Strange times. From a weird referendum to a weird coup to a weird nomination and an overall sad mess of nationalist and bigot discharge all over, the past weeks have been rather disheartening. While we (
and some of our friends) feel like we all should be coming up with better answers how we can make sure the world takes a turn for the better, others certainly make a good argument on why even though we might
feel differently, everything is
not as crazy as it seems. We’re still not decided on which side to choose, so maybe we can do both: focusing more on the lovely things that actually never left - while coming up with new ideas to make sure the world isn’t moving into the wrong direction just too far? What do you think?
To that end, Max spent most of the past weeks in the Brazilian Amazon, mostly without internet or phone connection at the
International Development Design Summit Amazon. The summit took place in small rural community outside of Belém and was organised in collaboration with an association of organic farmers. Max was a design facilitator, helping a team through a two-week process to find out what to do with all the fruit the associates have access too (pulp and cupulate, a of chocolate from a different fruit were the preliminary answers) and has a billion stories to share,
but we’ll keep it short here.
Simon spent his days in Cologne, Berlin and (lovely!) Vienna between work and visiting old friends - and curating a track on ‚Openness, Democratization, Digitalization‘ for the upcoming Innovative Citizen conference in Dortmund (Sep 15-18), which will also tap into the questions of what we as citizens and people can do to have our part in shaping our (local) environment for the better. Among others, it will offer a lot of hands-on workshops featuring our friends from London’s
public lab, an open science intervention by the great folks of
IMAGINARY - and also, the two of us will hold a workshop there on urban narratives and we would love too see you there, so you should come and join us.