Day 2 ⏐ Session 4
Expanding the future:
how designing small interventions can open up big possibilities
To sum up the day, Charlie Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall talk with Christian Bason, Danish Design Centre (DK) and Kenneth Bailey, Design Studio for Social Intervention (US).
Together they probed at the edges of what an alternative future might look and feel like, what it might taste like. Part of this as Kenneth explained is about weaving new social relations, just enough that people can start to imagine into the possible. This can start with something as simple as setting up a community kitchen. And, when lots of little experiments coalesce around a shared mission they help us feel our way into what might be.
“A lot of our work is about trying to break up that kind of tissue that keeps people apart from each other and to start rehearsing, new forms of relation.”
Resources
Christian Bason
Kenneth Bailey
Quotes from the session
“For us, it has to be tangible enough that people can actually taste but imaginative enough that people can continue to imagine into. We call that building productive fictions.” (Kenneth Bailey)
“…when people find that they are talking to people whilst their cutting up and smelling rosemary and cooking together or learning about some new dish that they never heard of before… it’s both in the sensorial and relational… for us, it's through creating these little windows… that we think start to build a desire to fight for these new kinds of what we refer to as social arrangements.” (Kenneth Bailey)
“So all of these new kinds of suggestions that we're making in terms of rearranging social life, all bump up against power, and all bump up against the world as it is. One of the places where that fight tends to really take form and take shape is in a sort of capitalist realism.” (Kenneth Bailey)
“...you want to build a public kitchen, you want to build a public library… these days with the market rate as it is it's impossible… so these kinds of capitalist realist ideas start to surface then try to shut down the imaginary and a lot of our work is about trying to find allies inside of urban systems, inside of cities, that are like no, actually we need to move in these directions, which is a fight. It's a struggle.” (Kenneth Bailey)
“I think part of the challenge we have is that almost by nature, the proposals we're making right now for a different system that are espousing or suggesting ways the system could be different are imperfect, and they're not as described and as detailed or as mature as the current system which means you can’t answer all the questions that might be there…” (Christian Bason)
Emerging Questions
How is it that you intervene and do something concrete and meaningful to open up the future?
What's one thing that you're doing now, a practice or an activity that you think is sowing the seeds for the future?
