Working Together/Designing Grounded Interventions

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Designing Grounded Interventions

  • Course
  • 61 Lessons

Understand the unique characteristics of your context, and design creative interventions that push the bounds on what is possible.

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Start with why? No.

We always start with the WHAT - we just don’t realise we do.

Let’s realise the context, and design accordingly.

Context is a constraint on design. But there’s a lot of nuance in “context”, depending on the position you’re working from, and where you're trying to go. 

And that’s what this course is all about, the nuance of context, specifically the social side of context from the following positions:

  • Individual

  • Group Conversation

  • Network

  • Neighbourhood

  • Social Movement

  • Organization

  • Network of Organizations

  • Towns, Cities, Regions

  • Nation-State

Each of these have material and expressive constraints unique to them. Each offers challenges and opportunities to discover and explore. Each offers new possibilities for radical innovation within, and between each.

In short, this rich context can inform the interventions we design, helping to ground our impact in systems, and reveal creative paths and possibilities forward.

This course is for anyone working to unleash radical innovation in whatever level of the system they are working and playing within. Policy designers, consultants, activists, community organizers, facilitators, network weavers, campaigners, and more - if you are keen to facilitate a grounded and creative shift in the world - WELCOME!

Contents

Introduction

Primer on Assemblage Theory
Panarchy Primer
Meaningful Applications of Assemblage Theory
The Ethos of Assembly in Collapse: the Principles of "Intervention"
The Assembly Mapping Canvas

Individual

INTERVENTION POSTURES: Self-Inquiry, Self-Development
Habit & Routine
Skills
Beliefs, Desires, Impressions and Ideas

Conversation

INTERVENTION POSTURES: Kibbitzing & Facilitating
One's public image or persona
Glances, gestures, positionings, verbal statements
Attention + involvement
Humiliation and embarrassment
"Saving Face" and "Face Work"
Work repairing "Disequilibrium"
Co-presence in space (physical + digital)
Content of conversations (undistributed/ distributed via LS)
Uneventful (commonplace)
Eventful (rare, outcome not easy to predict, high stakes)

Network

INTERVENTION POSTURES (myriad)
Pattern of recurring links
Properties of links
Density
Stability
Solidarity
Conflict between communities
Shared stories & categories
Group boundary construction

Social Movement

INTERVENTION POSTURES: Organizing & Policing
At least 2 collective actors & 1 government actor
Claim Making and Repertoires of Contention
Legitimacy to make claims
Provisional Coalitions (Organizers)
Specialized Associations (Unions, etc.)
Physical Control (Government)
Protest Cycles
Social Categories (Religious, Ethnic, etc.)
Legal Rights and Obligations
Social Distinction
Disposition

Organization

INTERVENTION POSTURES (myriad)
Weber's Authority Types and the separation of office from incumbent
Traditional/ Sacred Type
Charismatic Type
Post-Charismatic Authority Type
Rational-Legal Type
Authority's expressive constraint: Legitimacy
Authority's material constraint: Enforcement
Daily following of commands
Strict spatial and temporal partitioning
Use of language
Group beliefs and discourses (the presence/absence of them)

Network of Organizations

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Town, City

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Nation-State

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Emerging Assemblies of Energy Descent: Family, Collective, Neighbourhood, Region

Scaling laws and associated development patterns produce "residue assemblies"
Residue assemblies as latent sites of assembly in collapse scenarios
Historial and contemporary examples of "collapse response"
Key material and expressive components of assembly for transition
UNDER CONSTRUCTION