Another look behind the curtain

• Posted on 12th January 2011
• in Art Based Solutions, Community Change Management, Cultural Fusion Art as Philosophy, Relationship Management, Social Capital
• by ydubel

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Exploring Community Change Management in Infrastructure & Research Design

revised 2/7/12

If you pulled back the curtain of how community change happens over time, how would your understanding change? I'd like to ponder with you what Art Based Research has to offer in the quest to make sense of what lies behind the curtain...

Art Based research:

Definition shared at our wiki site:

"Art-based research can be defined as the systematic use of the artistic process, the actual making of artistic expressions in all of the different forms of the arts, as a primary way of understanding and examining experience by both researchers and the people that they involve in their studies... Artistic inquiry, whether it is within the context of research or an individual person’s creative expression, typically starts with the realization that you cannot define the final outcome when you are plannng to do the work. As contrasted to scientific methods, you generally know little about the end of an artistic experiment when you are at the beginning."Source: Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues Shaun McNiff "Art Based Research" pg. 29

Context

Discussions about education and career development have historically focused on youth, but as “working age adults” becomes increasingly inclusive, both need to be explored in a broader more meaningful context. “Recent declines in fertility rates and increases in life expectancy, combined with the dynamic evolution of past variations in birth and death rates are producing a significant shift in the global age structure. The number of people over the age of 60 is expected to reach 1 billion by 2020 and almost 2 billion by 2050 (representing 22 percent of the world’s population). The proportion of individuals aged 80 or over (the so-called “oldest old”) is projected to rise from 1 percent to 4 percent of the global population by 2050.1” [David E. Bloom, David Canning, and Günther Fink, Population Aging and Economic Growth]

Making the public personal

The range of the challenges includes those likely to be in ones own immediate self interest as well as [Crompton, Tom. Common Cause The case for working with our cultural values] “including global poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss. Whatever the success of civil society organizations in beginning to address such challenges, these often seem to be intractable or worsening.” These bigger than self problems “where the ‘return’ on an individual’s personal effort to help address this problem is unlikely to justify his or her expenditure of resources in helping to tackle the problem… There is mounting evidence that facts play only a partial role in shaping people’s judgment. Emotion is often far more important. It is increasingly apparent that our collective decisions are based importantly upon a set of factors that often lie beyond conscious awareness, and which are informed in important part by emotion – in particular, dominant cultural values, which are tied to emotion.”

At the core of my personal interest is advancing understanding of qualitative Attention and cultivating conditions (infrastructures) that support inner growth, and valuation of intangible assets as critical missing components. However, beyond idealist aspirations, if it doesn't prioritize economic viability not enough people are likely to care any time soon. Enter a new concept for developing economic infrastructures and systems - Ecological Economics.

"The growing community of Ecological Economists aims to expand the context of economics to include resource and ecosystem service constraints, and broader definitions of human well-being." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004571.html) Source: p2p Foundation

Quest to Develop Community Change Management Models

The place where Art Based research has the most to offer is that in a reality with numerous conflicting view points it helps us confront the fact that solutions need to be discovered - individually and collectively. So attention goes into innovation of design and testing of models that speed up the rate of evolution by integrating R&D into system infrastructure.

Defining Research

Projects of interest speak to the needs of the whole, willing to risk questioning assumptions associated with antiquated traditions, old research and infrastructure design. New approaches to infrastructure development are needed to create systems nimble enough to adapt to culturally diverse inter-generational populations.

New understanding driving community change

Discovery and learning are foundational elements of Social infrastructure layer that has a multidimensional relationship to the other two, physical and technological. However, the issue of defining flexible infrastructures that deal with the whole and part must deal with the “practical matters” in the context of what have traditionally been regarded as philosophical.

The most common mental models for infrastructure are anchored in the idea of connecting places. But place can be both the location on a map and the construction that you refer to you when you mention a place, such as home. In the same way that community can not be pre-defined, therefore requiring a new model for understanding community.

[Irwin, R. L., Bickel, B., Triggs, V., Springgay, S., Beer, R., Grauer, K., Gu, X., & Sameshima, P. (2009). The city of Richgate: A/r/tographic cartography as public pedagogy. International Journal of Art and Design Education 28(1), 61-70.] “Working with a ‘multi-centred’ community forces us, as art writer Lucy Lippard (1997, 240) suggests, to question the construction of place in ways that a ‘mono-centred’ community ignores. Multi-centred communities are not simply denoted by the ethnic makeup of their constituents, but are multi-centred because of their everchanging relationships to people and place. Within the rapidly changing landscape… a sense of place cannot be assumed as given and static, but is constantly created and recreated on an on-going basis”

Do we need infrastructures for locations on maps, points on diagrams or for individuals and ecosystems in communities?

This work in Cultural Fusion explores integrative and flexible infrastructures that facilitate growth as an outcome for the improved understanding and motivation to collaborate to achieve holistic solutions for the good of the individual and the community. But first we need to grasp the changing nature of this community and engage the community in the discovery process.

Tags: A/r/tography, adaptive, Art Based Solutions, change, change management, change management consulting, community change management, consultant, cultural, cultural fusion art as philosophy, models, open solutions, public, research, research design, values