Everything is a citizen by Dark Matter Labs [UK] // NATURE – HUMAN

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There is a river in New Zealand that has been granted citizenship. What if everything were a citizen? In this session we look at the world from this perspective. 

Agenda track:  1 Nature – Human 
Session type: New perspectives
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen needs: Possible to use audio only

There is an urgent and increasing understanding that humans’ relationship to the material and biological world is deeply flawed. At the same time there’s an increased understanding of non-human actors – from viruses to climate systems – playing a massive role in our everyday lives. However, “protecting nature” or “fighting the virus” for example seem approaches that do not address the real issues.

Could we instead give “everything” agency, see everything as a citizen that has rights and can make contracts with us? 

The session is for all creatures interested in biodiversity, governance and exploring a vision of the world where humans are not at the center of it all.

@indy_johar

darkmatterlabs.org

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Long-term Care Centres – a case for worker power and community autonomy based economies by Autonomy [UK] // NEW MODELS OF ECONOMY & GOVERNANCE

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How can we provide care to an aging population? What does the future of fair work look like? These are big questions facing the Western world. The mainstream fit-for-all solution of the past decades appears to be “efficiency”, treating care provision and almost any work the same as producing cars in a factory. Autonomy, an independent London-based think tank focussing on the future of work, proposes new models for critical parts of the economy and work, including eldercare.

Agenda track: 5 New models of economy & governance and 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New experimental models
Level of interaction: Most of the time
Screen need: All the time

Over the past two years the urban research branch of Autonomy has been developing New Foundational Infrastructures (NFIs). These NFIs are municipalist models to build fair local economies. In this ongoing series of proposals, Autonomy articulates a vision for worker-led and community-owned services and hardware. 

NFIs propose a new set of foundations for local economies: an environment where trade and work is anchored in solidarity and sustainable practices. So far the proposals have focused on smaller players and more marginalised workers, identifying lodestars around whose struggles we can start reorganising services and workspaces. 

The proposals focus on three increasingly critical parts of the economy: eldercare, SME logistics and desk-work. Though responding to different needs and conditions, they share a common logic and set of ambitions: community ownership, worker control, public funding and place-based strategies. They articulate the vision for a future where – instead of being commodities – workspace, equipment and infrastructure are shared assets of a commons of work and enterprise. 

During the session Julian Siravo, an Architect and Urbanist from Rome who leads the urban team at Autonomy, poses questions about the role of municipal institutions in building worker power and community autonomy and takes us through the processes that underpin the project’s stakeholder engagement and design. The session is designed around “stress testing” their model for Long Term Care Centres with the participants.

The session is beneficial for example for people working for municipalities, public sector, NGOs as well as for care workers and care entrepreneurs, community activists, trade union and future of work actors and anyone finding these topics central.

Autonomy is an independent think tank that focuses on the future of work and economic planning. It provides economic analyses, policy proposals and on-the-ground solutions with which to confront the changing reality of work today. Their aim is to promote real freedom, equality and human flourishing above all.

autonomy.work

@Autonomy_UK

 

 

 

 

 

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Biodiversity Building by Y-Foundation [FI] // NATURE–HUMAN

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The Biodiversity Building is a brand new concept for an apartment building aimed at radically increasing the sustainability of affordable housing. The wooden building aims to protect biodiversity and reduce the carbon footprint of housing. Also, the idea of the Biodiversity Building is to encourage its tenants to participate in and commit to a sustainable and community based lifestyle and urban farming. The concept is being developed by the Y-Foundation, one of the biggest affordable housing providers in Finland and a champion of the Housing First principle in Finland and abroad. Now they need your input!

Agenda Track: 1 Nature–human
Session type: New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None

The development project of Biodiversity Building strives to investigate how the technical and spatial solutions – such as use of the ground and the roof level – of a wooden apartment building could be used to protect biodiversity and absorb carbon. Also, the model for resident participation is being designed based on Y-Foundation’s previous work and benchmarking. For the tenants, the building will provide the opportunity to lead a low-carbon lifestyle and grow their own food whilst living in an apartment.

The Biodiversity Building is in design phase and with Untitled Festival participants The Y-Foundation wants to test ideas and solutions found, as well as look for cues for answers still missing. The goal is to have the first building built in a few years time.

The Y-Foundation’s (Y-Säätiö) mission is to enhance social justice. They do this by developing social housing for the largest Finnish cities lacking affordable housing. They build housing units where support services are easily available as well as state-subsidised rental homes. The work of the Y-Foundation relies heavily on their expertise on issues relating to homelessness and the Housing First principle.

@ysaatio
ysaatio.fi

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Living Change: grief as an overlooked force by Louise Armstrong [UK] // HETERODOX INSTUTIONS

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For those who are looking to enable a just and regenerative world, it is critical that we find ways to be closing the regenerative cycle.

Agenda track: 4 Heterodox institutions & 1 Nature – human
Session type: new perspectives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None
Screen need: Needed all the time
Day: Friday 24 September, 11 am EEST | 8 am UTC

We are comfortable creating the new, but often skirt around the loss, closure, ‘release’ and death phase of change – even though they are an inevitable and necessary part of any change process.

It is essential we know how to work with these powerful forces as we continue to adapt to and live during a global pandemic, increasing impacts of climate change and as our regimes and ways of being crumble around us.

This session will be offering a series of metaphors and framing that help us to work with grief and loss in a tangible way. We will also spend some time witnessing and sharing with each other and experiencing the power of grief-tending practices.

This session is especially for those…

  • who know they haven’t processed grief and changes experienced throughout the pandemic and beyond.
  • who want to connect to what is really important to them and are unafraid of the intimacy of life.
  • who are open and curious.

The custodian of this session, Louise Armstrong has experienced the transformative potential of tending to grief and is committed to supporting a shift in the culture and practices through which we frame and work with loss and grief as a part of the cycles of change. This festival session is partly a test of the potential of this type of space and offering in supporting those living and working towards transformative change

Louise Armstrong enables and supports those committed to living change and who are running ambitious system-altering work and collaborations. She does this through emergent facilitation, system-change coaching, power-informed practices, process design, visual thinking, pattern spotting and navigating complexity. She has formerly worked for the Forum for the Future.

@louise_a
louise-a.medium.com 

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Jarenko and Heikkila in colourful clothes

Crushing our social presets by Karoliina Jarenko & Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä [FI] // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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In Western cultures people have been indoctrinated to believe that rationality ought to govern the body, mind and emotions. This tradition originates from Plato, who glorified the rational and laid ground for the supremacy and social status of those who suppress their feelings, obey the results of their deductive rationalizations and keep with a restrained and controlled appearance. This narrative is still dominant in the West: look around at those we call successful and influential, and you see people of restraint. 

Karoliina Jarenko and Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä want to challenge that. 

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New perspectives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some / a lot
Screen need: Needed all the time
Day: Friday 24 September

In order to reimagine the future, we must be able to crush and reboot the social preset and we invite you on that journey with us. The session brings forward arguments as to why showing emotions and joy in our cultural webs of meanings is needed. 

The session is open to curious and playful people who look forward to exploring new breakthroughs in personal development, leadership, and creating impact.

The custodians of this session, Karoliina Jarenko and Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä have both been educated and acculturated into the Western academic, intellectual and rationality-centered thinking. They know its strengths and shortcomings. Life has also introduced them to communities that live in a more immediate and creative manner and have experienced their transformational power personally and documented it scientifically.

The next step following this session at the festival session is to establish a band that has absolutely no musical skills and start a revolution by expressing ourselves a bit more humanly. 

Karoliina Jarenko is an author, organizational consultant, keynote speaker, co-founder and former CEO of the Academy of Philosophy Helsinki. She is now working on a concept for creating 21st century learning organizations. Karoliina calls herself ”the HandyMandy of Future Worklife” and is known for her energetic and earthly delivery. 

Dr. Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä is a scholar-activist, who co-builds new openings and aims to bridge science and practice, especially through arts. From his social preset, Dr. Heikkilä’s disciplinary approaches are entrepreneurship and organisation science and he is a Royal Society (UK) Newton Fellow, and a visiting scholar at Stanford and Harvard University. He has published in leading academic journals such as the Academy of Management Discoveries, Journal of World Business and Environment and Planning A. 

jukkapekka.com & www.karoliinajarenko.fi

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See video at the bottom of the pageSee video at the bottom of the page

Reset anytime with Simo Vassinen

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* Shake, shake, shake it all out * Dancer–researcher Simo Vassinen from BodyTalk has created four short reset exercises for us. You can use them to tune yourself in at any moment to digest something, start something or to shift your mind through your body – to kick off a Festival session you are hosting, or to reset yourself between the sessions. Use them beyond the Festival: in the middle of the work day, to start a meeting, to brush off the day. They’ve been tried, tested and loved in the Untitled community.

Rave Shake, Walk in the Dark, Talk Gibberish and Breathe & Hold – which one will you try first?

To learn more about the thinking behind these excercises, check Simo’s session at Untitled Festival 2020: Re-imagining The Body by Simo Vassinen [FI / DE]

Music: S Ruston feat. Lucky Pete’s Lovers – Narcosexual [used with kind permission of the artist]

Website:   https: //www.togetheralonefi. com / round-i-selected-projects /  bodytalk

 

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What if we as employees were a pivotal force in sustainable transitions? by Service Union United PAM // NEW MODELS OF ECONOMY & GOVERNANCE

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According to research, climate change is a truly shared worry among citizens. We have looked for the solutions to come from consumers, from regulators, from investors. But as climate change keeps increasing and biodiversity diminishing, Service Union United PAM thinks we need to expand agency to tackle this issue. Employees – those same citizens that worry about climate change – are a resource too modestly harnessed for this work.

Agenda track:  4 Heterodox institutions & 5 New models of economy & governance
Session type: New narratives & New experimental models
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen need: Needed all the time
Day: Friday 24th, at 2 pm–4 pm EEST | 11 am–1 pm UTC

The role given to us as employees in the story of climate change is to be worried of jobs vanishing. But what kind of a force could we as employees be? How could we strengthen the collaboration of employees and companies in progressing sustainable transitions?  What would employee-driven sustainability work look like? What kind of asset would that be to the companies? How would that contribute to our feeling of rewarding work? And how could we experiment on this?

The Service Union United warmly welcomes you to explore these questions together. You can be an employee or employer of any field, a citizen, an activist, an entrepreneur, a student, a researcher, or artist – a person curious about fair and sustainable transitions, climate change, or  the future of work and rewarding work.

The fruits of the session are a starting point for developing concrete experiments for PAM and potential partners to take forward.

PAM logoWith its 210,000 members, Service Union United PAM is the biggest trade union in Finland. They represent people employed in the private service sector. So next time in Finland you visit a store, a restaurant or see your office cleaner, say hi! They are likely to be a member of PAM. Service Union PAM wants to be a strong, relevant, modern union for years to come and that is why it is one of the founding members of the Untitled Alliance. This session is a continuation of the rewarding work theme PAM explored at Untitled Festival 2020.

@pamliitto  pam.fi 

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Expanding the rave by BodyTalk // ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS

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We want to explore the hypothesis that life can be a party. Indeed some parties – for example rave parties – are already much more than just a party. In this session we explore mix of dance and rave techniques with a psychoanalytical approach of free association. In other words, you are welcome to be seduced by music, get lifted by dance and to speak whatever comes out of your mouth about what kind of role parties could and should have.

Agenda track: 2 Ontological politics, 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New perspectives
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: A lot
Screen need: Good to have

This session is for all the people interested in bringing joy and leaving ego to struggle for social change. 

We think partying could be so much more than escapism or revitalization for work. We are certain that social change should be a joyful thing, rather than waiting for the joy to come after the struggle.

 The session aims to build a loose community of dancers and organisers that can take the lessons into practice – to the coming Untitled festivals and beyond. 

Expanding the rave is hosted by BodyTalk, an activist-performance group working to join together moving to a repetitive beat, imagining the unimaginable and pushing for social change.

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Heat Resilient Cities Conference – Berlin 2039 // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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What happens if cities on the Northern hemisphere radically adapt to life in the rapidly warming urban heat island that they are becoming? Join us for a future conference, Heat Resilient Cities – Berlin 2039, taking place at the Untitled Festival 2021. Experience the biggest climate impact in European cities yet – extreme heat – and explore how we could adapt and thrive.

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some
Screen: Needed all the time

Heat Resilient Cities – Berlin 2039 is an immersive, collaborative storytelling experience consisting of a series of curated experiences and activities, and an experiment to imagine, create stories, moments, or personal experiences from a future where the climate crisis has had significant effects on everyday life. 

This session may involve moments of anxiety, stress, and hope.

Extreme urban heat is one of the most extreme threats from the climate crisis in European cities, though people rarely connect heat stress to the climate crisis in the way we do for floods. And while we may have processed the threat on an intellectual level, we struggle to grasp the magnitude of possible impacts with our guts, in a similar way to how we experienced the effects from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Urban Heat Island Living is an unfolding immersive experience about living with extreme urban heat, and an ongoing investigation exploring the effects of the climate crisis on the lives of humans and their non-human companions in cities. Read more here.

We are looking for people with experience or interest in storytelling and world building – e.g. writing, improvisation, or a wild imagination. What gets us excited are people with policy backgrounds, amongst others working on social and ecological transformation and public (climate) health. 

Heat Resilient Cities Conference – Berlin 2039 is an activity that will inform and influence the design of a future immersive experience on responding to growing heat for leaders and decision makers in industry, policy, and civil society. 

The stories and moments created at the Untitled Festival will be embedded into the growing future scenario of Berlin & Europe around 2039, gathered in the Transformation Report. The materials will be made available for all participants to (re-)use, and the activities are used in the development of a method on collaborative climate futuring. 

We are looking for connections to public resilience officers, municipalities, and others concerned with extreme urban heat, tasked/able to respond to it, to embed ourselves into an existing process or to jointly co-create a participatory, design-driven adaptation and mitigation process. 

We are also looking for funding, resources, co-creators and test participants to design an immersive experience on living with extreme urban heat.

This session is hosted by researcher-designers Juli Sikorska, Francesca Desmarais, and Dan Lockton. 

Juli Sikorska is a strategic and experience designer translating the uncertainty of climate change into tangible experiences. She is the initiator of Urban Heat Island Living, a participatory intervention that explores how the climate crisis might dramatically change the way we live, work and play. Juli has worked with the MIT Climate CoLab, EU CreaTures, conducted workshops for Climate KIC, and her work has been exhibited at the Design Museum (UK), Dox Centre for Contemporary Art (CZ), and Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (DE).

Francesca Desmarais is an experienced designer and researcher fusing disciplines to shape a design process that helps communities and systems adapt to climate change. She has facilitated climate futuring workshops for Climate KIC, IDA, and CIID, and incorporated climate futures into an adaptation project with UNEP-DTU to design services for small businesses affected by flood.

Dan Lockton leads the Imaginaries Lab, a research-through-design studio based in Amsterdam, creating tools to support people’s imagining—new ways to understand, and new ways to live—in an age of crises and transitions. Dan is Assistant Professor, Future Everyday, at TU Eindhoven’s Industrial Design department, and has run workshops at previous Untitled events on new metaphors and participatory futuring. He has previously worked at the Royal College of Art (UK) and Carnegie Mellon University (US).

@julisikorska @fdesmarais @imaginari_es
www.urbanheatislandliving.com

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Potential of anti-rival thinking to transform economies by ATARCA // HETERODOX INSTITUTIONS

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The world economy is increasingly based on data that increases in value when shared and combined with other data. However, our centuries-old economic models and structures fail to recognise this value-creation process, causing markets for anti-rival digital goods to wither.

The idea of “anti-rival” is a concept that describes goods not fitting into the dichotomy of rival or non-rival goods. Anti-rival goods can be shared or used exclusively and gain value the more they are used. They are embedded in the development of new technologies and especially DLT. If successful, they could have implications for our economic systems and thinking, interaction and the sustainability of communities.

Agenda Track: 3 Civic imagination, 4 Heterodox institutions and 5 New models of economy and governance
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None

The ATARCA project invites you to the session to imagine together new metaphors for data and discuss social, political and economic impacts of the implementation of an anti-rival economy. The aim is, via identifying the roles and nature of data in our economies and societies, to explore the potential of an anti-rival economy at large: how could it foster more fair and sustainable socio-economic structures and what kinds of policies are needed to enable that?

The new narrative challenges our fundamental understandings of how value is or can be created in data economy and how (infra)structures, culture and attitudes need to change in order to grasp the potential of new economic thinking.The involvement of citizens, activists, policymakers and researchers alike is central to grasping as many dimensions of this challenge as possible. We welcome everyone to the session, which consists of an orientation, discussion in small groups and wrapping up together.

A series of follow-up dialogue sessions will be organised in ATARCA. The discussions at the Untitled festival and other dialogue sessions will feed into the development of the project’s policy recommendations. 

ATARCA is a collaborative project designed to create a scientific foundation for anti-rival compensation and governance technology. As their early work strongly indicates, economic structures and institutions need a fundamental reform to fully leverage ICT and digital resources. Through participatory designs, prototyping and interventions based on action research and data analysis, ATARCA’s members will design, implement, and deploy and analyse initial anti-rival systems. ATARCA has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

This session will be facilitated by: Dr. Ville Eloranta, Aalto University, Johannes Mikkonen, Senior Policy Expert, Demos Helsinki and Research coordinator Atte Ojanen, Demos Helsinki

ATARCA has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

@ATARCA_EU
atarca.eu 

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