this page is huge. Check it out.

Here are some favorite quotes from their “ideas in a nutshell” presentation:

Copyright, patents and trademarks are often lumped together under the term of intellectual property. This term already implies that intellectual works are analogous to physical property which isn’t the case.

– Information is a nonrival good: It can’t be used up, information shared is information doubled.

– Information is a core-prerequisite to creating new information.

Such exclusive monopoly rights lock information in and prohibit innovation. In a time where the basic tools for information production in form of computers are available to millions of people, the law still favours capital-intensive industries over individuals and small businesses.

The idea of the non-rivalrous is an important new concept and an emerging behavior for the U.S. theatre field.  We’re seeing evidence of it daily on the hashtag #newplay in Twitter where you’ll see one theatre organization or artist re-tweeting another theatre organization’s event announcement or news.  Each of us promoting the other.  This kind of behavior never existed a few years ago.  It’s an indication that there’s a growing sense of the field galvanizing around a shared or common purpose, all for collective advancement.  There have always been theatre communities and organizations that have been more collaborative, non-rivalrous than others, and it’s heartening that our field’s use of these internet tools is enabling that local ethos to get amplified globally.

“The commons is not such a difficult frame of analysis in itself. It is, in fact, a rather simple and obvious concept. But because our culture is so steeped in a standard economic narrative about “how things work,” the idea of the commons often seems exotic. American political culture is a dedicated champion of the “free market,” after all. It celebrates the heroic individual, the self-made man, not the community.”

But for us in the not-for-profit theatre worlds, we’re kinda counter-cultural, right? So the commons paradigm should be an easier fit for us than mainstream political culture…

“there are significant differences between natural-resource commons like land, which are depletable and “rivalrous” (many people wish to use a resource to the exclusion of others), and commons that manage nondepletable, non-rivalrous resources such as information and creative works.”

So the kind of commons known as a “knowledge commons”, the kind that deals in information and art is one that is non-rivalrous and nondepletable. The dynamic is abundance, not scarcity.

Here’s an additional characteristic of a knowledge or information commons that’s actually the opposite of a natural resource commons:

“more value is created as more people use the resource and join the social community. The operative principle is “the more, the merrier.” The value of a telephone network, a scientific literature, or an open-source software program actually increases as more people come to participate in the enterprise- a phenomenon that economists refer to as “network effects.”

Yeah! Just look at how frickin’ amazing Wikipedia is. I need to constantly remind myself not to take that collectively created information resource for granted.  It’s an exemplar of leveraging the production methods and the culture that the Internet enables – for social good.  If we needed to shoot something into space to prove to aliens that earthlings are capable of large scale, peaceful, cooperative endeavors, it would be a thumb drive of Wikipedia!

I need to borrow your iPhone NOW please because there’s an app only available for iPhone that’s called Chefs Feed. Conceptually, it seems to be a “cultural concierge” mashed up with Yelp-type crowd sourcing.  It uses a group of local chefs to point a hungry foodie to different dishes at different restaurants. But it doesn’t stop there.  Based on what I’m seeing on the screen capture, it allows for crowd sourced ratings of the dish that the expert chef decided was worth eating.

I love this concept: we get the ‘expert’ opinions mashed up with the wisdom of the crowd.  If properly adopted, an app like this has the potential to help develop a city’s restaurant culture with the key behavior being that it enables a local chef to talk about and promote other restaurants and chefs – not just his or her own stuff.

This is totally adaptable to local theatre scenes.

This article from Knowledge@Wharton calls it “Cultural Sustainable Development” describing what they do as being related to the already established fields of sustainable development for the environment, social issues, and the economy:

Microcultures is an artisanal and participative art production house that links consumers and music artists. Consumers, or microcultivators, have the opportunity to donate funds to up-and-coming artists listed on the company’s website. Acting as an intermediary, Microcultures manages these funds for the artists, while the consumers, through their funding, feel they are part of the creative process for their favorite artists. “We want to make the link between the artist and its public the most direct possible,” says Dufeu. “Following the same model as that of agricultural cooperatives in which producers sell products of higher quality and freshness directly to consumers, we want the cultural transaction to happen with the least intermediation possible, with a transparent financial relation between artist and public.”

A possible analogue in the U.S. theatre field would be if a presenting organization was involved in managing the audiences’ relationship to the inception of a new work all the way to managing the new work’s life in front of various audiences in various venues.

And this video of a Rube Goldberg machine does it brilliantly, and is wildly theatrical in terms of spectacle and how it uses time: sustained suspense and the virtuosic coordination of the performers, music, and camerawork -

Check out this conversation that was produced by Culturebot.org and the Under the Radar Festival entitled: “The Black Box & the White Cube” which was about performance within the context of theatre institutions and within the context of visual arts institutions.  Two different cultures with wildly different impacts on artists and the work that they do.  David Levine’s perspective was especially illuminating since he  bridged both worlds in his work:

When live web streaming and live broadcasts of performing arts started – most notably with the New York Metropolitan Opera – the narrative around it was often that the broadcast wasn’t a replacement for the actual in-person theatrical experience and that the stats showed increased exposure and awareness via the simulcasts actually increased the numbers of people attending the in-person show. The big fear for purists was that the broadcast medium would replace or make irrelevant the theatrical experience.  Click here for the Harvard Business School Case Study.  The original narrative started out binary — broadcast vs theatrical.  What’s better for the art?

What’s really interesting with the above blog post is that the teenagers here don’t at all have the notion of it being an EITHER/OR situation, but an AND situation.  The livestream technology is one of many on the spectrum of experiencing of theater.  It’s all theater and theater culture for them: in-person in the theatre, previously recorded video and audio on the web and in their mobile players, or live, simultaneous streaming on the web.  For more on this kind of “virtualization of theatre” or the “post-building” definition of theatre of the future check out Polly’s new HowlRound article here.

Infographic Poster of Oil Supply

If there’s any need for urgency in order to stop doing ‘business-as-usual’ right NOW and to make and promote a culture of rapid innovation and creativity that permeates everything we do as a field, it should be the mainstream news in the past few years about life after cheap access to fossil fuel.  Here’s an article that points to various statements on peak oil from governments and scientific bodies.

I’m in New York now at a conference and festival which is making me fascinated about two things:  Scale of activity and Denial.  When in New York, it’s easier to get some kind of idea – or at least your imagination can be sparked  - about the massive scale of economic activity that we humans have created. It’s incredible and mind-blowing and it’s impossible for our minds to actually know what all we’ve created.  Here you see buildings, movement, people — and all the trillions of things that make that landscape possible. Most of what you see is in some way is related to a century’s worth of access to cheap, miraculous energy.  And then there’s Denial.  Many people in our field know or have heard about peak oil – but is it helplessness or is it denial or is it just myopic, aging leadership that makes us have no reaction to these facts and scientifically grounded predictions?

Shouldn’t we be designing, modeling, implementing, or at least acknowledging it in discourse – everyday – with a feverish urgency that we’ve never had before?  Isn’t this one of the greatest opportunities for creativity and innovation ever?

Definition:

In participatory design participants (putative, potential or future) are invited to cooperate with designers, researchers and developers during an innovation process. Potentially, they participate during several stages of an innovation process: they participate during the initial exploration and problem definition both to help define the problem and to focus ideas for solution, and during development, they help evaluate proposed solutions.

Some questions this raises for me: How does and how can artistic and organization leadership within the non-for-profit theatre culture relate to this methodology without feeling as though it’s a compromise of “vision”.  Is there something contradictory about the idea of “visionary leaders” and cooperative design?  Can they go together?  Why can’t we get rid of the notion of “visionary leaders” all together?  We seem to be living in a time that has advanced past the utility of needing to name and propagate “visionary leaders”.

Within the world of the ‘freelance’ writer, isn’t  a script just a “prototype” (see the good Wikipedia article) for a production that has yet to be realized and/or a tool to communicate and attempt to convince an organization to support the project in some way?

What if we start calling that stack of pages or that word processing file a “prototype”?  Maybe that would clarify the purpose for why “theatre-makers” create those pages.  And maybe that would open up the possibility to articulate the concept of the imagined theatre experience in ways other than in conventional script form.

I’m at the Under the Radar Festival – so this line of questioning is really relevant here.  I haven’t seen a play here yet where a script would be an effective way to understand what the intended theatrical experience could be.  So the greater question for theater organizations that take script submissions and have readers and a process that’s instituted:  Aren’t you limiting your theatre by only getting involved in theatre forms that are capable of prototyping on paper with only words?

There’s something here to investigate further because once air travel increasingly becomes more expensive and then eventually prohibitively more expensive, we will need to have in place a replacement infrastructure for breaking cultural isolation that geographic distance creates.  That replacement infrastructure could be shared and collectively coordinated livestreaming technologies like the current #NEWPLAY TV project.  Livestreaming certainly doesn’t replace a theater festival and live performance, however it is not such a bad compromise for festivals and conferences where there are important speeches and panel discussions — sites of idea and knowledge exchange and evolution.

In the future—this will all be under water. Old definitions will be drowned out—new and buoyant ones will float.
…
Theater will need to become about less waste. Climate change will be part of the discussion in the creation and presentation of the play because it will increasingly insist upon it. There will be no more disposable sets. It will no longer be cheaper to throw something than to store it. Theaters, will account for carbon emissions and pay for carbon offsets. We will have to create with less, and be more creative.

The context of her speech and the physical environment in which it happened – in the soaring glass-enclosed study of the new building – made these statements full of positive, productive dissent. To the majority of folks outside our arts field, these statements are already mainstream and ordinary.  But for us it was extraordinary. Climate change and our economic and social upheavals are realities that people are now experiencing on a daily basis.  However, many of us or I dare say most of us in the U.S. theatre are operating in a world that doesn’t take into account this new reality – which is a form of denial.  I’d like to think it’s because theatre people are extraordinarily talented at make-believe and can’t help but to imagine different realities.  That would make me feel better. Or denial is just so much easier to do and its systematized: People wake up, go to work, go home, get their salaries, get up, and repeat.  There’s no incentive or pressure (yet) to do anything else but the same.

This is an essay by Franco Berardi Bifo:  Replace “social welfare” with “not-for-profit theatre”:

After the illusions of the new economy—spread by the wired neoliberal ideologists—and the deception of the dot-com crash, the beginning of the new century announced the coming collapse of the financial economy. Since September 2008 we know that, notwithstanding the financial virtualization of expansion, the end of capitalist growth is in sight. This will be a curse if social welfare is indeed dependent on the expansion of profits and if we are unable to redefine social needs and expectations. But it will be a blessing if we can distribute and share existing resources in an egalitarian way, and if we can shift our cultural expectations in a frugal direction, replacing the idea that pleasure depends on ever-growing consumption.

…

We are living in a space that is beyond the future. If we come to terms with this post-futuristic condition, we can renounce accumulation and growth and be happy sharing the wealth that comes from past industrial labor and present collective intelligence.

These new realities have to become some of the topics at the forefront of our minds.  It’s only when we make that shift that we can start to innovate and problem-solve.

I spent a good part of New Year’s Day walking along a forest trail on the banks of the Potomac River with my wife and 3 year old son.  It’s a beautiful and bare winter forest and the slow flowing river looked like it belonged to another time period far from civilization.  My son is a fanatic of hide-and-seek and so the progress of our walk comprised of a lot of stopping, counting, ducking behind trees, jumping out, and squealing with laughter.  At some point, my son wanted to take a rest from all that activity so he chose a log that was under a fallen tree.  This immediately became his second most favorite activity: building little cabins and tents.  We sat together on the log while my wife gathered fallen branches and propped them up against our fallen tree and we immediately had a nice little cozy house built around us.  My son passed me an imaginary bowl of soup to enjoy on this chilly day.  We were missing a fire, a real fire to warm up with.  And then I realized none of us have the knowledge to actually make a fire without industrial, mass-produced tools you buy in a store. And none of us would be able to know what we can or can’t eat in this forest or even how we’d go about hunting or gathering food.  That river is full of fish but we were useless.  Later in that walk, we came across three deer who were grazing and probably knowing what kind of things they could eat without some other deer needing to show them.  This is fascinating because we humans actually need culture, ie. language, visual and verbal communication, transmission of knowledge, acquisition of skills to survive at the most basic level.  Culture is our survival instinct, but culture doesn’t have an innate form.  It is shaped by the contexts we find ourselves in as well as being intentionally shaped and directed by us.

This is a kind of visualization of large scale phenomena, however its instruction is much less fact and numbers driven than contemporary info-graphics.  It’s the kind of visualization that’s more about giving you a larger emotional, intuitive perspective, a mind-expansion from our quotidien and often times myopic experience of the world.

Here’s another great large-scale visualizer, Chris Jordan:

by Chris Jordan: "Car Keys, 2011" 60x86" Depicts 260,000 car keys, equal to the number of gallons of gasoline burned in motor vehicles in the US every minute.

Click on that image to be taken to Chris Jordan’s site where you can zoom in to see the individual car keys.  Can we really understand what 260,000 really is?  I don’t think so. But these kinds of images help us to at least feel in an amorphous way that abstraction.  What I feel most of all is “wow”, or awe.  I’m amazed that we, humans, have manufactured a world so complex and large that none of us can ever have a comprehensive, global, macro understanding of it.

A Head Tilt, the name of this idea studio, comes from a recent speech by the inspirational, brilliant, humanist, artist-intellectual Zelda Fichandler who was one of the pioneers of the U.S. regional theater movement in the 1950′s and 60′s:

“What drew us to the way we went? What was the vision, the inciting incident? Actually, there was no incident, no high drama, there was simply a change of thought, a new way of looking at things, a tilt of the head, a revolution in our perception.”

I love that reminder that changes in perception – perceptions that change the world – simply originate in our bodies. Tilt your head and you begin see things differently. I’m thinking out loud here because I’d love to get into dialogue with you whenever you feel like you want to ’tilt my head’.