It was more than 3 months ago when we set foot to South Africa. When leaving there I had no idea what can I contribute down there, or what can I bring back. I hope through these blogs I written about the trip, I’ve been able to somewhat explain what happened and what was my contribution. I have no idea if any of the workshops we did, where I took part has been able to ripple out of it’s own small scale to have an actual impact on the things and plans there, but I tried. And I do feel that at least some of the talks we had, some of the ideas we generated will resonate in the minds of the people who participated and thus hopefully help them deal with the issues now in a different way. I can say this because at least to me – it worked like it. I know I learned a lot from the whole experience. I learned from the people there, but also much from analysing and understanding the context.

Ever since getting familiar with the theory of panarchy by C.S.Hollins I’ve been looking into different areas where the idea applies. In social change, economic development, project management – but also I now believe, that it applies to learning processes as well. And more specifically when the learning is transformational. One has an idea how “things” are, based on theory, heuristic knowledge and by their own innate sense-making mechanisms, but the thing is that probably bunch of this knowledge has been formed true by the existence they get to experience in their own surroundings. Making a trip – as just to expand your perspective, mind – is beneficial in the way, that if you make it a point to observe you surroundings you’ll get more direct feedback of the ideas you have in your  knowledge core – the hard core. That hard core of knowledge one has, is basically the paradigm of information (in the philosophy of science) that one has and changing it – changing the paradigm can only come through peripheral information. The peripheral information feeds to ones knowledge core and by giving new reflection to it, it has the ability to change the core – if one is open to accept a new view of the reality that realigns itself by the core. In this case, the information that did change my knowledge paradigm came from literally peripheral source – to me – which was to observe and breath in the social context of South Africa. Like Helene Shulman writes in her book “Living at the Edge of Chaos” – that to become clinically insane is to observe something against ones own innate sense making mechanism. If this newly, almost forced, reality is in too much contradiction of the own hard-core knowledge, two things can happen; one is to accept and adapt so to learn in a transformative way, the other is with more severe consequences where the truth is in discord with ones self and the fact of the discord stresses too much the construction of ones mind, thus the mind lets go of that. So I didn’t (to my own recollection) become clinically insane during the trip but it did open up new thoughts by getting rid of some old constructions.

The more I think of the whole concept I got to experience, and the issue of social change, societal development – both up in South Africa and down here in Finland, the more of the few concepts I spent a lot of time thinking there rings true. First is about disappointment management. This was the base of our suggested actions in the Cape Flats case about health care, and it being insufficient to serve everybody. The case is of course more complex than it sound from just putting it like that but the thinking behind it and the group wide acceptance of the idea let me believe that it fitted the problem as a solution. In many cases the social group that is from the others perspective the problem – although in many cases really the problem lies at the other end – the group is somewhat disappointed, I mean disappointment and mistrust of the system is for sure found in any “social outcasts”. To process this though I will use few very different examples. When we visited the Sweet Home Farm in Philippi Cape Town, the disappointment that the area residents felt towards the system was apparent. But then again, their disappointment is more of the requesting kind – in that disappointment there is still hope and willing to fix the perspective. Of course this wont happen by it self but needs reconstructing of the system. But like Shannon said in her TEDx talk, the issue is as much in our end of the field, we tend to think of their way as the socially wrong way – just because it isn’t in-line with our own systems structure. And to some extent, I think the passive-aggressive way to abandon societal outcasts is systemically close to the way of a persons mind letting structures go and becoming insane – I mean, we have abandoned our own wish and hope to understand their way and yet think that what ever change need to happen, has to happen in the way that they change closer towards our way – if not, then the issue is theirs and we can let it go. So instead of us transformatively learning, willing to understand and teach our own system to adapt, we’d rather turn our backs and not take part in the learning, in the joint effort to manage the disappointment that is felt in both of us.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about ever since the trip is the process of mutual resource management. This concept came up in both the workshop in RLabs and in Sweet Home Farm and also has been coming up in my own projects in Helsinki. To summarise how it came up at the RLabs workshop was sort of a continuum of the idea of disappointment management. If we consider that there are two separate, almost opposite parties to an action – in the case of health-care service, integration of an illegal settlement to outside society or sharing a public space in a neighbourhood and so on – it is a resource that the two (or more) separate parties are sharing, whether again they like it or not. I think by bringing awareness and understanding over the simple issue that the parties have to co-exist could bring in more willingness to manage the shared things together. This then again could be the beginning to a better communication and over all facilitation to the process of the whole co-existing. Even take the co-existing from it’s hibernation kind of state of “just getting by” to mutually co-evolve and nourish by the fact that the resource itself is then better managed and both parties get to share the benefits of it. This is an idea that I am more or less still just developing but I promise to blog about it, as soon as I get to test it in real context. There are for sure several ways to manifest this idea and implement it to the real context, but as it is just on idea hopefully forming to a proper theory at some point, I guess my first “prototype” of it is just going to be done in the way of facilitated discussions. Probably through and object – as f.ex. planning an public space together.

This is also an thought that has been running around in my head since the trip; that in co-creation, or other way said, facilitated discussion with different parties – or stakeholders – the easiest way to get the discussion or creation going is to be able to let the stakeholders be reactive. Reactive in the sense that the discussion has to happen through an object. The object somehow presents an area of interest to them and thus it is easier to have an opinion about it. This object is then the subject as the resource, of which different aspects they have together manage. And the level of openness of the object has to be delicately chosen before the discussion is started. It has to be presented in the way that the stakeholders at hand at the same time are allowed to have their opinion and manage the resource from their perspective, but also in the way that the systemic picture of the resource is clearly communicated. This has to happen so that the co-creation happens in more of an inclusive tense, so the stakeholders add to the resource management their responsibility and through it benefiting most from its gain. Just to clarify the other way would then be the exclusive way to manage the resource, and co-create it – which would be to maximise the tension to their own area, sort of putting most effort to one area which will then cannibalise the gain from other areas. No matter which resource the output of its system can always only be 100% – but this isn’t easily achieved unless the efforts of the inputs, from the stakeholders, is 100% too. Since in organic, living systems every part has to play their full part to make the system full. Even if five parties gave 20%, the output of the system would also equal 20% not 100%.

Sameness, togetherness and similarities are also things that are pinned to my mind when thinking about the trip. I’ll never forget the dryness of my mouth and the anxiety I felt when the words rolled off my tongue to the audience, people living in Sweet Home Farm, when I said that we’re in the end not that different. I was of course afraid that I’m saying something massively stupid and offensive, that I have the arrogance to even claim I know how they feel. And it’s not about me fully understanding it, to me it’s about having the right mindset to look at the situation. It’s about aligning your senses and sense making that one has learned to use and believe to the new context you’re in. This might sound weird but in the end we, people, are pretty universal as we are these days – global. On my short peak to the world of anthropology I came to think, that in the end I have on this day more in common with a fieldworker in Cape Flats than I have to my own ancestors living in Finland in 18th hundreds. The rest is about understanding the ways and means of the other society and it’s complex structure these stories alike exist. Community is a concept we all understand pretty innate and we all in away understand how we belong to our own. It might be that we’re together with it – going with it, or going against the grain, or that we’re in the middle or on the fringe. But we do understand the position. Seeing a person from another context is as much about understanding that context, or even more, than about understanding that individual. Context has to accept the change the individuals are trying to achieve, otherwise it’s not really a societal but individual change. I’m not sure how I would achieve a societal change in my own society, but knowing the context I can at least try the right channels. I’m sure there is no pattern to it, no one-size-fits-all solution nor a equation that works idiot proof in every context. But I want to believe there is a general guides to it, that can then be applied specific.

One thing that comes to mind, on this moment, is the fact that maybe that’s why we are in the global pickle we at the moment find ourselves, that we’ve tried to change the world from an personal perspective and thus in an exclusive manner. One against all – not one for all. More to me is better than some to everyone. We’re managing resources by dividing the output, not the input. I probably expected nothing less, but was still surprised by the reception my offer to see that we all belong to a community and a society received from the Capetownians. That we all belong to a community and a society and all are in different locations in the structure of it. I am a student, part time worker and if we talk about socioeconomic structure I’m basically sharing the position of a fruit stand owner from the Philippi in my own community – middle class worker. But why would I define anyone’s potential in that context anymore I’m willing to be characterised by my own position in my community. When we talk about our lives, past, present and future tense we can see the similarities of our stories and plans for the future alike if we can adjust and accept how big of a part the context plays. We as individuals have too, share the resources we are able to manage with the existing society, we can’t have more of them for our pure benefit, nor we should release some of them from our hands to relieve our burden. There is a role in our lives to all of us, with both gains and takes and together with everyone. There seems to be almost universal stories, only so few ways that things might generally go – but what changes is the context. Context defined by the time and space it takes part. And from the day we spent with the Sweet Home Farm residents, I feel like we put up a harder crust than them in our belief how things might be. If a am surprised by the fact that a part time handyman from Philippi tells me that I and him both have educated our selves to survive in our respective societies – and in it we are the same, I need to learn more. I need to learn to let more thing in. Things to affect me.

I have had to redefine a bunch of common concepts to my self after this whole experience. Of course it’s hard to say when did it happen, when did I learn since learning is, like design – a process not the end result. What started before and was a though, and opening in ones hard-core knowledge to let in something new from the periphery, that then later becomes something learned when it fits both in your sense and the experienced reality. Community is not unique or context specific, I mean it is in the sense that not one is like the other but internally experienced if one can see pass the noise its true structure it becomes more universal. Oneness has nothing to do with time nor is momentary or circumstantial, it is an universal too. Resources, inputs and tensions are the building blocks of our societies, no matter if they are tangible or intangible – they are the basic element we share in good and bad and need to manage to nourish together, not to just benefit from and keep in state of hibernation even if we feel so. Disappointment is misunderstanding the premises of what is to become. this misunderstanding is sometimes unavoidable and that’s why its management is often more important than the prevention – since in most of the cases nothing could have prevented it. They are often based on honest mistakes, honest lies even from both parties where in neither knew before taking the steps of trust to see what is beyond the point of guessing and in the core of reality. Experience is nothing if not shared with other people and reflected with different perspectives of it. If the experience is left to be as its own element in the vast matrix of all things existing it’ll drift far from the context it appeared and in drifting, might get lost. When an issue appears in the mass of everything, it appears there because of its connections – no matter how distant, and from acknowledging its existence on the spot it could become meaningful and teach and reveal us something new. But to pinpoint it in there, extracting its appearance from the noise, we need to verify it and this is best done in reflection to others’ realities and other knowledge. Honesty is innate, lying is artificial, learned and forced upon each mouth to let it out. If you have nothing to lose, you will be honest – but instead of letting things go to that point, one should think of what is there to really lose. What part of the resource you’re trying to untruthfully manage and what is the exclusion that follows its ill treatment. That societal change cannot be scaled up, and has to be replicated to have a broader effect – not linearly and in linear logic but stochastically. I realise that this might start to be the summary of my odd education; official and unofficial and that’s why I might stop to digress. And say something about South Africa itself, and please remember this is how I see it. And if it is a lie, believe me it is the honest kind.

South Africa as beautiful as it is, is to me about those people inhabiting this south tip of our mother continent. I have traveled quite a bit in my life, on and off the beaten path. I’m not the nature loving kind – although I will be one of the first ones to bow in awe before its presence; here by the grace of it go we and we should never forget it. And of course I do stop and think when an breath taking scenery opens up before me. In those moments I too feel the connection, the connection of me not being that different of a creation of sums to luckily come together in the same equation, as are the trees and water of this still blue and green globe. But these aren’t the reasons I travel, I travel to be the Lilliput in other countries full of Gullivers. I observe as I’m lost and learn as I accept. Those moments of realisation in a new context is not just a thrill to experience but like said, it brings me closer to humanity and by it myself as well. I believe that the need to travel, see, experience and learn is empowered by the same internal burn as is to keep wondering about the world and its people. As is the need to help and for sure somewhat distorted idea that I can matter in this world and make it better. At the same time as I keep scavenging new parts of the reality I get to explain and understand bits and pieces of me and my existence. My mom used to teach me that the reason to exist is to help others to exist, and I do believe it is so – also because it leads to our own existence to be somewhat more harmonic, in its chaos. There’s nothing wrong with chaos, like said, but if the chaos appears too erratic, it leaves no room for one to grow to understand it. It’s like you’re buried alive and you need to rise, but if there’s no space for you to wiggle, for you to loose the tight bound the reality has from you, you’ll stay there deep and will never see the surface. Existence is true both on and under the surface, they’re just two different positions to take and stay in.

All and all this whole chain of events did evoke a heap of new ideas and cleared new paths to patterns in my own sense making mechanisms. From each and every encounter from the trip I took away something and I can only hope I “left” something there too, that I could have played somewhat a meaningful partner to those encounters. I do believe South Africa is on a verge of something absolutely amazing. They have everything there. The diversity of the population, nature, socioeconomic classes, cultures – the surplus of educated people and people willing to work – the proudness they seem to feel about their own things and the openness to listen and honesty in telling. All the elements of a beautiful heterogeneous society are there for sure. I’m not saying everything is yet fine, but as to a good food – if you get best ingredients it’s hard to mess up the dish, one just has to know how to make it. And South Africa is in the process of cooking, with few bold moves to be willing to expose the elements to be a part of something new and then having the patience to keep stirring and letting the opposites and complimentary elements to blend and support each other. I’m happy and most grateful that I had the chance to see it as is. I’ll be even happier to see what it becomes.

From all this I could say that I think I finally got a part of it. The realisation that these are things that I have now learned not for the learning sake, not for the brag rights to get to be a besserwisser, not even to bleed it to a blog but to feel more comfortable in my own existence. This feeling of oneness and understanding that maybe in the end we’re actually not alone at all. Few months ago I wrote an essay about using emotions in design. In it there was a quote from a social scientist Brian Fay: “Give the self fluidity, internal tension, and sensitivity to outside stimuli – it should not be surprising that self is essentially permeable. Indeed so permeable is it that not only are you not separate from others but rather others are part of you.” (Fay. B., Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science, p.39). This sort of rings true to me now on a very personal sense and in a really big scale. We’re all parts of this mess that can appear as harmony if you can place yourself in it. The complexity is overwhelming but denying it would not really make any difference other than leaving one feel alone or render them clinically insane – accepting it is the way to learn it. Accepting it is to step into the real world, I’d think. Like they say reality is the thing that you know to exist even though you close your eyes from it.

At the very last and not at all least I want to say thank you to the people of Cape Town and Johannesburg. Thank you for sharing this reality with me. Without you, there would have been nothing to experience, nothing to learn from nor no one to tell this to.

And of course thank you people from Aalto Global Impact, mainly Anne Badan for getting me on this mind blowing trip. Thanks to CPUT’s Bruce, Mugendi, Ashraf and Rael, Francois and all the other super nice students I met. Thanks to Creative Cape Town’s Farzanah and Yehuda. Thanks to the whole RLabs staff in CPT, especially Craig for being the catalyst in our group. Thank you Shannon and Marc, I really hope we keep in touch and see how we could work together. Thank you Essi Aittamaa and ACSI board members, Hank, Frank and Ehsan and my group for the super intensive and eye opening three days in Johannesburg. Thanks to my travel mates from Aalto, WDC Helsinki and many other delegates. Thanks to my friend Harry for taking me to see the real Joburg. And most of all, thank you Aalto Creative Sustainability program for knocking my wondering mind to the right direction of using this hat rack for something good. What began from my BA thesis three years ago is still bearing fruit in my personal battle to better my self to be able to better the world – as a tiny part of it, I’ll try my best to carry my own weight.

For now I’ll cap the trip blogging and continue with new things. I can see South Africa to be a part of me in the future too. So see you all – soon!
Love, Janne

The reason for me to fly up there and extend my stay was an intensive workshop, a legacy of Aalto Camp for Societal Innovation – called Societal Innovation Lab. The three days long SIL was organised in collaboration with Witwatersrand university from Johannesburg and University of Pretoria. Unlike previous ACSI’s, this camp had only two cases and thus two teams and altogether around 35 people – some familiar faces too like Ashraf Jamal and of course Eshan, Hank, Frank and Essi from ACSI.

The lab started with the official welcoming session at the enormous Wits university campus. We heard case setups from With university representative and Discovery staff – of whom I’ll tell more about later on. The other case owner was the two organising universities together, under the topic of “New Academia”. I’d like to tell you more about their case, but as always I think they would be better to do it – so as soon as they post something about the process to public domain, I’ll for sure link it to here as well.

The group that I was working with had a case around health-care and our case owner was from Discovery company’s – the market leader of insurance in South Africa – health program. Discovery is a really cool innovative company that has different schemes to promote healthy life and preventive health-care. For example with the Discovery Health -membership, you’ll also get discounts in gym memberships, buying a bike and apparently even when buying healthy foods. Our case was based on an idea our case owner, Craig once had – to build the environment so, that it promotes healthy lifestyle. This was to me a super interesting idea and in a way – truly novel in the context of private company joining public party to figure out something for the civic health – by built environment.

Craig’s initial idea was basically to put gyms to places where people might not be economically able to join a private gym – and thus I thought of parks. We went to visit one park that could have served as our case examples, the Joubert Park in Hillbrow. This park used to be one of the unsafest nastiest parks (I heard) downtown. I’m not fully sure what happened to the park to turn it around to be at least somewhat walkable at the moment  – other than of course people reclaiming it back to peaceful public use, instead of drug dealing and so on. But we went to see that park not only for its still a bit lousy shape, and I say lousy only because that’s honestly how I perceived it, and I’ll tell you why. After we had some get-to-know-each-other exercises at the With Uni premises we gathered our case group and headed to the park. On the way there a Joburg resident, who was one of our lab facilitators – the wonderful Athena Mazarakis, warned us to leave our belongings to the uni and walk in a group when we get there. And she was surely right to say so but also it does alter the way anyone experiences the space you go to breath in. To my surprise the park was really close to Park Station, where we had walked with a friend of mine few days earlier, so on the way I was more anxious to go there than in the actual park when I understood that I’ve been there already on my own terms. I remember asking my friend is it safe to walk there, to which he banally answered; as safe or unsafe as anywhere here. I digress. So how the people reclaimed the space probably happened incrementally and through activities – and these activities were the real reason for us to visit just this one, instead of some other Joburg’s hundred parks.

We were welcomed to the Joubert park by Johannesburg Art Gallery people, who run some programmes together with a NGO creche that’s also in the park – and this creche was just absolutely amazing! I’ve never seen such good comprehension and management of social complexity run from such humble grounds. This haven for neighbourhood kids, from the early years until they go to school, was started as a community project and for some time it received international funding – although not anymore, and frankly I have no idea why. The kindergarten has around 50 kids on the grounds, from families living close by. The area used to have a problem of people not being able to go outside, because of the imminent thread to their safety in the area. This often meant that the grandparents who took care of the kids, while the parents went to earn the living, just had to stay in and the kids had no fresh air, healthy play, exercise nor any interaction with other kids. This again lead to a huge problem when the same kids had to go to first grade – being socially undeveloped. Another problem in this modus operandi of childcare is that the parents spent almost no playtime with the kids. After the hard working day, no one probably argues that it isn’t easier to just sit the kids in front of the TV, and have some me-time, but of course for the relationship it’s less healthy. Because of these issues, and the economic status of many local resident, one way to pay for the kids stay in the creche is to participate in the activities. Every parent has to come down at some point to the grounds and play with the kids – not just let them play on their own but really take part, but if you want to settle a piece of your bill with putting down some time, you can come in and teach all the kids something you know: something from your work, from your background – a recipe from your home village for example.

There are people from all over Africa in the neighbourhood, thus there are kids from all over playing together on the creche grounds as well. The staff told us that basically when the kids “graduate” and move to primary schools at the age of six, they will probably know around 5 different languages because they’ve been playing and interacting with other kids from different backgrounds. Also they’ve learned new things from visiting parents and so the whole community around. This betters the relationships between families, neighbours and probably has an huge impact in the future attitudes of these children towards others and the community. This also gives the less fortunate parents a possibility to bring their kids to good safe care and at the same time better their self-worth by teaching something valuable. Kids from the creche also get to do projects with the Art Gallery at the other end of the park, and with the near by Green House project. This project studies and showcases how to build sustainably, using only recycled or earth materials with minimum resource and energy usage. They started from one hut that they have rebuild due the philosophy but are now building Green Offices to the same lot. This is also a place for the creche kids to come and learn. Learn about healthy food – and even better where does it come from and how to grow it yourself. The creche itself had basically nothing to do with our project but it just floored me how much of an impact one small cradle of good will can bring to the whole community. Visiting these people in their day to day struggle and joy just raised tears in my eyes and left me in awe.

The park itself wasn’t that nice – I mean as nice as the initiatives on its grounds. But still, it was peaceful. People playing park chess with broken pieces. Loads of people sleeping, or sleeping off their buzz. Homeless people and a free clinic bus treating people less well off. Reclaiming a space like this – and probably by the same people who were there initially but were able to reclaim their attitude towards the space – does come down to the usage of the space. A common cognitive atmosphere has clearly settled down and when that kind 0f relaxed and less anxious behaviour settles in, it becomes the social norm. I myself could feel, after the initial uncomfortableness – being in that space for awhile – it started to settle. I understood what the space is for; as for the kids the creche is a haven, and now it seemed to me to be a haven for all. You could come, and sleep it off, safely. Like I wrote in my previous blogs, and in this example again I can see it, I do firmly believe that one way to bring two social extremes of at least separate groups together is to let and make them mutually manage the resource they share. And in this case it was the Joubert Park. Now, back to the case and lab.

After seeing the real life context we were about to work with, we went back to Wits and saw a presentation from Streets Alive initiative. This initiative is operated by the city of Johannesburg and is sort of a pledge to join together with the residents to better the streets; whether it is for the pedestrians, drivers or public transport representatives. And I really liked their tag-line, which is Safety 1st. And in any other context this might sound patronising but safety in any mode of transportation is a big issue in South Africa It seems to be one of their core guides in all areas of life. Safety is a double edged sword, when used in such a way, but again more about this in the upcoming conclusions. Through co-creation the initiative is aiming to redesign or re-plan the streets to be more complete – for all users of the streets. This, I thought, was somewhat the right way to go if we talk about redesigning the living environment, or the urban plan in a way that it promotes healthy behaviour and an active life. Although there is a saying that you can’t bow to every direction without mooning to some – and this became my small critique towards the project – if it really was trying to do everything right, having the cake and eating it too… and so on. But again, and I am probably starting to sound like a broken record, this project is about shared resources management. I like the project though, it has a good operational method and it is written between the rows that misbehaving is to be replaced by behaving – but somehow, the concrete actions were a bit lacking. This said, of course Streets Alive is the umbrella that will cover many smaller projects. You should check it out and I will link the project at the end of the blog. Well, after the presentation we were finally off to the workshop.

We arrived to the lavishing Valley lodge in Magaliesburg. It felt a bit odd to go see the real-life context we were about to work with and in that sense also “in” and then escape the reality 2 hours away to a blue lagoon pool, 24h room service and non-stop buffets – but I understand – for the sake of the work itself it probably was a better choice to somewhat exclude us to have that intensity to carry us through the three day workshop. A quick check in and then to work. As almost any workshop, ours also begun with a round of introductions and from the spot I saw that this really was a diverse and impressive group to work with. We had a marketing specialist, a medical doctor, an urban planner, a designer, an industrial psychologist, a community health incubator and such plus a proper spread of few out of the group of ten coming from South Africa. The first day all in all was just much about setting the base right – a lot of talk about the aims of the project, why was Discovery into it and feeling around how people perceived the problem at hand. And the problem at hand is that in Johannesburg (or probably every where in South Africa) people aren’t in general physically active enough. South Africa is becoming one of the most obese countries in the world and, although nutrition is a big part of it, our case formed the boundaries to stick to the physical activity. The main causes of death are related with poor health and could be prevented if the precautions are taken into consideration in all areas of life.

There was a division to be made still, to better contextualise what we were tackling, and the scope needed to be narrowed down. Were we talking about physical activity as a part of daily routines, i.e. taking the stairs instead of an elevator and biking or walking instead of driving and so on? Or were we talking about physical exercise like going to a gym, for a jog or to play badminton? Of course these things are related and probably go hand in hand but, as an initial starting point, it is better to define which angle to approach the problem. I learned that “useful exercise” is somehow a concept coined in Finland while I thought it to be universal. The idea behind it is simply that rather than spending your time on a gym you can do something useful, like walking to work and getting the exercise at the same time. Anyway, I saw this to be both a bigger problem and thus a bigger opportunity too. Rarely people just simply do any kind of useful exercise in South Africa, at least from what I saw, and one reason behind it is that it is not safe. The group talked surprisingly much about race as a definitive way to live and, although everyone tiptoed around the issue (and I honestly don’t believe there were any racist thoughts in the room), much of it was still, had to be, based on racial stereotypes. The commonly accepted notion of black people living in a distinctive way and circumstances made me think of Finland and our context of people being separated to different living areas and life-styles based on their economic background more than their racial one – and I would think same goes in Joburg. So why talk about race, and I do mean in this context, rather than economic classes of the modern society. If one race would be a majority in one group or another it still shouldn’t be the main vocabulary when talking about the issue. Another notion, which in a small way started to look like a slight pattern to me, was that the tentative suspicion towards everyone’s motivation was to be there and give their best. I’m not saying people don’t believe in good will, but just like I said the initial reaction seemed to be in some of the workshops to rather suspect until proven to be trusted.

Again, the first day was the get-to-know, not only the group but the problem, problem context and the way we talk about it. The day ended with a group discussion exercise on the front lawn of the lodge. This exercise, although lasted long was probably useful to both of the groups. As I know a bit about the other groups “New Academia” case and knew that race played a part in their case too, so I do believe it to be an issue on their table too during that day, and this exercise made the iterative talk peak so it could be released for the next day to be more forward driven. We got over the talk about the tensions behind the issue – so we could talk about the issue, and the issue only, the next day.

The next day started with a heap of fresh air in the room – everyone focused in making it work. Everyone in the group wrote down few main aims they felt like to be the best descriptions of our task. From these few sentences we spread the key words to separate post-its and then grouped them to three logical groups. These three groups were to serve as the division between us, to form subgroups to work in, based on personal interests. For a while we couldn’t really name the keyword groups distinctivel but our super-skilled facilitator Frank opened the discussion of talking about societal change in scales: one on very local scale that is a specific park, one on community level that is basically all the communities, living around specific parks, and the third was the national big picture level that includes all the communities around all the parks. We had a really interesting intervention to our group work when Athena invited us all to meet her at the riverbank. Athena is a performer so she took us inside one of her interactive performances. We walked to the shore and she was sitting in a small rowing boat ten meter from the dock. She kept calling us to come to the boat, just jump in and she’ll take us to a perfect place behind the corner. Just come in! Come in, come and join me and Ill take you there. It’s perfect, even though you can’t see it! Of course we couldn’t jump in, there was 10 meters of water between us and on the dock you could see warning signs no to. This frustrating back and forth between Athena asking us to join and us being mistrusting and not able to jump on board went on for a good while until she drifted away and the boat had sailed away – literally. The point in this performance, to me, was of course that we talk about change but forget our subject. Often the change itself becomes the subject, even though the focus should be on people. The three topic groups formed were all talking about making a change to promote healthy behaviour, active life-style and so on but lacked to talk about them through a person – to have that person we were doing this all for in the middle of all actions. We planned for someone elses’ good – but actually forgot to include them, and the plans were becoming top-down by nature. Another lesson from this performance was that not only the plan itself was becoming top-down the way we talked about the whole project made a distinction between us talking to them from a different level. Like us being mistrusting toward Athena in her fancy boat, just asking us to trust her that the unseen perfect place was just behind the corner, we talk about better life basically – just behind the corner, unseen.

The group I was most interested in was working on the meso-level, on the communal level. We came up with a whole cycle of actions to embed physical activities into existing community structures. These structures could be different community groups like PTAs, clubs, business hotels etc. This step of the process we called “Select”. After selecting the community groups and their key personnel, they would be approached first by an the first incubator group but later on, peer people from the initiative and this would start the dialogue to co-create the kinds of actions that would be needed and would work in that specific community – so the process is co-creative, and not top-down. Together planned intervention would happen then that would be manifested in different activities that are accessible, fun, safe, useful and feasible to organise and good enough to be repeated. From the community group now owning the process and people taking part in the interventions the initiative would form the permanent action group that will keep building it in the community. The incubator level of the initiative would through this iterative process gain more access to conceptualise the whole scheme. This would then again add to the brand itself that can then be replicated in different communities and communicated on and on. It was important to us to understand the difference of up-scaling and replication in an initiative like this. Scaling up would make the whole scheme hierarchic and complicated – when these kind of peer-to-peer or level-to-level activities need to stay on their grass roots, that can be achieved by replication – so, the scale we work on doesn’t change – all the actions are still on the community level, even though they might be happening nation wide. The scheme we came up with was a sketch for the whole plan to be put in action and although linear, also self-referential as the process goes one way the feed back from each step can be taken back to every other step in the next run of the process. Because at the same time a massive amount of knowledge is gained about how to make communities move and how communities create movement we also thought that a knowledge bank should be created. This bank would serve of course the upcoming communities that wants to join but also it could be serving different research bodies like universities or Discovery in their quests for better life to all.

We also thought that the movement could join the forces with local schools that have the premises for different sport activities. Schools could this way reach out to the community at large but also educate their own students about active life and thus make a big difference in the preventive field of health-care. We branded the initiative as Community -> Moving -> Community and thought it to be almost as a certificate that different schools or community centres could live up to earn. Certificate would be a promise of different activities and level of skills that can be found from that instance. This could work for the benefit of the schools too, that the ones with the CMC would be more coveted.

We had a mutual deal within the whole group that subgroups could lend people to their groups for consultation, so I was pulled to the micro-level group that was working with a park concept. Their idea was to use the space in the way that it would let people do something useful but in a fun playful way. One of their ideas was to use stationery bikes to create electricity by pedalling, we brainstormed and came up with the idea of an outdoors movie theatre where the whole audience needs to pedal to keep the projector and audio system powered. We also came up with concepts of different amusement equipment for kids, like a seesaw that would play a violin like sound, a merry go round that would be like a huge musical box that would play piano and jumping ground that would play the drum sounds – this way if a bunch of kids would play together they’d also play in a band.  Some of the useful activities were – of course on top of healthy physical activity – were the idea of a railed bike you could cycle around, while the bike would gather trash from the ground and a pathway that would be constructed of pedals that are hooked to pumps and on each step you could see a squirt of water coming up to water the plants and the park lawn. The park concept was called “Kinetic Park” – awesome idea. I really hope to see these equipments to be built. And we thought that probably the Green House initiative, which has a lot of know-how in building stuff could help us get the things there. And of course in a sustainable manner.

The third, macro-level group that was working on a national level came up with a whole campaign called “What moves you”. Their ideas were quite comprehensible from different media activities to consumer challenges to urban areas joining for different interventions and so on. Truly educational too and would by it’s scale already involve a massive amount of people. But as a self-criticism to this concept and the whole groups work I had the need to ask what is societal innovation? Could a nation wide awareness campaign be considered one or should it be something truly novel? As we’ve seen in many cases awareness alone won’t bring the change, but then again is societal innovation something that requires a social change? Probably a basic breakdown of the works societal innovation would be simply something new for the society. And an idea that will be embraced by the society that leads to bigger action than just the social level thumbs up – then it must be the need to lead to change. And change for better that is. From the last 2012 ACSI I learned from Lennart that an idea becomes an innovation only when it is given value from the outside audience – I like this notion because it works as an assessment tool for the solution and also as a guideline to keep one focused on their subject while planning something new. And to comment the truly novel and new – a formula of 80% old used in 20% new way is already at a good level of innovation rating to me. If that amount is achieved the solution would bring people in just by curiosity and probably be suitable enough to offer a new kind of solution to an old problem – and in a way that’s what societal innovation should aim to; a new solution to existing problem.

Another criticism I’d give to my own group would be that many of the solutions ended up being sort of ad hoc. We took in a massive problem to tackle with – how to make people healthy by offering them more chances to have physical exercise and somewhat in an early stage decided to keep that activity separate from everyday activities. We approached physical activity from the perspective of “for its own sake” and then tried to involve the real-life aspects to it. This probably threw us off a bit from the beginning and every solution ended up being lucid. I’m not saying any of the ideas our group came up with were poor of infeasible but that the overall schemes ended up having a lot of “and then – and then…” elements. I somewhat also believe that innovation is at its best something small that has a big effect. It is that one piece that makes the puzzle – it’s not adding millions of pieces to create a new picture but having a small solution that fits the equation just right and makes the picture complete. I kept thinking about the Streets Alive initiative and what I had seen and experienced in Joburg and thought that, while safety is one of the biggest core values in this society, we should have probably looked into that more, and this being said, into all the existing values. Because through them we should find a way to leverage new activities around. And even though we would create more venues of initiatives for particular physical activities, the active-life style, which to me, means that it should happen in all areas of life – we couldn’t affect the useful part of every day routines kind of activities. For example why people don’t walk or bike to work of to the close by shops comes down to safety issues again. At some point I had a discussion with Craig about this, and we talked how the solution could be a social movement to make the streets safer to be active in.. or on. And how the concept of the initiative could be virtual in the sense that it wouldn’t require anything more than let’s say a T-shirt that says “I’m walking to work – keep me safe”. The idea of course being that people would reclaim the streets for walking and biking – safely, instead of driving. The change would happen incrementally and by the first few braves the initiative could grow to be a nationwide agreement among all that the people who want to live healthier – and environmentally friendly – would be left in peace and kept safe on their activities.

I was still very proud of what we could achieve in such a short time. The thing with this kind of workshops is that the end result rarely reflects the whole process. That way it’s also darn nearly impossible to report the meaningful things from the lab since, in a way, almost every word said was meaningful. Every word probably nudged us a bit towards another direction. To throw 10 people from allover the world together to work with a complex problem is a delicate thing and the interpersonal relationships and interaction is under an equation I don’t fully comprehend. I did learn again a lot during these three days and of course, all from the other participants. I understood that societal change has to happen with the value-boundaries existing in the society. I learned that initiatives should be empowered and maybe even kept in the societal level they aim to move – I mean the change that the movement creates should aim for whole society to change (for better) but as the initiative is either a one-off project or an ongoing living process the lifeline of it can only come from the level that feels the ownership of it. I kept thinking that any kind of planning that is done with the vocabulary of us and them is going to be cross-levelled – not necessarily top-down nor even bottom up across two or more and it is hard to say about initiatives like these that are they sustainable or ethical – at least always. Does better for all mean one size fits all – I love the saying one size fits no one, because I believe it to be true. Uni-level social planning wouldn’t again probably meet the requirements of societal change as such but if the movement happens on the nationwide level I think it would work perfectly. Reclaiming the streets for healthy activities, person by person and street by street. The power is once again in numbers. And the key is mutual management.

Thank you very much SIL staff, Wits, Discovery – and big cheers to my peers! I sincerely hope to see you at the next Societal Innovation Lab.

Links:

Soweto, Tembisa and Hillbrow

ACSI page about SIL

Witwatersrand University

University of Pretoria

Discovery Health

Johannesburg Art Gallery

Streets Alive

Athena Mazarakis

On our way back to the city from Sweet Home Farm we stopped to have meeting with the director of African Centre for Cities, Edgar Pietersen. ACC is an University of Cape Town multidisciplinary initiative that has a mission: The ACC seeks to facilitate critical urban research and policy discourses for the promotion of vibrant, democratic and sustainable urban development in the global South from an African perspective. The meeting was basically about the possible future collaborations between Aalto and UCT. ACC and UCT pay a lot of attention to Sustainability, and transformation, as does Aalto. I’m not sure if it led to any consensus but the meeting it self was truly interesting.

ACC and Edgar do a lot of really interesting, topnotch and cutting-edge research and project work in reforming urban planning, education, local democracy – just to name few. I highly recommend you to take you good time and go through ACC webpage that is really content heavy.

In the meeting we talked about multidisciplinary initiatives within universities. Although post-formal science is already pretty well established method for paradigm shifting thinking, it has its structural stiffness issues – especially in university funding. Funding is based still on the barrack or silo form of science making, each department receives funding based on papers published, researchers working, professors, graduations etc. so interdisciplinary projects are hard to fund since in true sense no department could coin the results. ACC was founded to function between different departments as an separate body, that is funded by the public sector. An interesting part of ACC is that they bring professional practitioners back into the academy sphere, to feed back to the academic knowledge pot, and also to learn something new – basically facilitating academic knowledge to effectively move from uni to society at large and back.

Another super interesting initiative, well not just an initiative but an established entity, that Peter told about is The Indian Institute of Human Settlement – of which ACC is a global partner for, among such entities as MIT and IDEO. IIHS is basically an effort to establish an national institute to India that is an university designed and planned from clean slate, that aims all its activities to benefit the society at large, so that the country can respond with wise and timely solutions. I’m seriously thinking of applying to their new Master in Urban Practice program.

There’s so many good things going on here.. and there. All these projects, programmes and initiatives led me to think about how we really are definitely transforming back to plural existence and togetherness, that is future and sustainability minded – in the true sense of sustaining. The future is going to be so very interesting.

Links:
ACC
IIHS

Shannon and Mark, two wonderful people working with an illegal settlement at Cape Flats Philippi called Sweet Home Farm, organized a tour and a workshop at their project ground – that is a home to 17 000 cape-townians living in this illegal settlement. We met at one of the local houses, which was the home of a community activist who lives there and has been working with Shannon already for quite some time. There were about 10 of us who came from either the city bowl or from the Finnish delegation and the idea was that each of us get a pair – someone from the village to show us around and for us to share a conversation while we tour the Sweet Home Farm. First there were only few of us but the brave ones kept rolling in and in the end we decided to tour in pairs  – so two from out, two from within. The idea was for us to talk about the daily life together with our hosts and with the ones we visited with their lead. And not only talk about the day to day struggle but to learn from each other – learn how they could help us and maybe we them as well.

We started the tour by visiting the house owner’s nearby neighbours. We walked into dark huts with smiling people and at first we mostly met housewives and young unemployed women. We talked about employment with them and heard about Mr. Peter, a local farm owner who employs bunch of the people from the village. Working days are 12 hours long and salary is, well as one would expect, but still in comparison to some of the stories to come quite okay. Maybe in no way fair but, like said, compared to others. I paid attention to the fact that these people were mostly cooking with gas, coal or alcohol based solutions. Not to mention they were used inside the huts. Most of them still had an electric meter running on the wall. So electricity was there but used to appliances that only work with electricity. Needless to say the huts, the shacks, the shanties were modest – tin or plastic as a roof, cardboard or carpet as a floor, cardboard or paper as isolation. Any window or door the houses had, where scavenged from wastelands and just forced to fit the house. Through the village there were a few bigger gravel roads. They were big enough to fit one car driving through which of course you didn’t see any on these roads. Any kind of grey and black water ran down in the shallow ditches on both sides of the road. Garbage is a serious issue, blue bags are the ones that get collected from a container, every now and then, but for example nobody could say if there was anybody to take care of the street cleaning. We talked with a housewife who moved to Sweet Home Farm from West Cape and since she came here with no paperwork she and her two weeks old baby received no government support.

We talked about the electricity distribution with our hosts and went to see a local kiosk booth owner who sells the electricity which, as many other contracts in RSA, is a prepaid deal. Electricity comes from the formal source right up to the borders of the informal settlement and inside of it gets divided informally again. This I think goes for other formal resources and services too. They are delivered to the border of the village and after that it’s the ‘let them figure it out’ -mentality. We also met a local goat farmer who used to work for the city planning department but got canned already in the mid 00’s and has been living off of his goats ever since. One goat sold covers his living expenses almost for a quarter of a year. After this we visited a local resident who had built his hut with a friend with whom he still shared the place. The hut was about the size of two single beds, other end having a bed with no sheets or pillow. The other side had the door open inside and in that one square meter of empty space this fellow had a tiny stool he was sitting on. He told us that he scavenged scrap metal from the dump yard on the other side of the big road. He was tearing a part a small old electric motor – with his fingers. His fingers were bloody and with the help of a broken scissor blade he was squatting on the stool and telling us how this task takes him about a day and a half or two days. With those separated metals he can probably make about 3 euros. I was looking at him, he had stereotypy, that hut, that stool and those clothes – and I kept thinking in my head that this guy should be my boss. He’s the one I should be working for. We left him to his work, me thinking I should send him some tools at least to do that and at the same time thinking that the tools I’d send him would probably – in price – take him a months work to buy. We moved onwards.

I asked to see the local barbershop since those spots are usually places for people to hang out. Maybe we could get to talk with some other local entrepreneurs. We walked in to container. It was painted white and had a mirror on one side and benches for waiting on the other. There was a young girl getting her hair done while we waltzed in and sat down on the bench. We had a talk with the shop owner who was from DR Congo. He told us that he wanted to upscale the place so he bought the container to have the barbershop in. Bruce, my mate from outside who is a professor at CPUT, asked him what would he do if he suddenly got 10 000 Rands – 1000 euros to his hand. The gentleman told us that he would expand the business and would buy another container next to this one, and have separate men’s and women’s sides to the shop – he had plans, clearly. He told us that business should expand and scale up to make more money to him and his business partner. While we were talking the one customer, that younger girl had joined us at the benches and just jumped in to the discussion by saying that it would make more sense to expand but to another area of business that would support the shop but also with another area of business lure in more new and other kinds of customers. She suggested that in the other container there could be an art gallery and locally made clothes to sell, and our host even added to the new scheme by saying that the container could be put on top of this container to make it more fancy. My god – I could already see it, a hub in there in the middle of Sweet Home Farm with music playing, hairs styled, people shopping for new outlook and checking out local art. How much would there actually be purchase power for these things? Well at least I saw quite few kiosks, barbershops and oddly placed screaming red branded Vodacom booth. And also, how much of art and clothes and such creative things are produced in this village? Just about when we were about to leave the owner of the place asked me, when will he see the results of what we were doing there. I could only answer – I’m just a student here to get to know you, so thank you for your time. I heard this question actually from at least two other people we met as well.

On our walk out from the barbershop I asked about the health-care, where is the closest local clinic ans so on, to which the hosts just replied far far away but they had a local healer almost next door, a sangoma. Sangoma is a traditional healer that is well respected in their communities. You have to study for years to become one, as long as it would take to study to be a licensed doctor in western cultures, and you don’t choose to become one, it chooses you in a dream. We went to her house, asked respectfully to enter and got to know that she was also the local fashion designer and seamstress that the young girl at the barbershop was talking about. She had a folder full of pictures of her traditional mixed with modern creations. She got her fabrics from a market and had a huge sewing machine in her small shack. She told us, that she doesn’t design them per say – they just come to her in her dreams. We finished our walk there and headed back to the villages and villagers community center to have a short workshop. We had some lunch, homemade burgers and some healthy good juice to wash it down, courtesy of our hosts.

In the space there were four tables and chairs around for people to group already. We had all the pairs from the walks and other local people coming in as well. They were told that no matter if they were there for the walks they should come by and see what we were up to. The workshop was organized so that there were equal amount of locals and visitors for each set of tasks. The tasks were discussions around certain questions posed to group. The first one was that what was surprising in the meeting of the day, the collaboration we had had between locals and visitors – so what had we learned or observed? I started by saying that how amazed I was that even though the village is called informal or illegal settlement, how it still had a functioning connections to the outside infrastructure. The roads led there, the electricity came to the gates, the garbage got collected from a certain point – so basically some of the infrastructure is outside it is served to the border of this settlement and within it’s their own way to structure how these resources are used. So in that sense it’s not fully informal nor illegal – the village is catered but then left to be self-served within. Instead of calling it informal, maybe it could be called unfamiliar. although in the governments legal perspective it is fully illegal and that’s why the infrastructure isn’t fully present. After every discussion, in a style of World Cafe, some of the people stayed at the table and some mingled to the next tables so we had good exchange of ideas from table to table too – I moved one table to my left. The next question posed to the groups was a follow-up to the first one and asked us to discuss how could we then, in our own lives or professions, use that one big surprise and realisation we had during the day. In our group we talked about how the people at the community could maybe figure out a way to use these loose ends of the served infrastructure to their advantage. I also started to think that whenever there is that that much left up to the people to work with it. In that, probably from the city side “good enough” service they at the same time agree to give the rest of the decision power to the people on local level. This isn’t, what we normally think to be good, but I suspect it could be turned into one. Again it was time to move and I took another one to the left – which somehow left me at the table being the only one from outside the community.

As a final question, and to me the most important one, was that what did we feel were the similarities we shared among each other, in what ways were we the same people from outside and inside the community. People took an immediate stance at the table and pointed out all the ways our lives and worlds weren’t similar. I felt a bit intimidated in the beginning but understood that since I was the only outsider at the table, and from Finland – the similarities were no way easy to see. We talked about day to day struggles they have and I kept it quiet. One interesting thing that a local construction worker did was that he referred to the people from the community as people from far away to the mountain and people outside, so rich people, as people close to the mountain, Table mountain that is. When we were at RLabs in Bridgetown, someone said the same thing, that the mountains must look very different at close range than from there, further away. I started to think that even though the lives we lived were undeniably very different, we all belong into a community. They belong to the community they live in and I here, up in the north, to my own community. I tried to compare myself in my own community to be at the same level of socio-economic class as in their community a kiosk keeper could be. It had at that moment like an almost innate feeling. The definition of what a community and belonging to it means as an universal concept. The issue in that context is that these several different communities and worlds coexist but somewhat stay separate. They share the same space but very separately and resources but with different rules. I was thinking of the analogue of people close to the mountains looking at them and people further at the Cape Flats looking at the same mountains but in doing so their views never match. People close by stay their backs turned towards the people that live further away. Still we reached to the conclusion that one thing that is really similar in all of us was that we all do belong to a community, no matter how different they are. Maybe the next step from this realization would be where are the possible connection points and how could we enhance them. Another thing that kept coming up in this and other discussions in the workshop too was skills, that everyone needed skills to survive in this world. People from the community talked about someone going there and teaching them skills that they can use to manage in a long run, rather than coming and giving something that they use in a day. We then compared the skills that we had among the group at the table and talked how they were different. I tried to explain that the skills I have acquired in my life are the kind I thought would help me in my society. I asked if they felt they needed skill that will help them in their own community – like building skills, or something that would help them in the outside community and got an reply that they need both. I agree. Skills and whatever comes from those is for sure one of the ways to binds us in our different worlds. From this realization I started to think back again to the RLabs workshop where we came to the conclusion that much of bringing people together has to come from a needed reason, like managing together the resources different people share: city, infrastructure, economy, culture and so on.

I was amazed how open and understanding the people at the Sweet Home Farms were. They were for sure more open to understand what I had to say from my perspective that I could have been without getting a glimpse of their reality. Then again, I guess it is more often they step into our reality than we to theirs. After the workshop we had a group discussion and from that I saw that many of the tables had the same kind of discussion about skills. At first I felt awkward when some of the people asked when will they see the results of our project but I don’t think it was because they were expecting something as hand-outs. I felt like they were just tired of empty promises from people coming by and vanishing off. Making any kind of promise to the people there would really require a long commitment, like I know Shannon has made. It’s not an easy task to face that, to understand that the development is slow and so are the possible fruits of ones efforts. Them and us, us and them, but never us versus them or the other way around – hopefully. There are so many people living in that village, from so many places that apparently in any other context they wouldn’t coexist in such harmony. There is for sure potential here among these 17 000 people inhabiting this field in the cross section of roads on the Flats facing the mountains. They’re entrepreneurs, hard workers, caring mothers and community-loyal neighbours. We thanked one another for a nice day and our hosts for being generous in spending their time with us. And then we drove off, close to the mountains. But I still keep thinking of that fellow, in his hut dismantling and recycling things with his bare fingers. Hopefully I get to work for him, it would be an honour.

Links:

Sweet Home Farms @ Google Maps

Shannon Royden Turner’s Ted x Cape Town talk: Redefining assets

Sangoma (wikipedia)

Blog post from the RLabs Talkoot!

Talkoot event was part of the official Helsinki meets Cape Town even series, facilitated by CPUT and organized in the impressive RLabs, in Bridgetown, Athlone – one of the townships of Cape Flats. RLabs was started as somewhat a personal spinoff of another Living Lab – or so I’ve heard, and was founded in a lot shared with other interesting societal initiatives in Bridgetown. One of their biggest projects is to create an opening for the gang members of Cape Flats for move away from the gang life. And a convincing, heart thumbing example of RLabs produce was an ex member of the infamous American gang who took us on walking tour around the area. We walked to the stores that were, and still are one of the main hangout spots of the Americans in Bridgetown. Behind the stores there was an electricity center building, that was somewhat white – more yellow, that was called the White House to the American gang – because the gang was actually formed there. There abouts we also got to hear that the ex member leading us on the tour wasn’t just any member, but actually the son of the founder of the gang. He gathered us as a group around him, whenever he wanted to tell us something about the surroundings – but he seemed to gather the still loyal, still into gang life members around him as well – and this gave us an opportunity to talk with them. The conversation with an American gang member , clearly high on substances was just flooring to me. He told us about his three kids, he told us about his substance abuse and he told us that the neighborhood was – in his view – actually getting better all the time. But directly after this, he also told us that he himself was actually getting worse and worse every day. And this made me think, that if he is somewhat one of the unofficial, unwanted member of the illegal – but highly actual structure of the community – getting worse but maybe in it letting the community outside gang life to get better. But should it be worth it? Should one’s wellbeing, as a member of the community but not maybe member of the legally sound society, be the cost of the community’s wellness? So, do two wrongs make it right? No.

Workshop groups were formed around two key issues in township communities, but most applicable to people living in illegal settlements as well; issue of sanitation and waste management and issues around healthcare. I chose the latter based on few other workshops and the upcoming workshop in Johannesburg I was heading in few days, once again – I’ll tell you more about it later on. The group members varied from people working with the communities, to community planners, from healthcare workers to designers and so on. The workshop was constructed in a way that another township too in Cape Flats – Khayelitsha brought some of their shared issues to be worked in Bridgetown to benefit both. Our group had healthcare and community workers from the actual communities to feed us with first hand info, and to co-create the solution. These people were an neccessary and valuable assess to the work to have an proper understanding of the context and the scale of the issues. The sharing of this info was done by story telling – story telling being used to have that maybe one specific case but known to be repeated through many of the less privileged citizens of the Cape. We seemed to spend a lot of time again on the problems, which is good for the setup of the workshop. We even spend some time on the barriers and disadvantages in and of the situation before we actually talked about any possibilities or wished outcomes. I recognize a slight trend here and this could be because the people driving their own issues see the group as a good forum of authorities to make things move forward, or it could be that since these sources of first hand information do really live these  issue everyday – they’re locked in it. These or neither, problem centered has a new definition to me now, we should call it problem driven but as we usually work it is highly solution centred.

Our group gave the floor to the community workers and listened to their problems concerning healthcare. And the first issue, that seemed also to be one of the biggest issue and ended up being our focus too – was the community clinics way to make people queue. Most of their patients came in with no booking, and queue outside of the clinic from 5 am, even though the clinic opens at 7 am. They have an one queue policy to everyone, so even the people getting for their test results, or collecting their medicine or came because of an acute reason all stand in the same line and go through the same counter and this of course creates a system paralyzing bottle neck to get in to the service chain. Another big issue that comes from this system is that a lot of the people queuing will actually be left outside and without treatment due to the opening hours of the clinic, so some people needs to take another day off from work, pay free, and come queue next morning 5am again.

So first we of course looked into streamlining the existing queue system or even creating a new one. People seemed to be keen on figuring out a mobile application the let you know when your time is precisely or when the queue is the shortest to create an opening for the patients to come, but these suggestions too seemed to have faults that made the system as dysfunctional. If you think of the system how patients are treated nowadays is that you have one doctor seeing one patient – face to face, so the agreed time to meet becomes an issue of perfection, if the patient is late then the doctor waits and looses valuable time from treating other patients, so basically this system of people queuing and doctor just taking them in as they come is some what most effective to the doctors time management. Then again if you put out info that hey the spot is free just for you, but you put it out to enough people to make sure the doctor as a resource is used to its best – you just create the queue that wasn’t there. So instead of jumping the gun and looking at the issue that is actually just the result of a somewhat broken system, we started to look at the bigger picture – what is successful medical treatment and it is fragile! You need timing, skills, needs, resources, place and so on come together on that same crossing of space and time. From this spider chart we started listing the key elements we have to try to manage in this systemic mess; staff – resources – and patients.

We looked in to the issue of cueing through these elements and figured that tangible or intangible resources, as well as staff are out of our scope to manage as such. We can write an pamphlet to the hospital management and ask for them to get a better queuing system, or write to the local politicians that we need more resources – or ask the god to make us not sick anymore, but in this highly realistic context – none of the above seemed feasible. So Resources are out of our reach, lets look in to the staff – and the only fault there seemed to be the lack of staff, not so much their inefficiency. So I asked the group; Do you think you’ll get those 200 more doctors that you actually would need to treat all the clinics patients – unanimous: no. Well, do you think that the trend of being sick will go out of style so the queues just aren’t there anymore – again no. So we – to me – were facing a somewhat a dead end. And what do you do the milk’s on the ground already? You suck up your disappointment and see what else you can drink? This way of really pinpointing our project to something that is absolutely community led felt appropriate in the group, since there were no officials, just normal people from different communities. We also started to think about the hospital staff and their daily routines – every morning they open the gates to let the first people in, they know that these people have been standing there for quite a while and they know that the tail end of the queue will be cut and told to come back tomorrow, maybe even again on the day after tomorrow. This triggered something in us: mutual disappointment for the lack of those needed elements of successful treatment, this also spreads ill attitude to both sides of the counter… Hey, we have something here – we started to talk about attitude change through disappointment management.

We looked at the clinic system whole through the different elements played and taking part in it; what needs to be fixed and through harsh realism – what actually could be fixed – bottom up and through the elements we can manage, and this was firstly and mostly the patients, so us. We already established that both sides us and them we’re already approaching each and every point of contact, the visit to the clinic, with attitude ready to be disappointed. Through group discussion it was established that much of the disappointment, almost generically comes out of misunderstanding the situation or the other side, so we though of creating dialogue between these two parties who in the end do aim for the same end result, but are both sometimes tied down by resources, or other reasons from producing the hoped outcome.

So the disappointment management could be done, like the days tasks introduction, through storytelling. A member of the community could go to the clinic and tell the staff the stories they hear and know to be true from the patients issues concerning the healthcare and at the same time listen to the hospital staff and hear their stories of their daily struggles too. This would create an open feedback forum and ripple trusted information through both sides of the service. So we wanted to get the straightest possible line to do this, and basically framed the solution as this simple; we spot the community leaders – like shop keepers, priests, teachers or such and gave them the opportunity to go and take part in clinic staff meetings and then organize their own meetings to tell the people what went on in there and then again take it back to the hospital and so on. This would be an ongoing somewhat community facilitated discussion and thus, the platform for future co-creation of their services. Our group members, who represented communities at our table agreed with this idea and though that not only it would be useful and meaningful, but easy to organize.

This concept of ours, to me, is a perfect example of stochastic thinking. We’re basically looking at the issue of “there are too long queues in front of the hospital” and come up with a solution of facilitated discussion. The reason we ended up to it was the realization, that no matter how well all the other aspects of the clinic as a service would be managed, if the attitude stays the same – none of it matters. And then again, since almost all other aspects of our case were matters beyond our reach of change making, it is most effective to start from within. We manage what we can, a small thing – a conversation, and with that we probably could alleviate a lot of other problems that makes the whole system ill.

I wish we could have the time to go and actually meet the community and those people queuing to the clinic, but then again we had a group who did rightly represent them and in that served as a good assessment body to the end result. I think in the end we were all happy about the days talkoot – and exhausted, we gave it our best and gave it our all. Then we had braai and drinks, like you should in the (new) very traditional South-African talkoot. Good food, good music – really good people in good spirits.

I did really learn a lot from this workshop: for example, that stochastic thinking does apply to systemic issues generally well – the cause and effect is often indirect and the solution needed could be most effective like that as well. I learned that moment of successful service provided by one and received by one is a fragile split second chance in time and space – of course if there is no chance of negotiation, like when the issue at hand happens to be something so personal and important as ones health. I realized that at a dead end, with no options to get over, it’s probably more useful to manage internal actions than trying to effect outside aspects outside of your reach. I might have figured out that to a complex problem, it is better to come up with a simple solution – since complex solutions will probably just bring out new even more complex issues, and it’s not about that the solution needs to always be the solution, the solution just has to fit the empty place in the complex puzzle. And most of all, when thinking about two opposite sides involved in one issue, like patients and staff, like citizen and city, like the ones in the city and the ones living outside – they have a resource that they share and getting these opposite groups together is basically best done by getting them to co-manage the resource that have and get to share. Social change surely has to lye in the connecting surface different systems inside the system share. I’ll probably follow up on this idea on my upcoming conclusions from the whole trip.

Thank you everybody who managed, organized, facilitated and joined this wonderful event – to name few; Lovely people of RLabs, Aki from the Finnish embassy, Wonderful volunteers from Urban Soul and from Social Justice Coalition, Anne from AGI, Rael and Francois from CPUT.

More of this kind, please!

Links:

Talkoot! Helsinki meets Cape Town

RLabs

A video of one group’s journey at The Talkoo!

Athlone, Cape Flats (Wikipedia)

The Americans

In the middle of it, we sort of snugged out from the City Dialogue event to have a walking tour around the Fringe. From Half moon we walked through the buzzing bus/taxi/train station, which after the walkthrough our guide, Yehuda, told us that probably 90% of Cape Townians (close to mountains) have actually never done so. Roughly said, to walk there you need a reason to walk there, and the only reason is to take the bus or train, and rarely these city people have to do so. Pity. Public transport is probably one of the biggest issues to over come in Cape Town, people love their cars – because they’re – and the public option is not; perceived or yet. Anyhow, they have a massive amount of really good plans to revitalize and reurbanise the whole area. And I love the fact that they’ve included so many areas and stakeholder to join the planning; from using an old lot that was reserved for a new street – which is traffic planning, to abandoned or overlooked buildings to give space to star-ups – to private property owners to support green areas in the Fringe. We visited companies, local stores and were even at the gates of a safe home.

Some how it seems to me that from this dismissed piece of land, so many magnificent and urgent things are arising. Like I said in my CS presentation, fringe is as the far edge of society, between belonging and being the port of departure – it does give us the murky things, or if not give it to us – fringe brings the issues to our face, to the state of no denial of what ever is wrong with the society, but also fringe is the nest for new emerged cultures, practices and so on. I feel like we own a lot to the fringe areas of all of our cultures; we need to listen to those weak signals, and we need to nurture the positive interventions they bring to our status quo society. Fringe is dada to anyone who wont want to understand, and fringe is art of living to anyone who does. Thank you Cape Town, and Cape Town Creative, for pointing out a resource that is too often overlooked and dismissed, we all have them, them Fringes in out own cities. And I believe in fringe – I think I belong there and root from there.

The evening ended with us joining Ashraf Jamal, highly appreciated author, multi-disciplinarian thinker and a teacher, philosopher – so might I even say a polymath. Ashraf invited us to his beautiful home in Observatory, East from CPT downtown and the welcome was just awesome; a bunch of 14-17 yo boys in drag, wiggling on the street. The thing was that the party originally was for Ashraf’s daughters 15th bday, but she had an transportation issue, so we were all left to wait and some of her friends – the boys, just had the benefit of time and went through her clothes to decorate themselves for the party – nice. But I digress.. We had a really interesting insightful conversation with Ashraf about the future of academia – where will we move, from the concept of knowledge cathedral to bazaar. We talked about academic and ethical integrity of response and intervention in discursion – to which Ashraf coined one of the funniest most to point terms; ethical Tourette. Which I could in a way describe in personal perspective like this; I need to be me, even though there is nothing in it for me. We all shared this notion of the need and in it, the only real reason to do what you do. Ethical tourette doesn’t mean no-compromise or puritan mindset – it just means, that when ever one feels there is something right or something wrong, one is vocal about it no matter what. And I feel compassion towards the notion – I do feel I have suffered from ethical Tourette. One more thing to feel kinda proud of.

Links:
The Fringe (again)
Ashraf Jamal (I’m sorry his lecture given in the latest Creative Morning, Cape Town isn’t online yet, but I’ll replace this link with it as soon as I can find it)

1^st ever HEL-CPT DRAW meeting took place in one of the really well sprawled CPUT buildings. Francois, one of the CPUT students who started up a non-profit design agency (awesome idea by the way) presented us some of his cases around the world. A really interesting idea, among many, was a concept of a temporary shelter that can grow into a permanent house. The idea was a basic blueprint to bamboo frame and cloth cover, that can then serve as sort of the boundaries of harder materials to make the hut into a house. I have to admit that it’s an idea that we also once played with, with my Spanish friend in Helsinki – Jose – who has an NGO called Friends of Western Sahara. Jose works with Western Sahara refugee camp, one of the oldest in the world that now has its third generation inhabitants. I will link these two brave souls together – with me – and let’s see if we could combine this passion. Teemu Leinonen gave us a more detailed presentation about the co-designing project for a hospital ward. The presentation brought up some deep sensitive humane issues, like sickness and death. Ashraf talked about how designers sometimes tend to overlook the harder issues, and by that would be sort of designing for a better scenario than is true. Teemu told us though, that they did for example talk to people with terminal cancer and the hardness of that aspect to co-creation. The question of how to die well arose, which to me Ashraf gave a good simple philosophical answer: to live well. Alistar threw an open question to the design community present, that we should share our experiences of co-creation processes, where we have found it hard to work with some groups or individuals, for the community to better understand what creates that barrier to co-create. My two cents to this is that simply, if there is any hint on the individuals working with you in the process that you overstep their line of expertise the friction to collaborate will come up. Once, years back, when I was doing my BA thesis project I interviewed a bunch of professional designers about their ethics, moral and societal responsibility. Back then, it wasn’t that big of a trend as it has became now due to our climate and economic, and somewhat social crisis – although it was a big issue in Papanek’s and Fuller’s 60’s. Anyways, I executed most of the interviews in outside office spaces, like cafes and bars. Only one interview was done in an office, where I could immediately see an resistance to join my mission of more ethical design. And I strongly believe that the opinions were also circumstantial. The situation in these co-creation or even collaboration moments where there is clear resistance, it of course might be from several different reasons, like lack of trust to the professional facilitating the co-creation, lack of feeling of ownership in the project – shortly what is in it to me, or like me posing change to people in middle of their day to day work – was somewhat taking a dump in their sandbox. And no one likes that, obviously.

City Dialogue event happened at the at Cape Town Civic Center – also called Half Moon by the locals, or so did we hear. Alexander Stubb gave a talk about the importance, or 5 good points about hosting World Design Capital, which one of the good thing was the promotion of a city and country brand. It’s of course to us so apparent that Finland is almost a synonym to design, and Helsinki being the capital it must be the zero ground of things happening. But now that I’ve been here for few days and have really had a good glimpse of the design community and projects going on, the realization that we really are not the only ones making the best out this process called design – these guys are awesome here! Of course Finland has a history of high aesthetics, unbelievable sense of beauty in simplicity and function and material usage bar none, but this sort of new breath of social and open design clearly takes place in all fronts and countries. After Stubb, our Helsinki Mayor Jussi Pajunen talked about Helsinki and  even showed a picture of the last years Monocle magazine cover, where on a bright yellow sticker it told everyone that Helsinki is the best city in the world to live in – or was, since Monocle has found already their new favourite. Who cares I like Helsinki, and I actually even like what Jussi has done with our city. If you don’t share my view, take a look for example what the city youth department is doing, now with a lead of the best possible man to have those shoes – Tommi Laitio, in Ruuti –project. Jussi also mentioned Ravintolapäivä, urban gardening at Kääntöpöytä, Kalasatama development and so on. I suddenly feel very proud to be a citizen of Helsinki.

Links:

United Development

Friends of Western Sahara

Aalto Media factory

Ruuti-project

Ravintolapäivä/Restaurant day

The ACCESS event, organized by Aalto Global Impact and CPUT with other partners as well, took place in the cozy and historical homecoming center, close to the Fringe. Morning was quite hectic, due of the fact that we could only access the space an hour before our 60 participants rolled in – the homecoming center functions as the District 6 museum and is clearly a space full of memories. Hard ones.

Our witty professor of emerging design practices, Alistair Fuad-Luke opened the event and worked the whole day, facilitating and coaching the groups. ACCESS event is all about different people, with a drive to make a change, coming together and kick-starting a new project that aims for change. There were three different case presentations given in the beginning of the workshop – all based and working under the three main themes Cape Town laid down for their winning WDC pitch: social cohesion, infrastructural development and knowledge economy. To me the most interesting keynote came from Sweet Home Farm project, which is a community building project executed in one of the shantytowns close to the edge of Philippi, Cape Flats. It’s an illegal settlement formed with a nice tight square with eight cross sections running through. I’ll talk more about this in a later blog, since Shannon – the project leader took us there for a workshop as well – so stay tuned for that.

The workshop started by people putting down (on post-its) their key issue around these WDC pitch themes. I wrote down “Democracy of design” and joined a group of people like-minded. Our group was one of the biggest formed there and with a really good mix of backgrounds: Community planner, contractor, designers and so on. The group tended to stay on somewhat negative tune in the beginning but I guess that’s just often the way to operate when you’re looking at such complex and deep issues  – as social cohesion in Cape Town is. At the time I must admit I had no better perspective to approach the issue than “hey let’s all get together and everything is possible” – and I still believe it to be so but now I understand better what really is the starting point here. The fact of the matter is even though apartheid – the nasty a-word – was abolished 1994, it is still rooted here deep in the societal and even infrastructural core. So hitting all the million walls around the issue, we tried to get over them, to see what is beyond those walls of social change. I told the group about our project – done in Helsinki with a group of CS and CS minded students – called Whose Issues. The project was all about wanting us, as Sustainability planners, to be best utilized for actual needs. We did a bunch of work on the Helsinki “fields” on the interventions called design probes. By the way, I don’t know if he was ever properly credited during our project but the name and the finalization of the probe concept came from Tatu Marttila, so thank him for that. Anyways, the idea of the probes was that we go among our Helsinki citizens and facilitate a face-to-face conversation about their issues. Whether it is about the environment being uninviting or the prices in local grocery store being to high for good quality healthy produce. But teasing out these issues, we at the same time added to our issue capital and got the actual real world themes to our workshop later on but also got the people, who were the initiators, to have an ownership in our workshop. So after the probe talks we invited the people to join our workshop. One of our group members, a gentleman from Kone Industries, told us his experience from another workshop where they we’re similarly trying to map the issues among a group of stakeholders to a living area in Brooklyn. This workshop was done by first asking what is broken and then what would it look like when fixed? This is something that I’ve heard to be called Utopian dreaming. So basically our group started to explore the possibilities of combining these two methods and how to execute it in Cape Town. We talked about the process and who could take the lead of it. One idea was to replicate what we did in Helsinki and give the idea to design students for them to replicate it further. Another idea was to go through some NGO already working on the field. So our suggestion was a blend of these two, that the project would probe the citizens with their issues, bring them to a table of stakeholders – so the citizens and people around the issue. For example if the issue is about housing we could bring in urban planners, maintenance and city planning people together. With these probes the designers could better facilitate the process at the table and help these different stakeholders find their common ground, so design as a process, becomes a tool for problem solving.

After the group presentations we had cocktails, downstairs our working space and were visited by both mayor Cape Town, Patricia de Lille and mayor of of Helsinki, Jussi Pajunen.

Later in the evening the Embassy of Finland in Pretoria organized a Reception at 6 Spinn Street. The event was opened by our Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade of Finland, Mr. Alexander Stubb, who talked about Finnish design and what it meant to Finland and Helsinki as a WDC host. Both of the mayors were present as well and gave their short keynotes. After everyone had their drinks filled up, our host from the embassy, Aki Enkenberg welcomed us to the stage for Pecha Kuchas. First to go was WDC Helsinki Pekka Timonen who talked about World Design Capital in Helsinki and its several impactful projects. I’m not sure if I have to copyright to do so but I will attach here his last picture, which he told to be the most important. It’s a beautiful illustration of the whole idea of hosting WDC. It is a title granted for a city for one year but the effects will live of course much longer. WDC is a perfect platform to create projects that will immediately receive a larger audience which then again will bring in people to support it so it has more momentum and impact to create a bigger ripple around. After Pekka, it was my time to get up, the moment I’ve been panicking about for the past month – hehe. I talked about WDC Helsinki Pavilion. I was an intern at Demos Helsinki in the beginning of this year and was part of the team who curated the whole Pavilion program and after my Demos shift I was a producer at the Pavilion so I tried to talk about both perspectives; why was it there and for whom and then again, who came and did they get it. I’ll link my PK with notes here, so you can have a look. I’m horrified by public speaking, especially in front of such an audience so I had to support my first ever Pecha Kucha byt reading it pretty much straight from the notes and adlibbing some. But I think it went fairly okay in the end. After me Hannu Kähönen presented some of their Crea Design projects, of which one among was the building complex in Helsinki called Teurastamo (Bucher’s house). Aalto Professor Teemu Leinonen presented their work, of which to me the most impressive one is the design lab kind of co-creation project to design a new hospital ward and Yehuda from Creative Capetown told us about their Fringe project. I will link info on all of these as much as I can find, to the bottom of the page.

Here:

Aalto Global Impact
Helsinki Meets Cape Town
ACCESS: Design Needs Your Voice
Whose Issues*
WDC Helsinki
My own Pecha Kucha: WDC HEL Pavilion – a Yes Space
Teurastamo
Design for Health Care
The Fringe

Our picture blog by Aino Huhtaniemi, which explores the world for the rest of the year. Today’s destination: New York.

More from Aino Huhtaniemi’s blog: Happy Little Foreign Town.

Little Resident of Greenpoint, / American Museum of Natural History

Click to enlarge.

Left: Rooftops in Chelsea, Right: Men Crossing the Blackfriars Bridge

Our picture blog by Aino Huhtaniemi, which explores the world for the rest of the year. Today’s destination: London.

First image from Aino Huhtaniemi’s blog: Happy Little Foreign Town.