New Geography of Living by Demos Helsinki & Dark Matter Labs [FI/UK] // HETERODOX INSTITUTIONS

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In this session, we will explore the possibility of a new way of living, something that overcomes the centre-periphery distinction and aims to create a language for a new aspirational way of living.

Session Type: New Narratives
Agenda Track: Nature-Human, Heterodox Institutions
Interaction level: Some of time
Movement: None 
Screen: Good to have 
Time: Friday 24th September 11–12.30 EEST 

In recent years, living costs have skyrocketed, while some neighbourhoods, areas, and even cities are becoming desolate. People are increasingly in competition while living among millions of neighbours. City centres are being drained from the spaces for connecting that previously have been the very essence of living. Cities are increasingly being built for capital, but it is unclear for whom these cities are built for.

Ultimately, we aim to reconceptualise what living in cities-villages-countryside could look like in the 21st century.

A compartmentalised model of urban core – suburbia – countryside does not work anymore, but we do not have a clear understanding of what can replace the monopolistic model of urban development. With the unforeseen infrastructure investment (stimulus and refurbishment in the Global North and new developments in Global South) we have a unique opportunity to reimagine economic geography.

Together, in this session we will be rethinking the language, models, institutions and forms of knowledge that inform geographical development. Demos Helsinki and Dark Matter Labs have been working towards developing a new geographical model for living that would unlock true alternatives for the futures of life in cities. But this work is still incomplete.

This session will be hosted by Johannes Nuutinen from Demos Helsinki and Jake Heitland and Juhee Hahm from Dark Matter Labs.

@DemosHelsinki, @DarkMatter_Labs

demoshelsinki.fi, darkmatterlabs.org

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How inclusive is your future narrative? By ALT-TOPIA // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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We are concerned about climate change and rising sea levels. Research and new innovations are helping us fight climate change. We are imagining a future with architecture adapted to rising sea levels. We are projecting cities which will withstand climate change. But in the present, there are parts of the world where people experience floods and drought every year. As we are scraping to fight climate change, it is already a daily part of many lives. In this future narrative, where do these people stand?

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination, 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New narratives 
Interaction level: Most of the time (through conversation and miro board)
Movement level: Some (placard writing: what is your ‘inclusive future’?)
Screen need: Needed all the time

Imagine a new social housing policy where rooftop activities and functions are included to improve social life and cohesion. On the other side, there are dense cities where people have limited open space, so they use rooftops extensively for gardening, playing, drying clothes and gathering. One is structured implication and the other one came from the need. How do these two narratives go side by side?

Many people are relentlessly working towards automation of industries. The garment industry is one example of this. To ease up fast fashion and make the fashion industry more sustainable, people are leaning towards automation. Now think about the female garment worker who works on an hourly salary, earns for her family and is empowered by her economic freedom. What will happen to her in the age of automation? How will she fit into the narrative of future industries?

We like to imagine future narratives, but sometimes we don’t even realise we’re leaving out some parts of the world. This is a call for an inclusive place, to discuss the future we are imagining, who and where in the world we are imagining for and affecting, and how inclusive or exclusive that narrative is. In the end, we only have one world, and our future narratives cannot remain isolated imaginations.

A conscious future narrative is more desirable than an exclusive one. We believe that narrators should declare their perspective, position and context when they are proposing a new future narrative. We must consider inclusiveness, and how we will impact others not included in our narratives. For a sustainable future world, an inclusive narrative is key.

Are you a thinker practicing towards the future? Are you a narrator of the future world? Do you have a story, imagination, vision for the future? The session is inviting people who want to have a conversation, discussion and exchange for an inclusive future. 

With this inclusive narrative we aim to give a conscious nudge to the future thinker. When we talk about the future, we are hoping to consciously think about whose future we mean by this. We hope to build a conscious group or a platform where we express not only the ones we are including but also the one we are not including and why we are doing so. Through more connections and interactions, we want to build an inclusive platform and an inclusive future. 

ALT-TOPIA is a research and design platform/studio for practicing alternative realities through different approaches and scales, from detail to speculative world-building, which can generate innovations and projections for inclusive future wellbeing in the face of converging crises and complex challenges.

Sadia Humayra Mounata is the founder of the practice ALT-TOPIA. She is a speculative architect and researcher living and working in Germany through freelancing and collaboration in different projects, such as: Digital Unforgeting: Future of Archives, the Future of Post-Death, and Empathy Playground. 

Linkedin: linkedin/sadia humayra
Twitter: @sadia1302
Website: alt-topia.com

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Tech narratives and the collective good by Bethnal Green Ventures & Future Narratives Lab // New models of economy and governance

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A fierce debate rages over the most effective ways to tackle the problems that our use of technology is causing for democracy, equality, and society as a whole. Built into the terms of these debates are a series of unhelpful assumptions that constrict imagination and undermine the perceived viability of truly radical approaches. 

Agenda track: New models of economy & governance
Session type: New narratives 
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Good to have
Day: Thursday 23 September

In this session we will interrogate concepts including data privacy, tech for good and the narratives deployed by big tech companies, to explore the individualising and extractive narratives that underlie the way that technology is thought about and discussed today.

Through group discussion we will work together to unpack the common foundations of these approaches, and explore more constructive alternatives, as the basis for practical steps that can help us reimagine our relationship with technology.

This session should be of interest to people working in technology as a founder, funder or policy maker, or anyone looking to improve the impact of technology in the world today.

Milly Shotter is Brand & Communications Manager at Bethnal Green Ventures, Europe’s leading early-stage tech-for-good VC firm. Milly has a background in creative production and communications. 

Daniel Stanley is Founder & CEO of the Future Narratives Lab, a nonprofit initiative that works to analyse societal narratives, design new alternatives, and create strategies to spread them. He has a background in community organising and social psychology, and is Creative Director at strategic communications consultancy Cohere Partners. 

@dajastan @narrativeslab @millyshotter @bg_ventures

 

bethnalgreenventures.com & futurenarrativeslab.org

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Good hair day gathering

Subversive Care as a Practice for Belonging: Prospects of Community Care by Akunna Onwen [FI] // CIVIC IMAGINATION & ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS

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A sense of belonging in the communities that surround you is an elemental human need. In this session we are imagining community care as a practice for belonging. 

Agenda track:  3 Civic imagination, 2 Ontological politics & 4 Heterodox institutions
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement: None
Screen need: Possible to use audio only

Belonging and even just existing in a marginalized body can be challenging or even dangerous. Safer spaces, working on “from us to us” principles for marginalized people are still quite rare. Exclusion has a large effect on society and individuals. 

Care is a concept that we are familiar with. Community care and healing as a tool for communities to survive and thrive in spite of discrimination and racism is more unknown. Community care and belonging have transformative potential as they do not focus on the individual but the community around the individuals. 

Good Hair Day celebrates afro hair and Afro-Finns’ wellbeing through hope and joy, and will serve as a case study of community care and community organizing for this session. Good Hair Day uses community care as a form on anti-discrimination and antiracism focusing on the community needs and wants. I myself have been for long intrigued by belonging and the sense of belonging and explored the topic through a personal and academic interest. The community organizing work through Good Hair Day has only deepened the interest.

We welcome everyone who works with or is interested in communities, marginalized communities or wants to reflect on the changing concepts of community, communality and belonging in this world in flux. The session gives you the means to build community care practices in your own work, as well as the connections enabling these practices.

Akunna Onwen (@akunnaon) | TwitterAkunna Onwen is an expert working on issues of equality and equity. Currently Onwen is working for the Anti-Racist Forum of Finland as a project manager developing a hate crime online reporting tool and a network around it.

Good Hair Day collective is an antiracist movement that tackles racism with joy and hope and Afro-Finnish community care.

goodhairday.fi  @akunnaon

 

Good Hair Day group by Sam Boateng

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Reimagine Wellbeing Part I: Conscious multilevel cultural evolution – a Paradigmatic alternative to individualism by Life Itself & Prosocial World [UK/FR/US]

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Fighting climate change with technology and changing consumption behaviour won’t be enough. The pivotal answer may be to finally pursue a world where cultivating better ways of being, for current and future humans, is the goal of social and economic policy. Life Itself is hosting two sessions on this theme of well-being and sustainability. The first is a collaboration with Prosocial World and esteemed evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, exploring how a shift away from an individualistic paradigm might transform our world for the better.

Agenda track: 2 Ontological politics, 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Some
Movement level: None
Screen need: Possible to use audio only
Day: Thursday 23 September 14–16 UTC | 17–18 EST

Individualism – the idea that all things social can be reduced to the motives and actions of individuals – has long historical roots and has been the dominant intellectual tradition of western societies for the last 70 years. An alternative to Individualism is the idea that societies can qualify as organisms in their own right. This idea also has long historical roots, but only very recently has it been placed on a solid scientific foundation. David will provide an overview of the new paradigm and its implications for positive change efforts and the unification of science and spirituality.

The second session on Friday will be a workshop organised together with Moral Imaginations. In the workshop participants – using collective imagining methods – will dive into the implications on policy and current possibilities to progress this shift in policy-making.

You can participate in either one or both sessions. Attending the Thursday session is not a requirement for participating in the second part on Friday.

Life Itself is a community of pragmatic utopians, committed to practical action for a radically wiser, healthier world. Life Itself creates co-living hubs, starts businesses, does research and engages in activism to pioneer a wiser culture.

lifeitself.us @forlifeitself 

Prosocial World (PW) is a non-profit organization that seeks to evolve a more prosocial world. Inspired by scientists, PW takes the word “evolve” seriously, basing their methods on the most recent developments in evolutionary, complex systems, and contextual behavioral science to enhance cooperation and inspire positive change for the well-being of others. David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, as well as one of the directors of Prosocial world. His publications include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society; Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, and This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, among others.

prosocial.world @David_S_Wilson

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Reimagine Wellbeing Part II by Life Itself & Moral Imaginations [UK/FR] // ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS

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Fighting climate change with technology and changing consumption behaviour won’t be enough. The pivotal answer may be to finally pursue a world where cultivating better ways of being, for current and future humans, is the goal of social and economic policy. 

Agenda track: 2 Ontological politics, 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: None
Screen need: All the time
Day: Friday 24 September

Any social or political envisioning or policy is constrained by an invisible frame: by the implicit values and views on which it is created, such as its views on the nature of human beings and the good life. Life Itself will be hosting two sessions to work on changing the narrative of what we are capable of as humans and the narrative of wellbeing, and what it means to bring this shift into policy-making.

This second session on Friday is a workshop organised together with Moral Imaginations. In the workshop, participants – using collective imagining methods – will dive into the implications on policy and current possibilities to progress this shift in policy-making.

You can participate in one or both sessions. Attending the conversation on Thursday is not a requirement for participating in the second part on Friday. The first Thursday session is organised together with Prosocial World and the conversation is fuelled by professor David S. Wilson‘s key insights from his wide work on group or multilevel selection in evolution, and applying evolutionary theory to different aspects of humanity, such as studying cultural evolution or group health.

Life Itself is a community of pragmatic utopians, committed to practical action for a radically wiser, healthier world. Life Itself creates co-living hubs, starts businesses, does research and engages in activism to pioneer a wiser culture.

lifeitself.us @forlifeitself 

Moral Imaginations is building a movement of moral imagination: collective imagining to increase radical kinship with the human and more-than-human worlds, present, past and future. They facilitate and develop collective imagining to empower people to create shared imaginings of the future. Phoebe Tickell is co-founder of Moral Imaginations, who believes that we need new stories of what it means to be human.

moralimaginations.com
@moral_imagining @solarpunk_girl

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Associate, the resident AI Poet of Untitled, by Otso Havanto [FI]

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Untitled’s resident poet Associate is back. Associate creates an experimental and poetic digital documentation from the various discussions that take place within the Untitled events. Associate is at the same time an independent artwork and experimental documentation of the festival. It is displayed online at associate.associates

The recorded discussions in Untitled meetings and festival events are processed through a machine learning algorithm. This process picks up parts of sentences and individual words that accumulate and mix in the ever increasing database. The algorithm forms new connections between various textual elements based on machine learning models that analyse the context and statistical properties of individual words and phrases.

The machine learning model aims to bring light to emerging and new connections between textual nodes, and reflect on various alternative meanings and paths derived from the language used within Untitled discussions.

Privacy and anonymisation of data is a core function of the artwork. All the conversations recorded at Untitled Festival that are used for Associate, are processed in a way that it is impossible to identify an individual speaker. The recordings are not published. 

The version at display on the website creates new textual interpretation clusters and poetic variations from the Untitled discussions, ultimately aiming to foster the creation of Untitled’s own unique discourse engine. 

Associate uses a statistical machine learning model that has been trained by the Common Crawl dataset, and by the OntoNotes source material from the University of Pennsylvania. The work accumulates ever expanding textual material from the Untitled discussions and produces novel statistical vectors between the various meanings of words and concepts. Over time the work trains a model that is unique to the language used by the Untitled community and platform.

The artwork aims to encourage us to use big data as a tool and resource for the various communities, movements, and other non-commercial organizations, that aim to create a more just and fair future society for all.

Otso Havanto is a new media artist and a maker creating digital art that leverages data and experimental analog/digital interfaces, and audiovisual sculptures and instruments exploring both new and obsolete technologies. Otso works cross-disciplinary with different tools and methods, focusing on generative processes and automation.

The artwork can be found on the following link: associate.associates

More of the artist: otsohavanto.net

A poem by Associate

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The Future of Work – the stories we tell ourselves and the ones we’d like to be true by Chipo Hamukoma [ZA] // CIVIC IMAGINATION

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In 2000, 11% of the global labour force was in Africa, and 25% in China. By 2100, 42% of the global labour force will be in Africa, and only 8% in China. As our future narratives are increasingly orientated towards a technology-driven world, where do all these people figure in? This session led by Chipo Hamukoma investigates the stories we tell ourselves about the future of work and the ones we’d like to be true.

Agenda track: 3 Civic imagination
Session type: New narratives 
Interaction level: Most of the time
Movement level: Some (Warm up at the beginning)
Screen need: Good to have

Our imaginations of the future are largely embedded in the past. New narratives of the future are shaped by climate realities and corporate forecasting. What does it mean to pause and collectively imagine a new world of work that honours the things we know to be true and creates space for more possibilities?

My name is Chipo Hamukoma, Research Manager at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. I’ve worked with governments across Africa solving complex problems in challenging contexts and am now exploring how to get more young Africans engaged in income generating activities. 

I grew interested in understanding the future when I led a project on the Future of African Cities. Which gave a really granular perspective on how to build cities for the future.  My current work is in solving youth unemployment in South Africa and that puts me at the intersection of futures and work. With our narratives about the future as old as they are, there’s a really interesting opportunity for us to introduce contemporary hopes and dreams to the stories we tell about the future.

This festival session will be a collective intelligence exercise in identifying 3–5 core principles to improve the nature of work, created for people who enjoy thinking, complex problems and creating.

From the insights developed in this session we can work towards distilling the fundamental nature of work, focusing on the ideas that will allow for more inclusive advocacy in discussions of the post/inter-Covid future of work.

@n_hamukoma
www.linkedin.com/in/nchamukoma 

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What kind of organisations survive in a regenerative world? by Halogen & Future Fit Leadership [NO] // NATURE–HUMAN

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We as societies need to move away of our current forms of action based on extracting resources from people and the planet around us. This form of action is pervaded by a sense of separation from our own true nature, from each other and from the natural world around us. Moving beyond sustainable, we believe the future will be regenerative – finding harmony with our own human-natures and the wider nature of life on Earth. But what kind of organisations have a role in a regenerative future, and what are the characteristics of a truly regenerative organisation?

Agenda track: 1 Nature – human
Session type: New narratives
Day: Thursday 23 September

In order to open up possibilities for regenerative futures, we will need to reinvent our organisations. Join Halogen, Future Fit Leadership Academy and Demos Helsinki to explore the qualities of a regenerative organisation and discover how our business becomes life-affirming for ourselves and all life on Earth.

Our businesses are powerful forces of agency. Each organisation has both an inner-collective of people within its culture, and also a network of stakeholder relations and communities through its ecosystem connected through vision, values and value.

In enabling organisations to become more regenerative we unlock potential in the people and stakeholder communities touched by regenerative organisations, hence help system-change beyond reducing harm into life-affirming futures.

This two-hour workshop is for a diverse group of cultural creatives, social pioneers, leadership and organisational development practitioners, sustainability specialists and regeneration explorers.

A rich picture of themes will emerge from this session and be shared after the event with the
participants, along with information on the systemic tools, frames and methods used throughout the
workshop.

Halogen is a cross-disciplinary design and innovation agency from Norway. halogen.no

The Future Fit Leadership Academy is a community of forward-thinking practitioners involved in transforming leaders and organisations. ffla.co

Demos Helsinki is a globally operating, independent think tank, which believes that
only together can we fight for a fair, sustainable, and joyful next era. demoshelsinki.fi

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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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Contact us

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