At the same time, these tensions were understood to play out at a distance, i.e., at a different time, with a relationship that was not in the room at the time, and/or with a different organisation. When we asked participants to map out their feelings while working on a particular project or within the organization, we began to get a hint of how participants brought tensions with them throughout their careers. In many cases, this spoke to the generativity of what is carried forward, even if not explicitly. For example, at a different workshop with the team at Outlandish one member discussed how internal relationship tensions created emotional highs and lows, but also how both unpredictable elements (Covid-19, shifting finances) and changing practices (of care, of negotiation) interacted to change relationship dynamics in the community. 

This initial glimpse into the challenges that community co-design faces has become the basis for a new project called “Uncommon Knowledge” to elaborate on Modes of Community Organising activities we’ve developed during this work and informs the final event that we will host as part of the Counter-Framing Design project.  This in-person interactive installation will focus on countering as a practice in design movements and is set to run on Friday, February 3^rd at 14:00 at the Chisenhale Dance Space in London. Spaces are limited, but if you’d like to come get in touch or register at the Eventbrite link to explore the work so far.  

It’s time to take stock of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. Most research projects are beholden to funders or other entities that ask for deliverables, including an update on what the project actually achieved. Proposal writing always encourages a clear path and a focus on feasibility- perhaps in part because they know that the end result will be far more complicated. Indeed, the influence of funding institutions on research communities is a longstanding conversation within participatory design, both in terms of how it affects relationships between designers and their participatory communities (Björgvinsson et al 2012) and how it directly affects the outcomes of design projects (Kyng 2010, Whittle 2014). Therefore, we would be wary of research that doesn’t evolve and respond to insights and knowledge produced along the way. Good research involving people is often messy, sometimes disjointed, but always improving upon itself and, therefore, always changing.  

Our project is no different. Our initial exploration into counter-frames led us to focusing on counter-actions. We were interested in how counter-frames could be mobilised to unsettle institutionalised frames and practices, as a means of community building through constructive opposition and dissensus (Prendeville, Syperek and Santamaria, Forthcoming). In attempting to unpack these counter-actions with our partner organisations, we found that these framing actions were evidence of something larger, the way those organisations and their networks were challenging and reinforcing values and practices. This often included a way of naming those values and practices, such as a sociocracy or a cooperatives, particularly horizontal practices and critiques on the horizontalism/verticalism binary (Nunes 2021, Süß 2021). The more we broke down the defining features of these two frameworks, the more we realized that we needed to move away from horizontalism and verticalism as two discrete types of practices, the former being disruptive to the later. For instance, we might encounter an organisation that works to strengthen leadership  within local communities, as a grassroots operation, but is still beholden to a strong hierarchy of governmental power brokers to enact policy change. Therefore, we started to focus on the reality of daily practices within an organisation—or any community for that matter. Organisational structures, like cooperatives, sociocracies, and democracies, all contain moments, interactions, and bits of daily life that may be ‘horizontal’, ‘vertical’, both, and neither. It is more significant for us to investigate these moments and see what they can tell us about where dissensus lies, and what that dissensus can teach us. 

 In that vein, we have begun planning workshops informed by our design research approach that will dive deep into organisational structuring, as a process that (re)creates these organisations and their communities through everyday moments and practices. We also propose that instead of attempting to turn dissensus into consensus, we work toward productive dissensus. Our initial idea, that frames always act in relation to other frames and that they can fluctuate to accommodate the desires and interests of other groups, is still embedded in the research. We are still talking about interactions which often involve framing (like an organisation pitching to a funder, appealing to a political party, or searching for collaborators), but it is not just that kind of interaction that is significant. Alignments are formed in other ways, hierarchies are reinforced or broken, consensus is made and unmade, solidarities are reinforced, and so on.  

Where will we go from here? We will begin workshopping with partners and collaborators to see how small, everyday practices inform their organisational structuring, how they understand themselves, and how they might be framed by others in their respective fields. In so doing, we hope to extend our project outside of its timeline through generative design that can be reproduced within other organisations and broader communities.  If you are interested in collaborating with us on future iterations of the workshop, please get in touch via our website or social media platforms.  

We heard from members of the community who have been affected by these issues and benefited from the respective campaigns, in the presence of external representatives, such as Cllr Carole Williams, an Amazon community engagement officer and a member of the Metropolitan Police taskforce. Their moving stories exemplified how community organising can use personal storytelling instrumentally as a form of participation and to mobilise policy change. Amongst other forms of activism, many of the campaign successes were in part realised through the act of members sharing their stories with stakeholders and power brokers, putting into action storytelling as a mode of participation and method of producing social change.  

With the dawn of 2021, there was a sense of optimism. In his report on the assembly, Citizens UK Community Organiser and Counter-Framing Design advisor Froi Legaspi quoted Amanda Gorman’s poem she performed at the recent US presidential inauguration: 

We know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright. 

As Citizens UK moves into the new year of campaigning, we look forward to engaging with activities such as the Settle Our Status campaign, looking at intersecting issues and frames of new economy, climate and migration. This campaign arose out of the precarious position many undocumented migrants found themselves in upon the first UK lockdown. Prohibited from participating in the economy and public life, they were unable to support themselves and their families, to contribute to their communities or to seek medical and other necessary social services. A 2020 NEON report, showed the decline in climate mobilisation at the outset of the crisis and the corresponding rise in mobilisation around migration and housing, surfacing the challenges in developing ‘cross-cutting movements’.* 

 Our fieldwork will engage with the campaign through co-design and participatory methods, including a policy workshop, which together will allow us to map the field of issues and debates on new economy, climate and migration and develop preliminary design interventions to support navigating competing frames and counter-frames, and facilitate and sustain more integrated ways of organising.  

*NEON. Covid-19 Social Movements Report. (2020). Available at: https://neweconomyorganisers.org/covid-19-social-movements-report/  

Image Credit: Sherry R. Arnstein, ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’, JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224. Licensed under CC BY 3.0