One of Clear Village’s main responsibilities in Human Cities IV is to create the methodology for impact assessment. All Human Cities partners will carry out an intervention in a small, remote place and our goal is to develop a robust way of measuring the effects, of seeing what works and what doesn’t work and drawing lessons that can then be applied elsewhere. We’re taking a rigorously co-creative approach to the work and will jointly develop the methodology with our Human Cities partners, who will then jointly implement it with the communities of the small, remote places.
We’re thrilled to be in charge of this particular piece of work, as Clear Village has always been interested in data and measurement. Thomas Ermacora founded the organisation in 2009 with the intention of creating a reservoir of best-practice intelligence to help villages become more resilient. We subsequently went in a slightly different direction- towards more practical work in cities- but we have always retained our initial interest in villages and data and we’re excited to be returning to our roots. And we’re not the only ones: with the rise of remote work and in the wake of the pandemic, we anticipate that villages will finally start to get the attention from placemaking professionals that they deserve.
MODELS & METHODS
Our journey towards a co-created impact assessment methodology is underpinned with in-depth research into innovative practices and projects with regards to their uses of creative evaluation techniques, frameworks for impact assessment, and design fiction.
Some of the examples we’ve been looking at in terms of co-creative impact assessment and evaluation are Tools to Act, the second annual report for the Every One Every Day initiative in Barking & Dagenham. Three Clear Village team members have been involved in this Participatory City project in one way or another, so we were keen to consult PC’s approach to reporting on their amazing project. We were also inspired by DIY (Development Impact & You): Practical Tools to trigger and support social innovation for their powerful templates for moving projects forward and creating tangible impacts. We looked at the Creative Evaluation Toolkit for alternative approaches to engaging and doing evaluation with hard to reach community groups, to promote a deep level of imaginative thought and complex reflection and evaluation of our project, and approaching qualitative and quantitative evaluation as equally valid. We also looked at the Unesco Culture for Development Indicators for how culture fits into the wider picture of countries’ development processes.
Furthermore, as a result of the pandemic, we have had to completely rethink the nature of our collaboration with our European friends, such as exploring using new virtual environments for collaboration. This has led us to develop a co-created impact methodology workshop in a bespoke fictional village environment. More on that soon!
DESIGN FICTION
In developing this workshop we quickly realised the difficulties of talking and thinking about specifics of projects that don’t yet exist – how do you discuss the challenges and opportunities of something that hasn’t happened yet without becoming lost in the abstract? This led us to exploring design fiction as a technique that would allow us to explore specific situations to analyse methods of impact measurement within fictional scenarios.
Design fiction, either in theory or in practice, behaves as critical design. It speculates on an alternative future (from asteroids heading towards earth or a dystopic northern town frozen in the 70s, or future ecotopias) then uses this to analyse and critique our current situation. The issue is that this can often remain in the research and academic sphere. We are interested in how it could be applied to impact measurement, to create fictional specific scenarios to allow us to take a closer look at how impact could be monitored and recorded in a way that is bespoke to the situation and community.
Fiction plays an important role in helping us detach our thinking from the barriers associated with our current situation and to open up our minds to wider possibilities.
In our workshop, design fiction is serving multiple functions:
- Providing a fictional case study with which to trial and co design our methodological ideas
- To create an example community whose culture is not defined by its location
- A way to communicate and replicate these complex abstract concepts in a way that remains accessible and engaging
- A way to simulate and predict potential problems or push back from the communities we are hoping to engage with.
Whilst developing this idea we started to analyse a few different ways that design fiction had been employed – although as aforementioned its main role here is to provoke and critique.
Scarfolk Council is a speculative ‘town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979.’ It is heavily dystopic and draws on the horror genre and British advertising posters of the 70s as its graphic language, and the only lens through which we experience Scarfolk.
A key text about speculative design or design fiction is, of course, Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Everything. Although they utilise it formerly as a method of critiquing our society and imagining a different future rather than simply an alternate reality to create an alternate mindset, it is nonetheless a seminal text in the field. It is frustrating to see it simply being applied to objects, particularly art works in a gallery context, but is a great introduction to these ideas.
“We believe that by speculating more, at all levels of society, and exploring alternative scenarios, reality will become more malleable” (p. 6)
Watch this space for further exciting developments on this innovative virtual village workshop!