the sceptical futuryst: Robin Wall Kimmerer

Showing posts with label Robin Wall Kimmerer. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Adding Dimensions to Development Futures with UNDP

(Update 28jun22: It was announced today that this project has won at the 02022 Core77 Design Awards in the Speculative Design category! Ceda and I are grateful to Core77 and want to give thanks again to our indispensable collaborators, listed below.)

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Last week I helped to launch the United Nations Development Programme's annual innovation event, Istanbul Innovation Days (IID), using an experiential futures process and format created for the occasion.

Back in January, they had come to me with a challenge: how might experiential futures practice be brought to bear for the event's Opening Session? Due to Covid everything was to be run online this year; this kickoff was planned as a panel conversation about global development's futures, live in video chat, with the head of UNDP and invited speakers around the world.

Mission accepted: I proposed to interview all the panelists in advance, one on one, then design and send an artifact from the future to each, to arrive at their homes by the week before the event. After more than a year on Zoom, thanks to the pandemic, my hope was to breathe some dimensionality into our talking-head squares.

Each artifact would draw inspiration from ideas about the future shared with me by the speaker in our pre-conversation, and would try to picture a far-reaching shift in relationships and power, manifested institutionally, affecting whatever we mean when we say ‘development’.

So, what happened?

Sophie Howe, Welsh Commissioner for Future Generations, the first person in the world to hold that remarkable cross-cutting role, emphasised the critical need for a “holistic view” in governance. I wondered: how might next-level holistic, inclusive decision-making look?

Sophie received a bilingual Welsh/English mailer from Wales’ Parliament of All Beings in 02056, notifying her that animal wellbeing data indicated consent to move to the next phase of Rewilding in her neighbourhood in Cardiff.

Nanjira Sambuli, a powerhouse tech justice advocate from Kenya, when we spoke registered the absurdity of a few Silicon Valley tech bros ruling platforms that mediate our relationships all around the world, noting “the dream to democratise, decentralise” and “take on the giants”.

At home in Nairobi, she received a letter written to her as a Board Member for RECODE Africa (REclaim community, COoperativise platforms, DEvolve governance), with a T-shirt for its 3rd Annual Festival in 02030, after Twitter ownership has been taken over by users & workers.

Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor, told me about the importance of “political innovation” dealing with the “decision making structures” underpinning development at all levels. So what might such transformational change look like on the ground?

Based in Oxford, Roman received a thank you for serving in the 02032 Oxfordshire Ancestors’ Assembly (modelled on Japan’s current “Future Design” process), and a robe as ritually worn by participants when deliberating the potential impacts of their decisions on future generations.

Marcela Sabino, Head of Innovation at Brazil’s Museu do Amanha (Museum of Tomorrow), evoked a scenario in which we relate to corporate entities as legal persons very differently: “Companies have to be held accountable for what they're doing.” The question becomes –– how?

In Rio de Janeiro, Marcela received a screenprinted poster, one in Portuguese and one in English, advertising the public execution/dissolution of a corporation that in 02036 has been convicted of ecocide by the International Criminal Court.

Achim Steiner, head of UNDP, observed that by the later 21st century what we currently know as the United Nations “will have to be significantly different. . . . But the fact that we will need a governance platform on which to come together is absolutely essential.”

At home in New York, he received a hand-calligraphed copy of “The Words Spoken Before All Others”, aka the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, adopted in a ceremony at Onondaga Lake as the Opening Invocation for the General Assembly of the United Peoples, on 22 April 02070.

When the day of the panel itself arrived, I had the pleasure of moderating the conversation, with Luciana Mermet, UNDP Resident Representative in Bolivia. The speakers didn't know yet what the others had received, so we had everyone use their future artifact as a portal through which to introduce themselves and their ideas to the conversation.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of the Republic of Turkey, Faruk Kaymakci, also joined the session, as a distinguished “Future Steward”, sharing remarks on and helping draw connections among the perspectives offered.

It’s a minor miracle how it all came together. The future artifacts arrived in multiple locations around the world, our Internet connections held up, and almost 700 people joined in to listen, chat and ask questions. If you're interested, the Opening Session is available to watch in its entirety here:

This was an exciting piece of a much bigger conversation, about decolonising and reimagining development for the 02021 edition of IID. It was also an encouraging way for a new experiential futures* format to add both a third dimension (physicality) and a fourth (direct engagement with time) to a 2D medium. I half-jokingly dubbed the format a "4D Panel", and it would certainly work as a replicable structure –– if anyone decides to give it a go, please get in touch.

The other thing to mention about the format is that it is scaffolded using Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) –– a framework that my colleague Kelly Kornet and I derived from a set of precedents for exactly this sort of purpose –– to make it easier to generate customised projects that pair culturally-specific futures research with design-led experiential outcomes. There's more research in the pipeline, so stay tuned.

This post is a quick one based on a thread shared on Twitter earlier today, and I plan to include more details of the project in a proper write-up in due course. For now, though, much gratitude to the many amazing folks who made this possible.

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UNDP Objects of the Future (4D Panel) –– #IID2021 Opening Session –– Project Credits and Acknowledgments

Co-designer and lead artist:
Ceda Verbakel

Robe co-design and construction:
Lindsay Goranson

Calligraphy:
Catherine Marsceau

Welsh translation:
Angharad Withers
Sarah Elizabeth Siân Withers

Portuguese translation:
Jacques Barcia

Screenprinting:
Max Emiliano Gonzales

Documentation photography:
Matt Geiger

Special thanks to the following research informants, advisors and sounding boards:

Jacques Barcia
Ginny Battson
Cennydd Bowles
Jonathan Chapman
Jake Dunagan
Jasper Grosskurth
Jonathon Keats
Michelle King
Peter MacLeod
Sheila Ochugboju
Ollie Palmer
Hannah Muthoni Ryder
Ella Saitta
Wendy Schultz
Sian Sheu
Danny Spitzberg (@BuyThisPlatform)
Maya van Leemput

None of these fine people are responsible for my misunderstandings, errors or other sins

Thanks for generous logistical assistance:

Leonard Kinyanjui (Nairobi)
Sheila Ochugboju (Nairobi)
Siri Krznaric (Oxford)
Kate Raworth (Oxford)
Nina Barbuto (Pittsburgh)
Rich Pell (Pittsburgh)

Thanks also to Jill Chisnell, Trebor Scholz, Brad Towell, and Cameron Tonkinwise

Thanks for additional design explorations to Myrna Rosen and Amrita Khoshoo

Framing by Carol Whitehead

T-shirt production (PIT) by Clockwise.io
T-shirt production (NBO) by Mattel Printing
Shipping by FedEx East Liberty & Monroeville PA

4D Panel members and artifact inspirers:

Sophie Howe

Roman Krznaric

Marcela Sabino

Nanjira Sambuli

Achim Steiner

4D Panel Future steward:
Faruk Kaymakcı

UNDP Innovation liaison:
Milica Begovic

Thank you to Kelly Kornet for co-authoring the Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) framework which scaffolded this project

Thank you to Robin Wall Kimmerer for inspiring the artifact for Achim through her brilliant book Braiding Sweetgrass (see “The Sacred and the Superfund”)

Thank you to John Stokes for kind permission to use the text of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. © 1993 Six Nations Indian Museum and The Tracking Project. ISBN 0-9643214-0-8

Extra special thanks to Ceda Verbakel, wonderful partner, fellow traveller, and problem-solver-in-chief

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* Or design fiction, speculative design, etc –– call it whatever you like really –– but know that experiential futures, more recently dubbed design futures in some quarters, has its own genealogy and contours grounded in decades of futures work; lots to dig into for the curious!

Monday, August 31, 2020

The Spirit and the Letter

As the new school year gets underway I've been thinking about some of the reading that left an impression on me this summer. Tonight my mind goes to the collection Dreaming Too Loud by the remarkable human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson, who is known for representing, among others, Salman Rushdie, Julian Assange, the Aboriginal Tasmanian Centre, and A.S. Neill's Summerhill School. His other books include Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice and Who Owns History? Elgin's Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure. A man of uncommon moral clarity and a wickedly sharp turn of phrase, Robertson was once described as "the greatest living Australian" by the now much missed Christopher Hitchens.

I was in search of insight into the ingenious show that he used to host in the 1980s on Australian public television, Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals (a cousin of the long-running Fred Friendly Seminars on PBS in the United States, and their roots are intertwined, as Robertson relates in his memoir). This brilliantly improvised quasi-roleplaying-game format for supporting public imagination and debate could sometimes be controversial –– the hypothetical transcribed in the book comes from an episode dealing with the politics of media ownership in Australia, which apparently ruffled the wrong feathers, and disappeared without ever being broadcast –– but this is just one facet of a long and colourful career illuminated from many angles in Dreaming Too Loud.

Among the themes of Australian history and society running through in the book is the abysmal treatment of the country's first inhabitants and the need for legal redress: "Restorative justice requires some atonement to indigenous Australians."

I was born in Adelaide, South Australia –– Kaurna Country –– although my family moved overseas when I was very young, and I have had too few opportunities to spend time there since, so my ignorance of the place is sadly extensive. Something I learned from this book is that the Letters Patent issued by the king of England in 01836 that founded South Australia, then the only state free of convicts in a country otherwise settled as a series of penal colonies, explicitly included the following condition:

Provided always that nothing in these Letters Patent contained shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said Province to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own Persons or in the Persons of their Descendants of any Land therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives.

As Robertson points out, almost two hundred years of studied disregard for the letter and spirit of the law were to follow. But this fascinating legal timebomb from the early nineteenth century, a potential basis eventually for the kind of sudden paradigmatic shift that international legal scholars call a Grotian moment, remained, like a cultural earthquake waiting to happen.

Introducing the article 'Give Adelaide Back', he notes:

Adelaide may have been an act of theft, but, unlike most colonial acquisitions, it might one day be returned –– if lawyers in the future can work out how to enforce the patent as the king of England and his Whig ministers, back in 1836, intended. This would provide an example of how, in the law, time past is present in time future.

Towards that end he ventures some legal formulations that might be helpful, including a 'Statute of Liberty', a counterpart to the United States Bill of Rights, which is something that the Australian Constitution has never included. Understandably this is a special point of interest and concern for a human rights lawyer. The proposed Preamble starts as follows:

Whereas the people of Australia, united in one indissoluble Commonwealth, declare it the democratic duty of their parliaments and elected bodies and government officials to uphold, protect and advance their hard-won liberties, and being:
Humble in acknowledging the first owners and occupiers of this unique continent, whose ancestors have walked about on its earth for many thousands of years before British settlement;
Sorrowful for the dispossession, discrimination and degradation they have endured and
resolved hereafter to respect their relationship with the land and to atone for past wrongs by future equity...

This proposed document appears in full elsewhere in the same collection, but Robertson has previously published a whole book setting out the argument, too.

A provision on the Special Rights of Indigenous People is suggested as follows:

Indigenous people have distinct cultural rights and must not be denied the right, with other members of their community:
i) to enjoy their identity and culture;
ii) to maintain and use their language;
iii) to maintain their kinship ties;
iv) to maintain spiritual and material relationships with the land and waters according to their customs of old.

Evaluating the specifics of these proposals is not my purpose here. What catches interest is their force and simplicity as prototypes of legal artifacts from the future –– we might say, time future crystallised in time present.

In the law words have a certain magic. They are used not merely to interpret but to map the very contours of the world. Among its affordances as a practice in our society, then, is the fact that if you can find the right words at the right moment, they can work like a spell. A skilfully woven thread tying past and present facts to tomorrow's legal logic can just about pull a future into existence. I don't know that this fully landed with me in law school –– and there's a bit more to it than that of course –– but after many years of working with all sorts of media and strategies to bring futures to life, I appreciate the potency and currency of words in the legal realm in a different way now.

I've also been tracking a long, slow loop through experiential futures back towards where I began in the law, and the challenges and opportunities of synthesising the two. What radically different arrangements in systems of law and justice might lie on the other side of the racial justice reckoning that we're moving through in America and other settler societies at the moment? In different ways, two enormously inspiring books I've also read in the past couple of months have ushered my curiosity further in that direction; Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (thanks to my friend Michelle King) and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (thanks to The Ezra Klein Show).

This reminds me –– a professor I recently met from the law school at the University of Pittsburgh, Tomar Pierson-Brown, pointed me to a remarkable series of legal publications called Feminist Judgments that started in the UK a decade ago and set a pattern since borrowed by writers in other common law jurisdictions. Each collection presents a set of historic legal judgments, "using only the precedent in effect and the facts known at the time of the original decision", critically reimagined and rewritten through a feminist lens. I love the depth and detail of this mode of engagement, the counterfactual hypothesising with teeth, the committed performance of principle with far greater groundedness than much of what passes for speculation in some other contexts.

And here again, the summoning of a power in legal writing to dream alternative directions, and not just tell but show the truth of that vital activist and futurist dictum: other worlds are possible.