Ep.3 – Transcript & Description

And I put a little note to myself to remember our audience also that Dimeji has a lovely painting website about his own art, yes.

And so we formed Common Cause Collective in the Pacific Northwest. At that time I was actually living in Portland, Oregon, but now I live in Seattle.

And one of the problems we looked at is thinking about the regenerative economy in Seattle that includes all different lived experiences.

So it’s really quite expansive, the work that we do, but most of us are volunteers so, sometimes, we can only do our best.

Just a note, Dimeji, for our audience, if they don’t know what Transition Design means, can you give just a very quick explanation what it is.

Someone once uses the analogy of a gardener who’s tending to crop. The gardener just knows where to intervene, but then the right conditions need to be met for that crop to grow.

But then, Dimeji, you use the term recommoning in your work, and I know that you’re soon going to have a chapter in a book on design-enabled recommoning, so what can you tell us about that? What does it mean?

So, Joanna, when you and I first talked, I talked about Charlotte Hess, a woman who once worked with Elinor Ostrom.

And Charlotte Hess really presents in her work what she calls six entry points to the understanding of the new commons. So the emergence of new versions of the commons. And so recommoning, I believe, proposes another entry point.

So, in essence, recommoning really just pushes us beyond the nostalgia around the commons to start thinking about, what are the politics of design and designers in making impact on commoning and how commoning itself might shift the role of the designer working in this type of space.

And, as you mentioned, I am Yoruba, and I am Yoruba from the country of Nigeria.

So I often give the example of the way the relationship between a landlord and a tenant is perceived. In Yorubaland it’s quite different as the way that relationship is perceived in a Western context.

So these patterns, for example, there’s one of them, one of the ideographs, is called nsibidi, and that’s found in South Western Nigeria, and these symbols actually mean and can be translated to mean to transition, which is quite serendipitous, yes.

They create prompts, they create provocations that really allow us to advance these initial conditions to address what Ostrom calls social dilemmas. They bleed into what we call wicked problems.

And so it’s, as we all know, common in itself is very performative, right? And so this is the performance in recommoning that allow even the artifact to be, in other words, quote, unquote, a commoner as well.

I think we’re going to soon move to opening up a bit more this topic of the agency of the designer, actually, and I know you have a lot to say about that. But before that, I think Giacomo has one question, also.

And when I present the politics, I don’t present it as designing for politics. In other words, enabling a political discourse. But politics that allow us to shift power differentials, and allow us to actually understand shifting the balance of power.

So it’s a very, very deliberate approach, but it’s something that…

So this is the politics of designing with recommoning, is you’re working within a system, but you’re working with co-commoners to be able to start impacting the system shifting.

And this, talking about a designer as a problem revealer really starts to present new spaces for new paradigms and new approaches to the problems that we’re looking to solve. Some of these problems are intractable. We’ve been living with them every day.

And then, thinking about… So I talked about the town crier, Joanna. We had a conversation about that. And I know that the town crier does not only exist within a Western context.

So in other words, using commons speak, they are the ones that set the action arena where the social dilemma is negotiated.

So this is like a different way of design.

And then, also, then the designer must understand the tension in the space. They must understand the tension between, like I shared earlier, between the individual selfish needs and then the need for the collective. And being able to negotiate that tension and represent that is another thing that the designer must do.

And then the second thing I do is, I essentially use the tools that designers use to critique design itself. One of them is designers are very principle oriented.

And I feel like that is a way for designers to really understand this whole, entire space. And then, for one, another thing is designers always want to act, and they always asking questions, how must we act?

So, yes, well, one of them is… So initially, these have evolved over time, and they continue to evolve.

One of them has to do for example is being egalitarian, so respecting the perspective and the expertise of the non-expert. So, in other words, understanding that people, they have varying forms of expertise in, quote, the space, that you are negotiating the problem.

I think about the work of Manzini again. He talks about diffuse design in that book he wrote a few years back called Design, When Everybody Designs, and the talk about diffuse design is really designing where everyone can participate in the activity of designing.

So that’s one, and another one I had was thinking about, not only working across scale, which designers are very, very good at.

The upstream… Ostrom talks about a negative externality. The consequences of an exploitation being faced by someone else besides the person that’s exploiting. And so being aware of the negative externalities and your upstream privilege.

One of the things I… Yes, I would agree with you. One thing I always highlight is the fact that design, itself, is a colonising force, right. And for design itself to be colonised or to be liberated as this colonising force, we really have to tell a different story that liberates design from Western modernity. And so that’s been always my policies about talking about telling different stories.

But I feel like I find different ways to tell the story. I start from what is common to all.

Well, that doesn’t always ensure that you will have agreement. As a matter of fact, many times you do not have agreement. Like some of the work I did with the tenancy advocacy group around landlord and tenants’ relationships.

And so, one thing I am aware of is that there’s a privilege that can…

And, yes, because most of us working in this space are passionate about the work. It’s also difficult when you do not see the impact and the change.

Maybe I have one last question that was triggered by, I think, something you wrote that said that a designing working in recommoning space is invited. And also, you talk about how designers working in recommoning space, they’re lending their expertise.

I feel that, yes, so, it’s definitely a little bit of both.

So a lot of the work I did with the tenancy was really strong relationship building. The work did not emerge until I had spent a lot of time with this tenants’ advocacy group.

I have a friend, Silvia Mata-Marin. She worked with immigrants in Costa Rica.

And so, for me, I understand the invitation came over time.

So it’s a really tough question to answer because, yes, a designer must be invited into these spaces, but also, yes, a designer must have that posture of being willing to engage if they were to be invited.