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.  

Sharing our project vision – to understand the relationship between socio-political framing and strategic action in the field of sustainability to develop a novel design approach to support design for social change theory and practice – we set out our meta-design concepts: design anthropological methods, working within an extended time horizon, mapping practices and design tactics. We outlined the field of grassroots organisations and issues comprising the new economics with which we are engaging, including creative commons, universal basic income, decarbonisation, migration, housing, land stewardship, solidarity and transitions movements, the repair movement and sustainable arts and culture. This was followed by an analysis of the competing frames we have identified within the field, which form the basis of our critical discourse analysis. 

We homed in on the frames and counter-frames of ‘the New Normal’ and debates around going back to normal, when the pandemic has revealed such profound structural inequalities – where does this position the rhetoric and campaigns to ‘build back better’? Similarly, we considered tensions between criticisms of climate injustice and the whitewashing of the environmental movement, with calls for unity and to overlook differences to come together in an age of division. While the ‘counter-frames’ at the centre of our research include intersectionality, decolonising, Indigenous worldviews, anti-capitalism, sociocratic models, radical openness, storytelling tactics and green recovery, between these frames exist points of conflict and tension. 

To consider visual and material as well as textual aspects of discourse, we looked at these frames in the context of a case study: Extinction Rebellion. XR has an interesting relationship to our counter-frames, as its aim is to normalise mass civil disobedience, and it has received criticism for a lack of intersectionality within both its membership and its methods, despite (or perhaps, in part, due to) its decentralised, self-organising structure. The movement is particularly relevant to our project, as it arose out of research in organisation design as a practice of subversion, and its widespread success has largely been down to its strong design principles, including its name, its famous logo and its uniquely embodied and replicable protest actions (think: the Red Brigade), readily likened with Anne Thorpe’s design tactics.¹ Extinction Rebellion refused to be included in the 2019 Beazley Designs of the Year awards, as it accused the Design Museum of ‘artwashing’ the insurance company’s activities.

It was useful to think with Torange and the Cultural Commons students and their material and aesthetic practices, engaging with topics ranging from chemical and noise pollution to use of communal spaces on a council estate and facilitating children’s communication through design. We discussed how actions can intersect with and support emergent frames in grassroots organising around the concept of a new economy, and where they might conflict. Design has traditionally ‘re-framed’ problems without challenging underlying hegemonic epistemologies that can undermine progress on sustainability, but critique is necessary to establishing alternative ways of building this ‘new economy’. In a similar way, the commons can function on assumptions of privilege, both in terms of capital – the expectation of free labour – and aesthetics – ideals of rewilded greenspace, for example, often suit the tastes of a certain demographic. Yet, at the same time, we recognised the need for synergy between different groups, while asking, à la Chantal Mouffe, is consensus even feasible, or indeed necessary?²

Such debates will continue to inform our project as we proceed with design research methods that are diachronic, norm-critical and dissensual.  The session gave us an opportunity to consolidate our research to-date, before we enter our next stage of field work with project partners Public Works, Citizens UK and ECHO. We were also able to trial some of our initial findings and design concepts in advance of the design anthropology workshop we are planning for the New Year. This workshop will use design concepts of mapping to convey and initiate a discussion on the relationships, tensions and contradictions between the range of frames that we identify in the field. 

1 Thorpe, A. (2019). Design Activism in the Context of Transport and Mobility. In Tom Bieling (Ed.), Design & Activism (First, pp. 198–202). Mimesis International.

2 Mouffe, C. (2016). Democratic Conflict and Politics: An Agonistic Approach. 9, http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0009.011