2. FARMING Experiments
Methods
Research
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[to promote or improve the growth of something, by labour and attention.]
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"Seeding" describes how I got a deeper understanding of the world's problems and where we designers could turn our focus towards social issues through co-design and communities of practice. "Farming" explains the process of how I explored what the contents of a CoP around design and urban farming could be. I did not know how to work with or how to create a CoP, I had to experiment my way through it. I chose early in the process to give my project the working title Growlab – a laboratory for growing a community of practice, design and food.
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NEW WAYS OF DESIGNING I saw that in the process of cultivating a community there was no use in designing products and spaces in the way I was thought. I had to learn myself new ways of implementing design, and I started an exploration of how I could work. I identified that through my educated practice I had a lot of knowledge and skills that I could take with me and use in the meeting with potential participants. And the already existing objects around me I saw not as competitive products, they became building blocks that I could use together with my skills and experience to facilitate situations where Growlab could evolve. BACKGROUND. I first realized this during a course we had December 2011 during the first semester in Socially Responsive Design (SRVD). Here we worked with improving a socially challenged area called Veitvet in the suburb of Oslo. We used a half-empty shopping centre as the placemaking base, and started to investigate how it could revitalize the area with bottom-up approaches and interventions.
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FAIL FAST, FAIL BETTER. "Quick and dirty" prototyping completely changed my view on how design could be created and what design is. The method involves facilitating interventions in form of situations or simple prototyped design to test an idea or concept out in the real world. Afterwards one reflects upon the design, then adjusting and improving it, before a new version is implemented – an iterative process of testing and learning. In this way it is possible to design with users rather than for. This was what we wanted to explore further by co-designing and co-creating a symbolic chandelier (right illustration), and after that became of the core principles in my design work. Working with real life situations made me realize the complexities of implementing design. It is impossible to imagine how it will work socially and culturally. Veitvet is a very diverse place in this sense. One failure came when we tried to create a nice atmosphere with a handmade carpet in the main hall area at the centre. It turned out that noone used our design because they thought it was an art project. Our assumptions of what peoples wants and needs were, did not turn out to be true. “Quick and dirty” was later rephrased by me and some fellow students to “Quick and awesome”, a more positive version of it.
My group facilitated a co-creation workshop in the main hall of the centre, for the making of a large chandelier out of coloured hands under the slogan “Give a hand to Veitvet!” The aim was to create an object that could give new levels of ownership to the centre as well as new ideas to the owners and stakeholders connected to the place.
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The workshop table was scaled as the workshop progressed, and attracted more people when it was bigger (below).
Small model showing what the workshop will end in. A manual in form of a cartoon flyer, showing what to do and what one contributed to.
A little mess is good.. Makes people less afraid to contribute. Showing off the number of participants that already gave their hand..
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Nice, cosy, multicultural and inviting furnishing that could make the main hall at Veitvet more attractive and vibrant?
Apparently not... (additional info: we experienced that during the day the locals had actually continued the knitting in the bag placed by the bench. A possible way of inviting social creativity.)
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FACILITATING EVENTS AND WORKSHOPS. The second, and mainly the third semester I started to implement the same fast thinking into my own project in form of various events and workshops. Sometimes alone, sometimes in collaboration with others, and often I engaged helpers through Growlab. Facilitating events requires thinking about many practical things, from the range of the over all experience to the smallest details. For instance making sure that the space have enough light, that people are warm, that they don’t become hungry and thirsty, which cups to use, how to label goods on a market and so on. I constantly used my inherent knowledge and skills. For example when I was doing an Urban Farmer's Market I had to use my spatial skills to analyze e.g. the walking routes, planning the over all spatial experience as well as details. When I was facilitating the Stool Workshop I needed furniture construction and making skills. But when I wanted to create a discussion, I also needed social skills, which have become a new part of my work through my master, for example which roles I take, group dynamics, control, constraints, time-frames and so on. Read more about this in "Preserving".
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LESSONS LEARNT: All in all I did six research events. I used them as a test ground for my design methods and tools to research the contents of Growlab, as well as getting people together and discussing with, inspiring, getting inspired by, and learning from them about food and growing it. The SRVD project at Veitvet was the entry point where I understood that design thinking could be used in other ways than just designing products and spaces like I had done earlier. It is about using the creative and exploratory ways of working in a design process in a constructive and strategic way. By doing research projects with participants, I understood that society is always in change. Also, design can take many forms, and become tools for users and stakeholders to use in different ways. It does not need to be physical, we can use our skills to find the best suitable solution to the given situation. That something small, like the chandelier, can have a lot of meaning for people.* Because mass produced products rearely have the adaptibility and flexibility that is needed. I can take the role as a facilitator for "situations of mutual learning" as Alastair Fuad-Luke puts it. Which is also what a CoP is about.
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* One of my group members went back to Veitet some weeks before the end of our studies. The chandelier that was made is still hanging under the ceiling in the main hall.
Facilitating: sofa carrying.
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DESIGNING LEARNING EXPERIENCES I had realized by growing my own food I could achieve a lot of good things for the world and for myself. But I also wanted to create situations for others do discover these contextual topics, and enable them to reflect around food in society as well as in their own lives, together. As the name suggests, a CoP is all about collaborative learning in practice. “WHAT IS FOOD?” One learning experience I did was to facilitate a workshop for my class and others called «Ta en potet» (take a potato). I wanted to show how the potato is a piece of nature, as well as chemistry and food. Its flour, together with water, makes a liquid called «oobleck», that changes between solid and liquid states. I encouraged everybody play with this, and afterwards we ate potato flatbread my grandmother made and her grandmothers before her, reflecting the traditions of the potato in Norwegian culture.
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“HOW DO WE GROW OUR OWN FOOD?� When I got my community garden plot, I started to regain knowledge I had lost since my childhood. When I also became a part of the CoP that existed here, it skyrocketed my learning curve. Throughout the summer I also invited friends and classmates to the garden to take part in the same learning experiences, and to open the already existing CoP up. I also asked the garden managers if they wanted to collaborate in using the garden as an educational tool in this important question. Unfortunately they did not like too many people having access to the garden, and I had to get the expertise from another place. I searched widely for experts to involve in my project, and I obtained a large network of people that I can invite in.
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“WHY GROW YOUR OWN FOOD?” Some of my learning experience events have focused on looking at the “big picture” of todays food system, to discuss how it works and what different solutions might be, and where growing your own food is a part of this. I arranged events where we looked at documentaries (like «Food Inc. and «Farm for the Future»), and where I invited people to give talks (like Dayton from Omstilling Sagene and Tom Haugeplass from Velg Sunt). We have to learn ourselves how the food system works, because there is no one telling us. At one event I asked why the attendants were interested in growing their own food. I anticipated that they would be concerned about the environment, but the majority were concerned about their health. "contact with nature", "fun and pleasure" as well as social reasons all came before environmental factors.
LESSONS LEARNT. I have understood that people experience very different things from the same situations, because they enter a situation with different motivation. All though Wendell Berry (see "Seeding") points out that we have to understand our connection to a problem to do something about it, learning experiences are for me not about pushing forward “a point� that everybody should understand and how, but create rather universal and faceted, playful and engaging situations the participants themselves will interpret into their own lives. They have also showed me how food as a theme in itself brings together people from different social worlds and cultural backgrounds, and in this way works as a "boundary object" discourse in itself. Learning experiences is for me about life, because every day we go in and out of experiential situations that we learn from. It is about being a human, because we constantly affect the world and nature around us, and we too are affected by it. The moment in which we discover these connections we have the chance to make choices and take action. I believe we designers are suited to create and enhance these connections for several reasons. First, we have analytical skills we can use to break up a theme into smaller, more manageable parts. Secondly, we have conceptual skills that enable us to put different ideas together in practical ways that are easy understandable for an audience. Third, we have visual and implementation skills that can enable high levels of interaction and engagement around the theme. When these experiences are put into system as in a CoP like the community garden I belong to, it gets more powerful. People become able to learn and reflect from and with each other, in a continuous process.
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May
August
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MEETING POINT – GOING PUBLIC During our SRVD-project at Veitvet as described earlier, I discovered the connection I got with the users in public space through design interventions and by being present and active myself. But as I had realized it was not only about me meeting people, they should also meet each other, as a community. Since communities are about interpersonal relationships, it is somehow site specific, either in the physical or the virtual world. I wanted to give experts and nonexpert the possibility to meet and teach each other in a physical place.
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non-growers
food grown by the food grower.
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food grower from CoP
URBAN FARMERS MARKET. The table is a genius furniture. It is what we all eat by and work on, we gather and discuss around it, it can be authoritarian and democratic; it is a social interface. The first idea I executed for my own project was an ÂŤurban farmers marketÂť. In earlier times the market was a meeting point between the farmers and the people, a connection between the farmer and the customer was developed. It was also a meeting point between the locals themselves. Markets all around the world are basically constructed with tables in the form of market stands. Since I had my allotment garden, I saw the possibility for a similar connection. I could create a market stand with goods from my garden close to it and make nongrowers outside meet the growers inside. People that entered it would get the possibility to join my project, and at the same time get goods from and maybe also talk with people that actually grew food in Oslo. I facilitated a simple, quick and awesome market with a big wooden plate and some ikea table bucks. It was not a huge success, very few people came (probably because of the horrible weather), and only one from the allotment garden showed up. But I got in contact with a few people that were interested in knowing more about the project.
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A FLEXIBLE LITTLE HOUSE. I still wanted to attract people to a meeting point, but realized that if I was going to work in public space during winter, shelter was necessary. I got the idea of a greenhouse, which could provide me a place for growing both my community and food together. I also saw that the market I had made was too temporary, and I wanted something a more permanent. Drivhuset was built in two weeks as a collaboration with two designers for an International Restaurant Day event. The result was a rough construction with walls and roof in polycarbonate sheets. A completely transparent wall in 1mm thick plastic cloth on one the end wall made the house extrovert – as a play with the boundaries between private and public space. The other end wall is covered in OSB sheets, with a little door. For the event we furnished it with nice second hand furniture and lamps, and served 50 portions of soup during a cold, rainy November Saturday. All though it was very small, we managed to fill the tiny 9 m2 with 12 people at the most. The reasons for the form of the house was several, but one of the main ones was that since none of us had built a house before, we decided to do it as simple as possible. The design of the house also blends well with the surrounding architecture (see next page). My intention with Drivhuset was still to build a space, and not a building. The smoked poly carbonate creates very nice play with lights, and creates a nice atmosphere. The idea of Drivhuset is that it should be flexible and adaptable to various situations and needs. Because 30
of its simple structure and unrefined materials, It can be redesigned and hacked in different ways. During it’s life span of two months it was made it into a movie room, a concert scene, a lecture room, a restaurant and workshop space. Another idea was also that temporary structures are easy to test out, and the idea of a house like this could grow into a larger building structure for larger communitites in the future.
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Up: first Growlab meeting/workshop. Drinking homemade ginger beer. Down: Drivhuset was used as a concert scene at Jovialbiennalen 2013. Right: Stools from the Stool Workshop.
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LESSONS LEARNT: Working with meeting points made me realize the importance of the relationship between long-term and short term thinking and planning. As I experienced with the one-day urban farmers market, was that since it did not relate to any kind of fixed structure the success was only defined in terms of the amount of people attending. By building and using Drivhuset, I created a more fixed "support structure"/ platform for social interaction. I had then a better chance of sustaining a CoP over time. These meeting points can further be classified as "boundary object" artefacts, because their openness and flexibility brings together different people with different social backgrounds to share a discourse and an activity. Space and furniture have the possibility to facilitate as physical, flexible, responsive and adaptable versions of these platforms for social interaction. The designer skills I have I can use not only to design and facilitate these spaces and objects, but also the social programs connected to them, in order to create synergies between different actors. This was something I did not do properly while I had Drivhuset up the first period; I used it on impulse, when I needed it. To create a longer term plan or a set of game defining rules could therefore be useful in order to develop and maintain Growlab.
TIME/FUTURE Government/laws plan og bygg GrowLAB park og idrett Moloch Filmclub
Student community exhibitors others President of school Bypassers
USE/CONTACT
Teachers/tutors Invited students/teachers Lecturers posters Visitors facebook Bypassers Restaurant Day RestaurantDay.org GrowLAB
Musicians Journalists
Jovialbiennalen Exhibitor
BUILDING
Akers Mek. Participants School workshop 1 Head of school School workshop 2 workshops
PLANNING Material sponsors Land owners Carpenter
Car owner
IDEA
Designers
Diagram showing all the participants that related to Drivhuset and its development through its first period as well as some that are timerelated. All these parts are important to plan properly to maximize synergy effects. Diagram adopted by Jones and Lundebye (2012)
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EMPOWERING AND ENABLING I had worked with creating a community around food growing, what was left was how I could help them growing food themselves. As described in "Seeding" a way of thinking about design could be to create tools that will enable and empower people to do problem-solving activities on their own. TOOL-KITS. What I first did was a small seedkit – a little package with a couple of self-picked seeds from my garden, a recipe of how to dry, store and then plant them plus my contact information. I gave it out at the urban farmers market as a business card. What I tried to do with this was to create a kit that could empower the people that got it, and at the same time offer them a community around growing their own food in Growlab.
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I developed this kit into what I called «inspiration boost kit», where I used the same concept, but developed it further into a more elaborate and complex package. These kinds of kits I have called «closed-loop toolkits». The point is that they create a loop that feeds back in to the community. F.ex. seeds today are sold to consumers that maybe don’t know what to do with them, so they also have to find the knowledge about growing somewhere. With Growlab I aimed at providing a platform where people can get support in continuing the activity, and get more tools and knowledge to develop their gardening activities.
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D-I-Y AND CO-CREATION. One of the few things I will write about here which is not directly related to growing food is the stool workshop I did the third semester, in december. Because it was out of ordinary growing season I had to think differently. I saw the opportunity to use co-creating seating furniture for the club house Drivhuset as a way of strengthening the community. I designed a simple stool that was easy to build for the participants, but where I left a part of the design open for participation and customization: the seat. The goal with the design was not to create a long lasting, durable product, but rather giving people the ability to build something with easy accessible, and also reused materials. I discovered here the importance of constraints when I am enabling other participants to design and make. I believe that all people have or have potential of possessing designing and making skills, but at different levels. It was therefore important for me to create a design which had enough constraints for the participants not to feel powerless when relating to construction and building; I very accurately prefabricated the parts they were going to use, as well as creating a clear D-I-Y (do it yourself) manual the participants could follow. In this way they could use time on the seat, and customize this in their own personal way. The level of execution differed of course, but none of the stools were useless in the end. People decided to use everything from rope, to OBS-plates, tape and cellophane, but also more sophisticated methods. One got yellow tape legs and a magazine seat, while another reflected a famous artists pompous, furry costume. 44
INSTRUKSJONER
LYKKE TIL!
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LESSONS LEARNT: By designing for sustainability and social responsibility (or as in SRVD-thinking: social responsiveness,) I realized I have to think differently about how the products surrounding us are produced. Why do I have to put a prototype in a furniture fair if I could just give it to people right away, and even offer it for them to make it themselves? I can involve participants actively in the design process, and also make designs that they can customize. For me it is not about teaching them how to design, but making the design open in a way that they can modify, hack and customize the end result. I have also realized how Growlab can work as a support structure for the physical design, where the participants can use and develop, and then consult the community. It enables me to create closed-loop cycles where design solutions can be developed and grow inside the community of practice. Design in this way simply can be described as tools. Tools that can help everyone shape their own future with their own capabilities. The tools I create does not only have to be design objects or other new solutions; a plant seed is in itself a tool for helping people deal with change. It needs only natural resources like soil, water and sun, natural materials. But yet, it can change the world by offering what is the basic ingredient in our lives – food.
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TOOL (seeds)
KNOWLEDGE (dry/store/plant)
HELP/ SUPPORT (community)
Model showing how the “closed-loop toolkit” is working.
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The evolving community of Growlab Oslo visualized by the Facebook page.
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DIGGING FURTHER... On my way to define and build Growlab I have tried different ways of cultivating a community and empower the people there. Through facilitating learning situations, practical workshops, and by creating toolkits I have enabled and inspired people to start growing their own food. I have experimented with the meeting between the designer and the public, and what co-design processes might be. Cultivating a community is not a simple task, in fact I find it really hard. I have reached out to a lot of people during my project, and new people join the events all the time. I also created a Facebook page to use as a tool. It now has more than 300 likes, and more join almost every day. What exactly defines as a community? Is it only when a group with specific members are developed over time? I would say both yes and no to this. An urban setting provides a very open relational framework, where possibilities are endless, and where we go in and out of social situations all the time, without much responsibility and commitment. The same with the internet. In this sense there are different levels of open and closed communities. The community garden is very closed, and the relations are much tighter. Growlab is much more open and exists over many platforms, both online, in Drivhuset, in workshops and so on. When evaluating Growlab I would say that it is perhaps more a design office than a 53
Empowering and enabling Meeting point
Invited and noninvited participants at my events and workshops. Me.
Design skills, ideas, toolkits, materials, objects. Drivhuset.
Knowledge possessed by the participants, films, internet. Experienced knowledge.
Learning experiences
input/output
community of practice
Planning/research
open source situation
When mapping the things that I've done into the trialogue model I introduced in "Seeding" we see that I have been exploring various parts of a community of practice: learning, use and development, and planning and research. The heart of the community of practice is when participants, knowledge and tools meet in amazing explosions of creativity.
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community at this point. But time will only strengthen the relations, and expand the activity range. And what Growlab can give to people I still believe is valuable. By constantly working and testing out things I have identified many methods that I use during my processes. When looking back I also see things I could have done differently. If I was doing this again I would have been more aware of the actors that I involved and what synergies they could create. And perhaps also set clearer goals. It is much easier to involve people and make them get what is going on when they know what the community is aiming for. Both thinking about synergies and goals was useful when I tested out my methods on a garden design workshop at MESH, an entrepreneur-community in the center of Oslo. In the next chapter, “Harvest� I will show you how I have materialized what I have discovered through my explorations. I will describe Growlab as an enterprise and design office, and how it can work responsive with society. The workshop at MESH was Growlabs first "commercial" mission, and you can read about what happened there. Growlab is a tool for me, to meet and work with different stakeholders and users, and develop new synergies between different actors in Oslo.
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