Project Summary

Anne Eggebert and Jane Chambers

They are instant happy makers. CSM student

The unlikeliness of us. AgeUK member

The project began with a conversation between neighbours living on the edge of the city far from King’s Cross – Anne Eggebert, XD Pathway Leader BAFA from CSM, and Jane Chambers, Network and Provider Services Manager for Age UK Islington. They discussed Age UK’s aim to link their users with young long-term unemployed people to offer skills support and as the conversation unfolded it occurred to them that there may be potential to link art students with Age UK members.

Superannuates and Tenderfeet has been developed with Anna Hart who has established a curatorial practice of pairing people who might not normally meet and asking them to explore place together. The project proposes space for connections between art students and older members of the local community, to test possibilities of exchange and mutual production, and to examine the value of dialogic practice for everyone involved. Nine second year Fine Art students have been paired with nine members of AgeUK Islington’s art groups over the spring and asked to make something in response to this pairing, either individually or in collaboration. All the participants were invited to bring their on-going artistic concerns to these conversations and potential processes.

The initial sessions brought all eighteen individuals together as one group, visiting each others’ ‘studios’ in the art school and the AgeUK day centre, presenting artworks to each other, and drinking a lot of tea. After some hesitancy from nearly everyone, the pairings were postponed until early April to allow further groups sessions that extended the initial conversations through doing things together, for example drawing each other.

The pairs have now been doing things together locally and further afield for six weeks, including going for walks, visiting exhibitions, exchanging techniques, writing each other letters, and drinking yet more tea. Destinations have included Tate Modern, South Bank Centre, Camley Street Nature Reserve, casinos in Leicester Square and cafes in Archway. They have made performances, films, prints, drawings, sculpture and text-based works. All the pairs have ended up making collaborative work.

A selection of outcomes will be shown this Friday in Conway Hall Library as an exhibition titled by the group ‘Exchanging Time’. There will then be a final evaluation event on 25th May using Lynn Froggett‘s Visual Matrix method to explore what has happened for individuals. Anna Hart will also interview some individuals in May 2017 to look back at the experience.

‘Exchanging Time’ is a mystery, a thought, a moment, a discussion, a space, a unified phenomenon, a remarkable understanding. AgeUK member

http://www.airstudio.org/studios/superannuates-tenderfeet

Project Summary

BECKY EARLEY, BRIDGET HARVEY AND LUCY NORRIS

Crucial to every society is the kind of union and solidarity it fosters and the kind it can further, under the given conditions of its socioeconomic structure (Fromm, p108).

Building on our earlier work – Elastic Learning Tools – we seek to create a model for how a range of voluntary practices can contribute to crisis situations by developing a deeper understanding of how social relations are constituted through and by the material world in specific contexts. The authors intend to provide a common intellectual space for reflective thought and empirical action through three voluntary projects: collecting donations, sorting and distributing used clothing, and developing capacities for maintenance and repair. These are understood to have potential as politically radical activities in a capitalist economy (Graeber 2012), yet are themselves constantly subject to tensions and ambiguities, exposed through face-to-face exchanges and the materiality of the gift.

An artistic installation will include the (re)creation of collection bags and using visual analysis methods, donation typologies will be identified, in order to further understand our behaviours and expectations around giving (time and materials) and our relationship with those receiving. An ethnography of kleiderkammern in Berlin will focus upon the perceptions of refugees amongst those involved in Germany’s Willkommenskultur and the tensions revealed.

Project Summary

NEIL CUMMINGS AND MARSHA BRADFIELD

CRITICAL PRACTICE

Critical Practice (CP) is a group of artists, curators, researchers, academics and others. With support from Chelsea College of Arts, we have been self-organising into various configurations for over a decade. Building on our collaborative research on ‘being in public’, we turned to the subject of ‘value’ back in 2010.

Convened by us on the Rootstein Parade Ground at Chelsea College of Art, #TransActing: A Market of Values was a flea-market like event that hosted diverse communities of evaluation: perma-culturists, skillshares, alternative art schools, economists, a freegan juice-bar, an organ donation bank, expert and enthusiast knowledge, Artists Union England, carbon divestment campaigns and many more. Values beyond the financial were transacted and celebrated in an overarching but temporary ‘community of communities of evaluation’ that came together for market day on 11 July 2016.

The gathering of this community, comprised of some 65 value-based practices, marked the culmination of five years of practice-based collaborative research. This was an exploration of ‘value’ in all its authority but also its fuzziness that took many socio-cultural forms. We worked locally and internationally with other individuals and groups to probe the complexities of value, valorisation and evaluation through seminars and unconferences, bike and walking tours, screenings, practical workshops and more. What developed over these diverse activities was a loose network of practitioners who share with Critical Practice an interest in valuing values that are not usually valued. These include social values like those embodied in acts of care, trust and loyalty – commitment-based behaviours that we too often only appreciate when they’re absent or withdrawn. Critical Practice and its collaborators were also compelled to think differently about formal values like fragility, temporariness and difference that tend to languish in the shade of their opposites, with robustness, continuity and familiarity often connoting more desirable ways of being. Surely ‘valuing value’ entails identifying and valorising a fuller spectrum? Or at least it was this possibility that cohered the significance of our research as much more than #TransActing: A Market of Values as a spectacular event.

Project Summary

DAVID CROSS

Main aims

• Progressing from the single issue of fossil fuel divestment to the broader goal of envisioning UAL as a co-operative social enterprise
• Creatively engaging with psychological and institutional obstacles to the transition to a post-carbon society
• Bringing staff and students together across the university to combine institutional critique with transformative pedagogy

Results

Following a campaign by a group of staff and students, our university has divested £3.9 million endowments from fossil fuels and signed the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. Building on this success, our campaign group has developed into a community of proposition and enquiry, reflexively engaging with our university as a place of learning. Currently, the university separates the theoretical, critical and creative work of research, teaching and practice from the practical, pragmatic, and ‘realistic’ work of finance and governance. Since political proposals aim to transform education into a profit-oriented private business, we are exploring the possibility that our university could become a co-operative social enterprise. Aiming for equality while acknowledging our differences, we imagine our university as a place where we might collectively test our ideas and assumptions, and base our choices on our values.

Project Summary

Nick Bell and Fabiane Lee-Perrella

Early Lab is an on-going research experiment at UAL that addresses socio-ecological challenges with the people facing them in the place they are happening.

Early Lab members are founders Nick Bell, (UAL Chair of Communication Design) and Fabiane Lee-Perrella, (tutor BA 3D Design, Camberwell College of Arts), plus 8-12 students from the six UAL colleges at any one time.

Project:	Mental Health of Children and Young People.
Partners:	Norfolk & Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT) youth mental health service with the NSFT Youth Council (service users); North Denes Primary School; Flegg High School.
Timeframe:	On-going from November 2014
Projects:	Project 1: Field Trip to Norfolk, March 2015; Research Findings Document issued July 2015. Project 2: Field Trip series to Norfolk, Spring 2017; Research Findings Document to be issued summer 2017.

During Project 2 Early Lab will conduct further field trips to Norfolk to scope out the potential of the proposals presented during Project 1.

The three recommendations that propose to transform mental health service delivery by weaving it into the territory are:

• distributed – decentralising and distributing the youth mental health service across the sparsely populated region activating existing unvalued assets and resources associated with informal relations;
• user centred – making it a mobile and pop-up service that travels to users where they live or where they prefer to meet;
• networked – and connecting to them, and from them to each other, through a new digital platform designed to speak in their voice.

In the hope of generating more favourable conditions in the territory for a preventative service, the three proposals on which the enabling solutions can be based are centred on primary and secondary schools:

• emotional intelligence – scoping the potential for preventative behaviours (in children, that promote wellbeing) through school curriculum developments centred on emotional intelligence and empathy;
• peer support – increasing mental health awareness in schools to normalise it and build peer support structures and cultures;
• early intervention – scoping the potential for an extra educational layer of health resource (connecting education with other sectors) to enable early intervention for mental wellbeing in schools, relieving the GP bottleneck.

None of the above is achievable without creating a seamless, integrated service across the sectors of health, social care, education and youth justice. By bringing together representatives from each of these sectors to participate in a co-design process with service users, Early Lab aims to activate the desire all sectors are expressing, which is to share responsibility for the wellbeing of the territory. If it is possible to get sector responsibility overlapping, the gaps in service provision that young people, children, their families and whole communities have been falling through can be closed.

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Ezio Manzini

The CoR Project final goal has been to discuss how art and design contribute to weave people and place. That is, to (re)build communities-in-places and, doing so, to move some steps towards of a resilient sustainable society.

The experiment has been based of 13 project teams’ work. These works had different motivation and goals. But they also had a common character: they triggered and supported human encounters, intended as the molecular component of every social forms. The experiment specificity has been to present and discuss the proposed initiatives moving from this specific common angle and raising this question: how to describe the human-to-human and human-to place interactions triggered and/or made possible by these activities? What is the relationship between these interaction and art and design initiative that made them possible?

Here some common (or quasi-common) characters:

• The encounters proposed are (mainly) the result of light-short interactions. They range from art performance, to pop-up events, to punctual interventions in longer, or even open-ended, design processes.
• They happen out of the involved actors’ comfort zone. In fact, an encounter with someone who appears to be very diverse requires taking a risk: the risk of opening yourself to an unknown person and, doing so, becoming more vulnerable.
• They require enabling places. Safe and “de-risked” places where, for the involved actors, it become easier “to take some risks, without risking too much”. These safe places must be, at the same time, open, protected and, if possible, endowed with a kind of un-finished character.
• They require triggering artefacts. Tangible mediating objects or practical collaborative capable to offer the involved actors an opportunity to start a conversation and to experiment new kinds of interactions.
• The encounters per se cannot be designed. In turn, enabling places and triggering artefacts must be attentively conceived and developed.

Discussing these characters, it must be also considered that this Seminar discussed the results of experiments done by students and teachers in an art and design school. This implied that the proposed encounters majority had students as one of the main actors.

In turn, these encounters between students and other residents actors are very specific: they are the meeting of students, who, by the nature of their position, are highly transient and the residents who are, in comparison, much more abiding. At the same time, this kind of encounters seems to be highly emblematic: in a fluid world, the encounter between transient and abiding actors is a very diffuse (in a fluid world, for different reasons, a growing number of people is on-the-move. That is, these people are transient in relation with the others).

In conclusion, the new communities-in-place must be able to include, in the variety of interactions they offer, also this kind of encounters. Not only: they should consider them positive energies capable to trigger and support the communing: i.e. the community building processes that represents their normal condition of existence.

Students and teachers, as well as migrants, tourists, and other people-on-the-move, should be included, and play a positive role, in the community-in-place where it happens them to stop for a while.

UNDERSTANDING ACTS OF VALUING AND DEVALUING AS SOCIAL PROCESSES

NEIL CUMMINGS AND MARSHA BRADFIELD

REFLECTIONS

PART 1: MARSHA BRADFIELD

We first met anthropologist David Graeber back in 2008 when he held a stall in the Market of Ideas at Chelsea College of Arts. We’d organised this ‘knowledge fair’ as members of Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, designers, curators, academics and other researchers.¹Hosted by Chelsea College of Arts, Critical Practice is a cluster of artists, designers, curators and other researchers. Through our Aims and Objectives we intend to support critical practice within art, the field of culture and organization. Our cluster seeks to avoid the passive reproduction of art, and uncritical cultural practice. We explore new models for creative practice, and engage these in appropriate public forums, both nationally and internationally. Our practice takes various forms: exhibitions, seminars, unconferences, screenings, walks, bike rides, practical workshops and curriculum development. We work with archives and collections, publications, broadcasts and other distributive media while actively seeking to collaborate.
Critical Practice has a longstanding interest in public goods, spaces, services and knowledge and a track record of producing original participatory events. These include PARADE, an international series of research activities exploring the disagreeable, contentious, exhilarating, messy, efficient, live, improvisatory and provisional nature of publicness. And, more recently, we realised #TransActing: A Market of Values, which the preceding article aims to describe. Visit http://www.criticalpracticechelsea.org/ for more information.

That Graeber’s stall was on the theme of debt may explain its limited popularity, with only a few of the market’s milling crowd sitting down to chat. These were the days before the American activist’s meteoritic rise as arguably the definitive theorist of being in the red. Many now look to Graeber to make sense of their condition as chronically precarious and practically indentured.

As fate would have it the Market of Ideas took place on Sunday 16 March 2008, the last day of the first week of the banking crisis in the US.²See Nick Mathiason’s ‘Three Weeks that Changed the World’, 28 December 2008. [online] The Guardian, available from https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/dec/28/markets-credit-crunch-banking-2008 [accessed 14 June 2016]. On Tuesday 11 March, the US Federal Reserve injected $236bn into the American banking system; on Thursday, the price of gold reached a record, trading at $1,000 an ounce; on Friday, Bear Stearns received an emergency bailout from the Fed and JP Morgan Chase. It was the American equivalent of Northern Rock. Of course, not even Graeber knew then what the long-term consequences would be. Though by our next meeting some years later, the carnage in the UK was all too clear: the banking crisis has been used as a pretext to decimate public funding, tuition fees have been introduced, an ongoing disregard for environmental destruction – the list goes on.

We, the majority, had learned the hard way that our financial system wasn’t resilient enough to absorb unforeseen setbacks without paying a huge social price. But there were a few in this winner-takes-all economy who remained resolutely sanguine. To their mind the system’s sheer persistence was proof positive of its resiliency. It was homeopathy à la Nietzsche. By crushing but not killing the markets, the crisis assured their ascension. That this expansion would likely result in more and even greater volatility begs the question: a resilient financial system for whom and at what cost to the rest?

Fast forward six years almost to the day. Several members of Critical Practice joined Graeber at the Showroom for a seminar on 9 March 2014. Now instead of talking debt, he was talking value; and now, too, there were many more listening. This topic of value, had, by now, superseded Critical Practice’s interest in ‘publicness’ as our main research interest.³‘Being in public’, public services, public goods – the public sphere – had preoccupied Critical Practice from 2006 to 2010. Something that our cluster finds so disorientating is the widespread acceptance of austerity measures as a done deal. We’re observing the things our community values most – hard-won things like publicly funded art, education, infrastructure and healthcare – being dismantled and disappeared without opposition. One reason why this tends to catch us unawares is that we struggle to understand how it is that distributing resources equitably and using them responsibly aren’t commitments that everyone shares. A naïveté, perhaps. But when expressed in a voice full of defiant optimism that a better future is possible over the post-post-political horizon, it cannot fall on deaf ears.

This worldly idealism echoes the ethos of Critical Practice as a potent cocktail of pragmatism, resourcefulness and socio-cultural diversity. These things are shot through with the eccentricities of its members, who self-organise to work in ways that are less hierarchical and more transparent. From this matrix of values, emerged a concept that has come to motor our collaborative practice-based research. We coined the term ‘communities of evaluation’ to help us understand judgement and assessment as social processes. Acts of valuing and devaluing can assemble and organise communities but they can also be divisive.

The idea that communities are fundamentally value-driven chimes with thinking outlined in Graeber’s text, ‘It is value that brings universes into being’ (2013), which we read for our seminar on 9 March 2014. A few of his anthropological insights are schematised below, along with questions and reflective response. These gather significance when brought to bear on the social ties and social forms that have sustained Critical Practice for more than a decade. Those impatient for examples of this resilient community formation should skip to Part 2 of this text, where a brief but thick description traces flows of value through the fabrication, inhabitation and dissemination of our most recent project, #TransActing: A Market of Values. First, though, a few thoughts from Graeber…

(1) Culture is always already value-based: Johan Gottfried von Herder introduced the concept of culture in the eighteenth century, in part to challenge state-of-nature theories like those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They assumed that early humans lived in constant competition as a consequence of all pursuing the same sorts of things (e.g. pastures for the flocks). In fact, argues Graeber by way of Herder, they quickly clustered into language groups. Here members enjoyed not only solidarity with each other but also differentiation from others, in keeping with their pursuit for different things. Since time immemorial and second only perhaps to meeting universal needs (i.e. food, water, shelter), communities have been driven by the values pursued through their cultures. Egyptian culture, for instance, pursued order and security while for the Greeks, the values of political freedom and aesthetic expression reigned supreme (p. 220)⁴Graeber, D. ‘It is value that brings universes into being.’ HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 219-43..

Question: If all communities are necessarily value-driven, what differentiates communities of evaluation?

Response: Critical Practice gives pride of place, to a particular conviction – something we’ve dubbed ‘transforming through doing’ – with this pointing to creative practice as a core value of our community. More specifically, we understand our collaboration, cooperation and collectivity as explicitly pursuing certain forms of value (care, trust, equitability, responsibility) while actively rejecting others – e.g. wealth as an end in itself. And we evaluate this pursuit based on acts of critical and creative production in contrast to outcomes, which may or may not embody our ideals. This emphasis on ‘process as product’ differentiates us from other communities that share with us a preoccupation with evaluation but tend to prioritise ends over means, as in the case of for-profit cultures.

(2) Value and Values: The system of exchange value, asserts Graeber, does more than just promote exploitation by camouflaging the fact that value comes from labour, ‘[It] operates on an even more insidious level by encouraging us to believe that only certain forms of labour (waged labour, or at best, labour that contributes to producing remarkable commodities) produce value in the first place’ (p.224). One of the problems, of course, is that this evaluation marginalises reproductive labour, rendering it invisible. Under capitalism things like child and elder care don’t count because by reproducing the workforce instead of producing ‘remarkable commodities’, this other labour only generates profit indirectly. This puts its value beyond measure (p.224).

In a related observation Graeber notes that we reference value when speaking of labour that is commoditised. But when labour does not fit this bill, as in the case of reproductive labour, we speak instead about values and everything they connote (p.224). Good housekeeping, for example, is often extolled as an embodiment of ‘family values’. Pressing this thinking home, Graeber opines, ‘That which is thus rendered comparable can be considered under the rubric of “value” and this value, like that of money, lies in its equivalence. The value of “values” in contrast lies precisely in their lack of equivalence; they are seen as unique, crystallized forms. They cannot and should not be converted into money’ (p.224).

Question: How does Critical Practice negotiate the interplay of value and values, in keeping with Graeber’s distinction?

Response: The business of money is a tricky one. It both galvanises our community of evaluation against for-profit and privatizing forces and it risks dividing us, one from another, when there’s not enough in the common purse to go around.⁵In fact, there has never in the history of Critical Practice been enough money to go around. Ironically, Critical Practice might find negotiating the interplay of value and values easier if the cluster simply valued value more. But that we don’t is just as well, as volunteering is a condition of our sustainability, including our social reproduction through ‘housekeeping practices’ like documenting and disseminating our activity as publicly available.

To supplement our limited budget, Critical Practice trades on other resources, especially friendship, something that is both priceless and free. Like the other interpersonal relations enabling social reproduction writ large, friendship both benefits from and is disadvantaged by its escape from commodification. One of the ways we offset this is by placing such a high premium on peer-to-peer (P2P) exchange. We hold fast to Critical Practice as a project of reciprocal creation with mutual benefit.⁶Graeber argues that at heart, Marx’s theory of value is a ‘way of conceiving human creativity (“production”) as the endless pursuit of alienated refractions of itself’ (p.220). This tracks with a German sense of society as a ‘mode of coordinating projects of human interaction’ (p.220). The sociological traditions of France and Britain tend instead to hold social worlds to be collections of people and things. On Graeber’s view this cultural distinction explains why so many debates on Marx’s labour theory of value tend of miss the point. When we appreciate that for him society is a project of mutual creation, his theory prompts understanding that just might be compelling enough to actually motivate change. As Graeber puts it, ‘assuming that we do collectively make our world, that we collectively remake it daily, then why is it that we somehow end up creating a world that few of us particularly like, most find unjust, and over which no one feels they have any ultimate control?’ (p.222). It’s a good question, one that begs to be asked from a pre-neoliberal position, where people came before profit. Getting back to and operating from this mindset is so important because ‘[it] understands human beings as projects of mutual creation, value as the way such projects become meaningful to the actors, and the worlds we inhabit as emerging from those projects rather than the other way around (p.238). Our commitment to each other is evidenced by P2P as the lynchpin of our practice in common.

PART 2: NEIL CUMMINGS

Critical Practice’s current preoccupation with value springs from a sensitivity to the bonds that tie one to another as a community. We are interested in values and the communities that produce, share and distribute them.

Through our collaborative research we have come to recognise that values are usually expressed as things, all kinds of things – from foodstuffs, to artworks, currencies and living labour and distributed via bundles of technologies, including markets.

The most visible form of the market is a competitive one. The neo-classical economic model pictures rational individuals pursuing their own self-interest – without regard for others – as the motive force for markets. The laws of supply and demand that organise these homo economicus extrude the financial price, for the values exchanged.

Except of course, not all markets are competitive and nor can all values be expressed as a price. Yet art, artists and their artworlds reproduce through competitive markets; even art and design education is riven with ‘market forces’.

Why have we enabled the values of competitive markets to dominate our recent evaluations of art, design? Clearly, we inhabit a mono-culture of evaluation but this is not resilient.

Taking our model from ecosystems – where biodiversity is essential for their reproduction – Critical Practice set about identifying and tracing diverse evaluative communities. Once the values shared were identified (what Bruno Latour might call ‘matters of concern’⁷Latour, B. ‘What is the Style of Matters of Concern?’ Spinoza Lectures, University of Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 2008. [2008]) various research communities – i.e. working groups – formed around them. There were seminars to investigate the theoretical and historical speculation of values, their production and distribution; practical workshops to explore the physical infrastructure of markets and their materiality; a fundraising committee to secure money to stage a one-day market as a means of sharing and embodying our research; and a loosely-knit archiving initiative to document and disseminate the process.

#TransActing: A Market of Values was assembled from diverse, temporary, evaluative communities that shared a common commitment to exploring value through collaborative production. These gatherings were as fluid and porous as the interests of those involved were engaged and disengaged.

One of these communities formed around the production of the ‘market stalls’ that composed a physical infrastructure for #TransActing. To embody their interest in resilient evaluative practices, the working group recycled materials from the recently de-installed 2015 degree show at Chelsea College of Arts. In previous years a suite of skips collected unwanted artworks, trashed exhibition making materials, unloved things, etc. #TransActing, however, aspired to be more resourceful by repurposing what was otherwise ‘waste’.

Andreas Lang of the Hackney-based art and architectural practice public works helped us to reintrpret the autoprogettazione furniture series of Enzo Mari⁸Mari, E. Autoprogettazione, Mandova: Edizioni Corraini, 2014. (1974, 2014). The series uses standard timber sections to produce a range of tables, chairs, beds and bookshelves. The plans, with dimensions and cutting log for the furniture, were also freely published in a premonition of a Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ethic, and a gesture towards a cultural and material commons.

Taking Mari as our guide, we salvaged materials and set about measuring, cutting and screwing them together into stalls. Jigs helped a lot. Our jigs exemplified the tacit protocols embedded in any community, and enabled pre-cut components to be connected by volunteers with limited knowledge of the overall design, or its intention. People with modest DIY skills could contribute; Adam Smith would have been proud. The jigs, like the Guidelines for Open Organisations that are used by Critical Practice to self-organise and coordinate the cluster’s activity, stem from a commitment to keeping things simple, transparent and functional. It was the easy-to-assemble structures that proved key to producing the volume of stalls, some sixty and facilitating their necessary customisation. We ordered some additional timber, 60 tarpaulins and mountains of screws. We organised a common tool bank from our collective tool kits, and signed-up for daily working groups during the ten-day construction period.

And we learnt a lot while figuring out how to manage this emergent system, with our new knowledge feeding into our expanded understanding of markets. We considered, for instance, their improvisatory nature. We discussed reusing the stalls for other things after #TransActing. Too often in ‘art’ projects the incredible labour necessary for upcycling and producing stuff for exhibition results in little more than a temporary spectacle and, moreover, one destined for skips or landfills. To be true to the values we value, we made provision for the stalls’ afterlife. For several months some dotted the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, providing much-needed public seating for working, lunching and socialising en plein air. Other stalls found new homes around London, with several going to an anti-gentrification project in Deptford. The form of this has been inspired in part by #TransActing’s use of furniture to build and organise community.

Of course markets aren’t usually designed, and yet there is a recognisable coherence, a beautiful logic of practice at work. From the ancient bazaar, through the 19th century marché aux puces, on to the 20th century flea, thrift and street markets, and even in contemporary peer-to-peer digital exchanges: diversity and co-dependency are vital.

Another of #TransActing’s working groups cohered around producing a Local Currency (LC). We thought it would be good to have a medium which could be used to exchange knowledge, goods and services, with this technology also heightening our awareness of what was being transacted, i.e., attention, time, care, values and by whom. Things that, traditionally, money tends to erase. We wanted the currency to be one of the places where the various values transacted at the market would leave a trace.

After hours of discussion and some prototyping, we decided that the currency would be composed of four denominations. Each would be identified by a different material, and represented by an appropriate icon.

The currency is hexagonal in shape to encourage interlocking and interdependency. It has five key features:

1. to act as a medium of exchange; to encourage value transactions at #TransActing through time and space
2. to question the primacy of money as a ‘universal solvent’, in exchanging goods and services
3. as a unit of account, to intensify attention on the moment when values are transacted
4. to act as a claim on future value
5. for its intrinsic value, as a beautiful thing

‘Exchange’, wrote sociologist Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money, ‘[…] is one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialization; it creates a society, in place of a mere collection of individuals.’⁹Simmel, G. The Philosophy of Money. Third Enlarged Edition. London: Routledge, 2004. (2011, p.175)

Distributive markets are networks of interrelated interests and values. Obviously, these can only function in useful combination with others. Markets therefore, as Simmel so perceptively observes, are social mechanisms that enable people to swap, trade, bargain, compete, and cooperate; essentially to transact. Which makes transacting, first and foremost a communication praxis and distributive markets communications technology. Peoples come together to transact, perhaps for quite different reasons. They do not need to exchange equitably, or even communicate in the same language. All that is required is that they have some goods or services to trade, the social protocols to enable the transaction and a distributive market.

Transactions are possible without physical goods or ownership. What is necessary – like language itself – is that one value be substituted for another, and that interested parties, these temporary communities, can apprehend the substitution. Social relations as deep, subtle and complex as this could never be subsumed by mere competitive financialization.

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EXPLORING THE POTENTIAL FOR SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT WITHIN PRODUCT DESIGN CURRICULA

JANE PENTY

This reflection focuses on some key insights from participant feedback that has led to a re-assessment of my views on the pros and cons of socially motivated community collaborations embedded in the curriculum for product designers. Ezio Manzini’s Cultures of Resilience project came at a good moment, spurring me to examine and challenge the reservations that I discuss here. So when some connections with local organisations came my way, we explored what a collaboration with the BA Product Design course might look like with the following caveats:

1. responding to the brief would at least in part lead to a product design outcome
2. the short timescale we have available would lead to design concepts, not development or implementation.

The result of these discussions were two projects, Lets Sort it Out (LSiO) with Camden Environmental Services facilitated by Central Saint Martins’ (CSM) Public Collaboration Lab and the Living Lab with the Calthorpe Project and Communities by Design, both outlined below.

Coincidentally, both projects dealt with transforming our relationship with waste although they were tackled from very different perspectives. LSiO was about how product designs can facilitate behaviour change for residents on council estates to increase recycling. The Calthorpe Living Lab addresses waste by demonstrating to visitors their closed-loop urban food cycle: growing on site, consuming in the café and digesting this and other waste to feed new growing. Providing a cohesive message and finding ways to engage visitors through all the possible touch points was the main objective.

While both projects applied a human centred design approach, their structure was quite different. LSiO was fully facilitated with co-discovery and co-design workshops thanks to the Public Collaboration Lab, but personal relationships were more difficult to negotiate, whereas at Calthorpe, students were able to embed themselves in site activities through volunteering and engaging in more ad-hoc conversation with visitors. Many of the students involved in Calthorpe have said that they will continue their involvement by either implementating of their projects or volunteering and helping out in others ways.

Reviewing feedback from students and the different stakeholders, the first common outcome is that all those involved became highly sensitised to the issues around waste. While this is not an earth shattering finding it is important to remember that exposure to an issue is the first step in transformation. Therefore, in this type of project, the number of people involved (quantity) as well as the nature of the encounters created (quality) directly affect its impact.

For the rest, rather than trying to sum up and analyse, I will let some of the participants’ own words speak for themselves.

STUDENT FEEDBACK

THE BEST THING ABOUT THIS COMMUNITY LOCATED DESIGN PROJECT WAS…

Calthorpe:

• “the human involvement/interaction”
• “the open minded attitude of the people running the project”
• “building relationships with people and feeling that my designs can truly make an impact on their lives”

Camden:

• “grasping the complexity and making sense of all the inputs”
• “really valued getting feedback throughout the process”
• “the range of stakeholders we had access to”

THE MOST DIFFICULT/FRUSTRATING THING ABOUT THIS PROJECT WAS…

Calthorpe:

• “the short time frame in which a very complex problem needed to be solved.”
• “putting ideas forward without meaning any harm or hurting people as this is a project that is really close to them so it is hard to hear the negatives.”
• “simplifying, taking a step back from the complexity and focusing”
• “that you can’t solve everything and please everyone in a 5 week project”

Camden:

• “original fear: oh, another recycling project – another bin…”
• “seeing the reality on the ground, in peoples flats, can be limiting – getting past that”
• “encountered quite closed minds to new solutions – dealing with that was difficult”
• “disappointed with uptake by residents of sessions (talking to 5 people…), some were just there for the free Waitrose voucher”
• “the pressure and challenge of communicating to strangers who don’t know what Product Design is”

MY MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT IN THIS PROJECT WAS WHEN…

Calthorpe:

• “I volunteered - several times”
• “Calthorpe allowed our group to take over a room and hold a vibrant and energetic ideation session.”
• “I volunteered several times in the Café, I enjoyed helping out and felt a strong sense of belonging to Calthorpe.”
• “I propagated my own plants and starting hydroponics in my house, I took Calthorpe and it’s ethos home!”

Camden:

• “a resident showed us around their whole flat – they were very proud – [that is when] I understood their attitude to their space and their possessions.”
• “experimenting with ways to engage residents in the co-discovery and co-creation stages”
• “I realised that these designs could actually make a difference.”

OTHER STAKEHOLDER FEEDBACK

In order of comments: Calthorpe: project lead; Camden: resident and council officer.

DID YOU GAIN ANY UNIQUE INSIGHTS FROM THE EXPERIENCE?

Calthorpe

• “The process has certainly added value to the Calthorpe Living Lab project, giving us a multitude of fresh ideas, many of which seem implementable. To have young minds applying their creativity to a complex issue as individuals and in groups seems to help break it down into manageable pieces and the diversity of the offerings meant we now have developed ideas in many areas, which we can take further.”

Camden:

• “Nice to see all the different parties represented at the Presentation Day - it would be wonderful if Camden could arrange all interested parties in one room, for other issues!”
• “It was a great experience to see this platform that created conversation between real life (estate residents with a recycling/waste problem) and the interaction with the students that come with a fresh and creative approach to the problem. I think that made me see the value of bringing new ideas, new people and new perspective to my daily work.”

DO YOU THINK THAT THE RESIDENTS / COUNCIL HAVE OR WILL BENEFIT FROM THIS PROJECT – SHORT TERM? LONGER TERM? HOW?

Calthorpe:

• “They will benefit by having more entry points, which will make it easier to understand what the Calthorpe Living Lab is trying to achieve.”

Camden:

• “Funnily enough, I was thinking only this morning that it seemed as though that came and went and we will not benefit at all. I'm sad about that.”
• “I can see the benefit for the Council in the longer term. Because the next steps are to … see if there is any opportunities to develop some of the products and ideas that the students had.”

REFLECTION

Reflecting on this feedback confirms that everyone enjoys ‘fresh ideas’ and that there is much to be gained by students and tutors from this type of engagement. Overwhelmingly the students involved appreciated the facilitated access with ‘real people’ and the empathy, focus and meaning that specificity of place and people brings to their work. Although I would say that overall there is more benefit to students, in both projects, I see our partners also benefitting from the research insights and the possibilities that ‘fresh ideas’ open up mentally. In the case of Camden however there is a clear sense of frustration due to the limited scope for implementation.

Beyond creating possibility, taking any of these ideas through to development and implementation would seem to depend on the organisations’ own capacities and the complexity of their systems. In the case of LSiO, many of the solutions proposed, while valid with a holistic view of the problem, do not fall under the council remit, so the scope for taking them further is limited. For this type of project perhaps the biggest win is through a much higher resident engagement for sensitisation rather than direct product outcomes. Calthorpe on the other hand is a grassroots organisation largely made up of volunteers and community groups, and the technology for implementation is either one-off or batch production. This leaves the door open for the students to have continued engagement and for some of the projects to move forward through volunteering and crowd funding.

Taking the reflection more personally, not so very long ago, I questioned the correctness of involving design students in community projects that professed to deal with ‘social issues’ within the constraints of our academic curriculum. This might seem a strange position for someone who has been closely involved in a number of community action and campaigning groups over the last 30 years. But these were activities connected to my personal life and geographical community. In fact, my real ‘community’ grew out of these activities from the intense bonds of trust and regard that are created when people work together for a common cause.

It is also strange from someone who for the last twenty-five years in HE design education has led both small and big community academic collaborations. The difference is that these were primarily design-led projects, ranging from installations for arts festivals to the development of cyclestations for the London to Paris off-road cyclepath. The main difference is that although these interventions clearly had social benefits, we did not intentionally set out to solve ‘social issues’ or to create a sense of community and place.

And even stranger from someone with a deep conviction of the urgent need for change in our relationship with the planet and each other if we are to slow down its rapid impoverishment or sudden collapse.

But I digress and I would like to clarify my reservations. The thought of playing a do-gooding-academic setting things up for our (mostly privileged) students to pop in and out of people lives for a short time, ostensibly ‘solving problems’ or ‘benefitting the community’ simply made me shudder. Why? Because I could see most of the gain being on our side and possible frustration or loss of trust on the other.

Given that the whole nature of social problems is that they are on-going and systemic, the one ingredient they need is long-term commitment and follow-through. Both of these are hard for us to offer in any meaningful way within the constraints of our five to seven-week curriculum project windows. In summary, aside from the lack of extra resources that these projects require for facilitation and organisation compared with the other external projects we run, my biggest fears were the effects of short term, in-out involvement and lack of scope for follow-through and implementation.

So lots of reasons for sitting on my hands that these two projects have made me revisit.

Going forward, I would favour giving community embedded projects a regular place in our curriculum, rather than being ad hoc. This means that we as a course could cultivate on-going relationships with a small number of organisations that would understand both the limitations and benefits of what we can offer. At the same time, at an institutional level within CSM Public and the Socially Responsive Design and Innovation Unit, we should look to the models of other Universities such as Design Matters at Arts Centre and Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro amongst many others, for ways and means to take our activities beyond the standard curriculum through to a more flexible model that will allow for greater continuity and support of development and implementation stages.

COMMUNITY, MAKING, EXHIBITION AND ACT OF SERVICE

WHITNEY MCVEIGH

“When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” Lewis Hyde, The Gift

Art cultivates, strengthens and opens up lives through making and the telling and reinvention of stories. My research Human Fabric looks at core identity, who we are and where we come from and celebrates our universality as humans. 1000 coats provides learning, community and the act of making in order to give something back to a wider community.

COMMUNITY

About three years ago, I began to see the importance of working in communities coming out of the more solitary nature of the studio. Conversations took place with artists and writers showing the benefits of collaborative work to bring about change and to impact ordinary lives. Through commitment and a dialogue, I saw that creatively with local communities, change could happen.

There is growing evidence, particularly in a technologically evolving world, that the importance of community and community based work holds value. Connection, communication and making, enables a sense of well-being and the opportunity to experience life more fully bringing tools for social responsibility. Working together and the act of service creates stronger ties and more stable lives.

NETWORKS AND SUSTAINABILITY

1000 Coats is about building and maintaining networks within a wider community and enabling creative learning. Workshops teaching women to sew at a more advanced level will take place prior to the coats being made. The physical act of making is a process of learning through shared resources and therefore has the opportunity to empower lives.

The project will look at environmental sustainability. Fabrics will be up-cycled from such places as the Salvation Army with the belief that an existing fabric holds its history and will transform into something new. The work is in line with my installation work that looks at regenerative memory. How we bring new stories to existing stories in order to transform objects and lives.

Claire Swift (Director of Social Responsibility) and Carole Morrison (Outreach Manager at UAL) will provide technical expertise and knowledge of women both in prison and local communities.

EXHIBITION

The work once made will be exhibited in a museum or institution and may travel the country and the coats will then be given away to a chosen charity for children. Current thoughts are with the Museum of London, Museum of Migration and South Bank Centre. We are in the process of investigating charities and other institutions. The installation intends to make a comment on art traditionally being gifted rather than remaining stagnant in museums or institutions.

SHELTER

Shelter is not often something that’s offered through the arts and is an essential necessity to all human life. By providing 1000 coats for 1000 children, one is making a genuine impact on the lives of others. Each coat will be embroidered with Human Fabric further emphasizing the threads that connect us as humans.

Increasingly we live in a fragile world where communities are lessening and people are isolated. The project provides community, learning, the act of service and as Lewis Hyde says, “an act of social faith”. It enables us to take part in and create an ever-widening circle.

How design thinking and ‘maker spaces’ might foster communities in place for returning citizens

Lorraine Gamman and Adam Thorpe

“Let us suppose that an industrial designer or an entire design office were to ‘specialise’ exclusively within the areas of human needs …There would be the design of teaching aids… and devices for such specialised fields as adult education, the teaching of both knowledge and skills to the retarded, the disadvantaged, and the handicapped; as well as special language studies, vocational reeducation for the rehabilitation of prisoners…”

Victor Papanek, Design for The Real World, 1971, p73.

Why is it so difficult to change ineffective prison systems, many of which if not state funded at enormous cost by the tax payer, would simply go bankrupt and whose rising expenses are in danger of crippling nations? This paper will answer that question by arguing that a ‘people and place’ strategy, is often missing from prison reform proposals, but is central to tackling recidivism and preventing social disengagement that leads to crime. Three sections of this paper that follow will look at (i) prison facts in UK and global context (ii) exemplar/case studies in keeping with Papanek’s account of the need for “the rehabilitation of prisoners” (iii) “through the door” design led community based project proposals.

1. Prison Facts reveals that the high cost of prison and the criminal justice system to the UK tax payer is nearly as expensive as the entire national education budget¹Prison Reform Trust, “Prison: the facts – Bromley Briefing Summer 2015, http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/Prison%20the%20facts%20May%202015.pdf. Despite the massive failure of our prisons to make a difference, the UK continues to invest in this punitive system which keeps 90,000 people away from their families, communities and places that should be involved in helping them change. Prison time often punishes minor crimes, far removed from the communities who experienced them and who could be involved in discussing the aftermath, the events that led to their occurrence, or the steps that might be taken to ‘payback’ victims and try to make things right. Consequently, UK prisoners, with mental health or drug addiction problems²http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/healthadvice/problemsdisorders/mentalillness,offending.aspx, rarely get opportunities to engage with restorative processes³See discussion of Restorative Process and participatory design in Gamman L and Thorpe A in Wolfgang J. et al (editors) Transformation Design: Perspectives of New Design Attitudes, Bird, 2015., or do not do so consistently. Unsurprisingly, many inmates experience anger and frustration, rather than ‘correction’. They are put in a cell, congealed in time with little rehabilitative input from prison, then released into communities, either as ticking ‘time bombs’ or frozen souls⁴Jose-Kampfner, C., “Coming to Terms with Existential Death: An Analysis of Women’s Adaptation to Life in Prison,” Social Justice, 17, 110 (1990) and, also, Sapsford, R., “Life Sentence Prisoners: Psychological Changes During Sentence,” British Journal of Criminology, 18, 162 (1978). Craig Haney, The Psychological Impact of Incarceration: Implications for Post-Prison Adjustment, December 2001., with few prospects for employment or resettlement. So almost 60%⁵http://open.justice.gov.uk/reoffending/prisons/ 59% reoffend within 12 months of returning citizens in the UK reoffend and return to prison within a year. When there are so many alternative systems to prison available⁶Discussion of alternatives to prison see: http://famm.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/FS-Alternatives-in-a-Nutshell-7.8.pdf, it does not make sense that in the global context nations continue to invest in mass incarceration, particularly when, in the majority of cases it does not work. Whilst it may deliver a form of state ‘revenge’ or retribution, it is rarely shown to reduce reoffending, improve civil society or solve crime problems. Both in the UK, and USA, the mass incarceration system, often housed in alienating archaic prison architecture (subject to significant design critique for its failings)⁷For broad discussion see B. Dreisinger 2016; for prison design see Y Jewkes, H Johnston –“the evolution of prison architecture, Handbook on Prisons, 2007. fails to equip the majority of returning citizens with anything like the positive life re-entry skills they need to succeed as returning citizens. Even if, as Baz Dreisinger (2016) points out this system does raise significant profits for some private companies.⁸Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations, Other Press, New York, 2016. At a time when government calls for all things evidence based the justice system is a glaring anomaly. An evidence based justice system would not look like this.

2. Case Studies from Europe, however, show, from diverse research perspectives, that not all countries are as ineffective as Britain or the USA. Germany and the Netherlands⁹Ram Subramanian and Alison Shames Sentencing and Prison Practices in Germany and the Netherlands: Implications for the United States (Vera Institute of Justice, October 2013) Federal Sentencing Reporter Vol. 27, No. 1, Ideas from Abroad and Their Implementation at Home (October 2014), pp. 33-45 (Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Vera Institute of Justice)., for example, have introduced numerous progressive penal system reforms. As have Norway perhaps the most well-regarded in Europe for their success in rehabilitating offenders, with only 20% recorded recidivism¹⁰James Erwin “The Norwegian prison where inmates are treated like people”, Guardian, February 23, 2013.. This may be because Norwegian prisons are kept small (rarely housing more than 50 people) to create supportive community environments that cultivate both restorative and rehabilitative relations and values. The Norwegian Support Model¹¹The Norwegian Support Model is discussed at length by Dreisinger, 2016, pp 271-306. as it is known, connects inmates to the same welfare services as local people, inside and outside of jail. This means, unlike the UK where people get ‘lost’ in the anonymous prison system, a Norwegian inmate belongs to the same municipality ‘before’ and ‘after’ prison. This system is designed to resemble life outside as much as possible, so education, healthcare and other social services are provided by the same source inside and outside of prison. Family and community are kept close to the inmates too, because the systemic approach here is to embed restorative and healing processes into the prison system where possible, in order to get offenders to understand civil truths about why crime hurts their families and communities and ultimately does not really benefit anyone. So the voices of victims, notions about forgiveness and family relations very much matter to the way the criminal justice system is managed in Norway, all aimed at ultimately delivering Justice Reinvestment through prison. This approach, founded in regimes led at Bastoy Prison¹²http://www.bastoyfengsel.no/English/, and the latest flagship Halden Prison¹³See discussion of Haldon Prison in Thomas Ugelvik, Imprisoned on the Border: Subjects and Objects of the State in Two Norwegian Prisons, Justice and Security in the 21st century: Risks, Rights and the Rule of Law, Barbara Hudson and Synnøve Ugelvik (eds), Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. in Norway have been informed by many including Nils Christie¹⁴Nils Christie.Limits to Pain: the role of punishment in the penal policy, 1981 reprinted EugeneOR: Wipf and Stock, 2007., a respected Norwegian criminologist who made it his life’s work to argue for emptying prisons and restorative processes. Of course, even Christie recognized that seriously violent criminals should be locked up, but went on to point out that the justice system does a poor job of determining which criminals are so incorrigible that they need to stay behind bars, and this is the crux. It is not always clear. So the Norwegians invest not just in prisoners but in empathetic staff who know how to foster positive relations with inmates¹⁵To work in a Norwegian Prison staff must first obtain a special 2-year degree in criminology, law, ethics, applied welfare and social work, that promotes humanitarian values and relations, as well as delivering job satisfaction and status., unlike the Americans and the Brazillians who put great numbers of inmates in solitary confinement as a matter of course¹⁶Lisa Guenther Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives, Minnapolis, University of Minesota Press, 2013..

3. The Makeright – design thinking for prison industries¹⁷https://makerightorg.wordpress.com project understands change is a slow revolution. Operating at HMP Thameside, Plumstead led by the Design Against Crime Research Centre it seeks to connect education and prison industries, and to provide a positive reflective process for inmate learning¹⁸https://www.designweek.co.uk/new-scheme-launched-to-teach-design-thinking-to-prisoners/. The history of the project, is documented elsewhere, suffice it to say it took some time to get ‘buy in’ for the project from the necessary dutyholders but by 2015 the DACRC team had began training HMP Thameside inmates working in the textiles studios there, in design processes and methods. The focus of the design activity was the creation of a range of anti theft bags, co designed by inmates, to be sold in Sue Ryder charity shops in the UK. This ‘rags to bags’ project engages inmates in sustainable restorative processes. Using their knowledge and creativity inmates are trained and supported to design and manufacture bags from fabrics salvaged from damaged clothing donated to Sue Ryder shops. In this way inmates are able to pay something good back to society (the bags will generate income for Sue Ryder and protect people from crime). In designing and delivering design resources and teaching for inmates the Makeright project is a first iteration of a prison based design education programme that might move inmates towards reflective self knowledge, positive change and the finding of a ‘higher self’ more effectively than dour punishment ever could. It seems to work. In repeating the 8 week course several times, including students and other volunteers to work alongside us ‘facilitating’ inmates, our team have found that the participatory design process we implemented with inmates both in the UK (and at Sabarmati Jail with NID staff in India¹⁹http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/NID-goes-to-Sabarmati-jail-for-designs-against-theft/articleshow/51164067.cms) worked not only to generate bags but also to introduce opportunities for empathetic connection and encounters, reflection, discovery and self recognition that generative education usually brings. So much so that it provoked us to recognized that ‘hooks for change’²⁰Giordano et al.’s (2002) suggests significance in terms of their theory of cognitive transformation; namely, ‘exposure to a particular hook or set of hooks for change’; Inspiring Change Scotland –http://www.artsevidence.org.uk/media/uploads/evaluation-downloads/mc-inspiring-change-april-2011.pdf that are argued to lead to desistance, were manifesting before our eyes. But also to realize that these ‘hooks’ need to become anchored to secure inmates on ‘a pathway to desistance’. The course and the certification process required by the prison is simply a beginning, but nowhere near enough to deliver desistance. We observed that some inmates who were inspired by the course, and said that they wanted to change, were seeking communities on the outside, engagement with whom might make good their desistance.

At the moment in the UK inmates like Lee (pictured) when they are paroled, are often banned from returning to the locations where their crime was committed in the first place, often near where their families live and so end up breaking the conditions of license and because of this return to prison. Another inmate told a member of HMP Thameside staff he twice broke conditions of his license on purpose because “he could not afford to finish the training he started in prison (it was £2000 to complete ‘outside’) so he went back ‘inside’ to get the bricklaying course certification”²¹Email conversation with HMP Thameside colleague on 11 May, 2015..

These ‘terms of licence’ are clearly an attempt to distance the returning citizen from the provocations that might lead to recidivism but often they do not operate effectively and serve to isolate vulnerable people from their support networks; also to alienate them in unfamiliar communities where they do not have easy access to education of other opportunities. This unworkable scenario appears to set the cost of desistance as isolation and alienation. Even the prison community does not let them return, within six months, without reoffending, nor on leaving offer very much support, other than usual probation services, to inmates as returning citizens.

In response to this scenario, and building on the observed positive changes engagement in design and making can deliver, we are currently seeking funding, supported by National Offender Management and Fab Lab London, to combine education in digital design and manufacture with our existing design education activities, so as to create an education programme that can be delivered in prison (within newly installed maker spaces) and/or within Fab Labs/Maker spaces local to participating prisons, on day release. The Fab Lab network (www.fabfoundation.org) and other open manufacture spaces is a creative community. Maker culture is known for its focus on collaboration, on sharing knowledge, through group activities with making, and for introducing mutual support systems. Fab Labs ethos of ‘make, learn, share’ / ‘learn, make, share’ speaks of their open inclusive and collaborative approach top innovation, which places emphasis on self-sufficiency and enterprise. Inmates who are trained in design and maker cultures (of resilience) first inside then on day release, will be well prepared to enter these mutually supportive communities on release. We want to work with Fab Lab because of their strong track record in delivering teaching and training to a wide range of learners from young children to company directors. We believe that collaboration between NOMS, Fab Lab London and ourselves can find ways to enrich life experiences and harness entrepreneurial potential and well as empathetic encounters, for those who leave prison without a job waiting for them, and without a community to provide a place. It is an experiment we haven’t yet begun but which we are encouraged by research findings to push forward as the next designed move. Demos (2016), identify that “a ‘people and place’ strategy is central to tackling isolation, and that redesigning cities… could help prevent social disengagement”²²http://www.demos.co.uk/press-release/designing-housing-to-build-companionship/. We extend Demos’ account about the needs of the ageing population to also include those returning from prison (and perhaps other marginalized and vulnerable groups). Perhaps the two communities have complimentary needs that could be explored by social innovation designers in the future?²³Getting men trained to be carers may require a real intellectual leap by some prisons – as it is about “soft” training compared to “manly” tasks like plastering, fork lift or truck driving. The backdrop is that in the UK labour aristocracy and the models of masculinities that go with it have been challenged in the post war period. Just like every where else, working class male pride in a manly job well done has few outlets and may now transforms, according to Grayson Perry, into physical demonstration of “hardness” through martial arts and subculture… See: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2016/may/05/grayson-perry-all-man-martial-arts-durham-miners-suicide-masculinity. We have observed that in HMP Thameside prison gym is no.1 pursued activity and sewing takes a leap of faith.

Conclusion

We believe that designing spaces inside and outside prison to foster development of the skills and mindset reentry from prison back to wider society requires is what is needed to address the problem of recidivism. That understanding people and place should be central to the conception and realization of strategies for releasing prisoners as ‘returning citizens’. And, there are precedents for this approach. The John Jay University founded in New York, offers college courses and reentry programs to incarcerated men throughout New York State who are interested in academic education²⁴http://johnjayresearch.org/pri/projects/nys-prison-to-college-pipeline/. The scheme increases access to higher education for individuals during, and importantly, directly after prison – using the University as a community asset able to provide opportunities for inmates to successfully reintegrate. We believe such community assets, places and spaces (such as Fab Labs) come in different shapes and sizes. We need also to accommodate inmates who may not be academic but are creative and/or entrepreneurial and need new opportunities, with new communities, to support their reentry to society and avoid the revolving door of the prison system.

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