How can we turn new economic ideas into durational, relational imagination infrastructure?
Seeking 12 place-based, peer-led groups looking to apply new economic ideas where they live
The project
Civic Square is a place-based organisation in Birmingham taking a bold approach to visioning, building and investing in civic infrastructure for neighbourhoods of the future. As part of this, they are creating the Neighbourhood Economics Lab, ‘an experimental social lab, focused on exploring, experimenting and testing and building resilient, regenerative neighbourhoods.’ Rooted locally, the lab is also connected globally through its partners and projects.
I joined Civic Square as a learning designer for a collaborative project with the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) and Huddlecraft, in which we would support peer-led, placed-based cells of people to explore applying Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics on a neighbourhood scale where they lived.
The challenge
My brief was to help design a social learning infrastructure to help support 12 peer led learning groups across different neighbourhoods in the UK and internationally to read, engage with and apply Doughnut Economics in their local area over a period of 8 months.
Joining the project at the stage where the programme design had been blueprinted, my role was to identify the key support needs for participants at each programme stage, and design and make the digital and in-person touchpoints that would support a powerful and meaningful adult learning experience.
The legacy of this project was thrilling: we were not only setting out to build support for this programme, but also to deeply experiment with bringing Doughnut Economics to life, creating a large library of evergreen learning experiences mapped to Doughnut Economics’ key ideas and chapters.
My approach
I joined the project at the stage where Civic Square and Huddlecraft had co-designed a learning journey blueprint, but there was still lots of room to drill down into the specific user needs and experiences across these key touchpoints, enabling us to design the layer of touchpoints and infrastructure below the experience.
On a personal level, I’ve participated in three 6 month peer-learning experiences designed by Huddlecraft, and I believe deeply in the power of a bottom-up peer-led approach to learning, in which the definition of the ‘curriculum’ and content of learning resides with a group of peers.
In this case, with a ‘curriculum’ partially set in the form of the book Doughnut Economics, I was fascinated to explore how we might help people socialise new economics ideas over time and in their lives using the real agency created by a peer-learning experience, while also benefitting from the ‘expert’ role of a book, enabling them to deeply explore and apply new economic mindsets.
I also wanted my work to be able to demonstrate core principles in terms of bringing economics to life through embodied, social settings, so that we could translate this design into new settings for new ideas. In working through the project, I was particularly interested in the questions below:
How could we help people internalise and embed new economic ideas into real relationships with people, projects and place over time?
What imagination infrastructure would help people apply a major new economics framework at an interpersonal level in their own relationships?
How will we use digital tools for sense-making, accessibility, communication and collaboration - in practice?
The project process
See the ‘front end’ in the Neighbourhood Doughnut Miro World here where you can click through to an explorable Miro board for each chapter.
See the ‘back end’ of activities for an example chapter hosted in Notion.
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Mapping user needs and touchpoints
The first thing I did was to apply a learning design mindset, and map learner needs across the proposed stages of the learning journey, enabling us to consider how deeply learning could be supported within the programme, and also to underpin the experience’s accessibility for people joining with any level of background. To do this, I drew on what we know about learning, what we know about service and programme design, what we know about peer group formation, and what we know about effective learning and experience design for economics and climate activism.
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Turning a linear text-based book into formats for interactive social learning
Next, I spent time with Doughnut Economics, the book, reconsidering it as a learning experience. A first stage was to map ‘content types’ within the chapters and how these might be broken down and shared in different formats, which allowed for and relied upon peer-led participation. For example, to consider how we might turn a written chapter of Doughnut Economics into a fillable canvas, a story and a set of conversation cards.
My question here was how could an essentially one-way and long-form format, the book, be transformed into an interactive world and social experience in which someone could build their own journey with particular people, places and over time?
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A visual and media-led 'front end' to inspire participation
With both these ingredients, I then proposed a learning support structure and content map, with a proposal for digital systems with which to host the ‘infrastructure’, with a back end on Notion, and a front end ‘Miro world’, a digital whiteboard platform which could allow us to build an interactive ‘world’ which participants could navigate in a visually-led, non-linear way, encouraging agency and co-creation.
Use of transparent png visuals in Miro can create a beautiful living background which helps bring information to life.
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Creating activities as conversations for relationships, exploration, co-creation and closing
In the final stage of the project, I populated the back end of the learning support, creating a large library of potential learning experiences and activities which could help peers who were designing their own learning sessions take the ideas of each chapter of Doughnut Economics off the page.
For these experiences, I focused on creating social, emotional, visceral and mixed methods / media experiences which could be carried out in a group of up to 12 peers within a 2 hour evening workshop.
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Curating imagination prompts
I placed emphasis on creating prompts for shared social imagination, designed to enable people to reflect on, critique and share the reasons behind being able to imagine or not imagine radical alternative futures.
In this example, peers could read out a scenario about a change in government policy, and then use a journalling technique to imagine 7 different ways they could use this future.
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Creating the narrative frame
Finally, I created the narrative ‘framing’ and curated a database of overarching skills-based resources, which helped orient the user in how they might use the learning infrastructure while emphasising their role as a peer and facilitator.