Terms of service.
Chapter 1. On Civic Innovation. And Life Itself.
I don’t know anything about computer science, but I liked the concept of “weird machines” when I first came across it in a magazine or something. I like the idea of playing around with seemingly fixed and programmed things and making them act differently. I think that’s what I do for work — or at least try to do. Audre Lorde says “you can’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.” I’ve thought a lot about the various houses that exist today. There are institutional structures of dominance. There are the everyday objects of habituation and oppression throughout an inequitable world. There is even the absurd nature of reality itself, the shared reality that we all find ourselves trapped within - trapped together - where we seem to be an animal built to ask questions that we are unable ever to answer. In fact:
When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words.
The riddle does not exist. - Wittgenstein
Regardless, I think Audre Lorde is right about method. You can’t dismantle something the same way it was built. Even a hammer must be transformed, reversed 180° and used in an opposite motion, to take out a nail its other side put in. But I do believe you can fuck with the master’s tools, and when they can no longer build or hold their structure together, you can transform the tools to transform the house to transform reality to transform yourself into something new, something entirely unexpected. The past house is always there, embedded in the structure of the new and not to be forgotten. Like a bad memory, it is always coloring the present; but just as a memory can remind us of what once was so that we don’t make the same mistakes, past structures bind us to responsibility and the duty to never repeat the sins of the past, for we cannot turn our heads to it. We first must bear witness; then we must be clever; then we must create.
I’ve worked from when I was 20 years old in a field that’s kinda called civic innovation. This phrase makes me role my eyes, as I hope it does yours, but that’s the label my work has often been given. Why do I care? Well I’ve thought a lot about it. I’d put things this way:
“Innovation” is nothing other than when a novelty becomes a banality. A new invention or idea or action found its way to the world, and either remained a novelty until it faded away into uselessness, or it caught on by being used, and subsequently faded into the background of a system as part of its expected basic functioning. Like the smartphone. You can’t “do” innovation as if it were some basic action — it is always just something that happened; a tracing, after the fact, of many different actions and circumstances. But what you can do is create the conditions for novelty to emerge and facilitate its use to change a system (or a “house,” to return to the poet’s word).
“Civic” is wherever, whenever, however people come together to define and act for a common good by creating institutions. Institutions are just anything people create that are supposed to last after they’re gone — they can be government departments, advocacy organizations, a document, a baseball team, a sets of values and habits, a literal house, etc. What a common good is is whatever a community of people bounded together by some set of circumstances thinks is for the good. This value is relative.
“Civic Innovation” emerges when novelty and institutions are actively and intentionally kept in tension with each other. Novelty (what the philosopher Hannah Arendt calls the “character of startling unpredictability”) and institutions (or what she calls “islands of predictability”) are seemingly incompatible with each other. And that’s the key. Real Civic Innovation implies rebellion, or creative contradiction. It is about beginning something new, and holding a tension of what Simone de Beauvoir calls “a perpetual contestation of the means by the ends and of the ends by the means.”
Sorry, this has already turned into a lot. (Like this website. If it were to be called a style, I would call it “Ballistic Neue.”) There are some laws I follow more carefully than others.
ΔS_univ ≥ 0
I guess what I do do, simply, is design — civic design. From the journalism of FRONTLINE to the novel use of game design for social change at the Engagement Lab, to the design action research pilots with the UN and International Red Cross / Red Crescent, to being program director for pilots at the City of Boston civic R&D team the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, to designing innovation curriculum for the federal US government with the Partnership with Public Service, to my decade of volunteering as a part of the Medical Reserve Corps, to being the director of special projects at a community media center called the Brookline Interactive Group — throughout this time, I’ve designed things in a civic context. But always, I’ve tried to make my living as a trickster, a coyote.
I’ve worked in both small and large civic institutions, but I never saw myself as a person “changing things from the inside.” I’ve tried to use my various privileges to fuck with the master’s tools. To make institutions weird. To make lasting things new and new things lasting. Never to aim at a particular end by “any means necessary” and never to implement any means without thinking of the consequences — but instead to push and pull at institutions, or technologies, or people, or hammers, or myself, to question and reflect on the means in which they do things and the ends toward which they reach.
Perhaps my guiding ethic through all of it has been my belief that civic life should not be inclusive. It should be expansive. Growing to meet the living. Encompassing new people and new ideas so that civic life itself is required to change around the people whom it meets - not the other way around. I say civic life, but have only so far defined civic, and not life. What does it mean to be a living thing? What do I think life even is? Why do I care about the work I do with my life? A long time ago the educator John Dewey began a book like this:
“RENEWAL OF LIFE BY TRANSMISSION. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.”
- John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)
I think that is why I care.
Chapter 2. Staying With the Trouble. The Cost.
Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself.
A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?"
"Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."
"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again.
The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply. (Master Dōgen)
. . .
Like air, it is assumed that the support of government or civic institutions is distributed everywhere, that it touches all people, all places, and all problems equally. Indeed, many of us do feel the punitive pressures of government laws, surveillance, police, and politics everywhere.
But it is not the case that the wind of change and innovation touch all equally. There may be traces of it everywhere, but in order to affect the people who most need it, or people who are new, or those who are hidden in windless places, we who are called civic innovators need to continually practice; to continually fan the fire of innovation and ideas of radical pragmatism; to reach new people in new ways; to experiment; to put ourselves out on limbs, into the margins, or on the sides of cliffs where we lean over. There is a cost to this. Burnout, for one. Loneliness, another. Disaster, maybe.
Because the moment we stop practice, the moment we take as a given that government or civic institutions, like air, is everywhere equal, is the moment innovation stops, trust recedes, and equity and social justice are no longer being served by our institutions. The spirit of experimentation must be fanned nonstop, must be a continual movement, a never-ending process of engagement with people and with the difficult spaces and ideas where little wind traditionally reaches. This is what my experience says to me is the most important characteristic of civic design.
Here is a case study in what I mean:
→ I worked for 7 years on a project at the epicenter of Boston’s figurative and literal intersection of homelessness, active addiction, and mental health crises called Mass + Cass. The project was called the Engagement Center (we didn’t have time to think of a better name). I worked for the City of Boston, on its civic innovation team, called the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM). The problem we sought to tackle was that people at this exposed and dangerous intersection needed a place to go during the day, since the existing shelters were only open at night and besides, these were places many did not want to or could not enter, for a multitude of reasons. The city needed something without the restrictions (like metal detectors or gender conformity) and people needed a place inside that actually made them feel they were being treated as human beings, not just bodies to be housed. We sought to build the last refuge space in the entire region where anyone, in any mental state or legal status, could go to satisfy those simple human needs like sitting down, using a bathroom, watching tv, playing a game - or, if ready, to seek services such as medical, housing, recovery, or mental health assistance. For the first three years, constant experimentation was happening. We’d bring in experimental pilot programs like yoga, writing groups, full orchestra concerts, restorative justice policies where no one got kicked out for good, and worked with the clients to continually design and make the space anew: to be more human, more humane, a place where one would simply want to be. We even did some things that were not technically legal. But they worked.
But after those few years MONUM lost some of its influence in running the show, and traditional government forces began to take over - like the police and government bureaucrats who had never visited - and the experimentation stopped. The palpable attention guests felt, the trust they had built that the City truly was trying something different, began to wane when more restrictive policies came in, and pilot programming winded down. For the first time in three years, violence increased - the restorative justice policies and welcoming nature of the space, where ownership was spread from staff to the guests, waned, and over-correction, in multiple senses of that word, became the norm. After a few years of this, the Engagement Center closed indefinitely. Trust between the City and both guests and neighbors is virtually nonexistent.
I and members of the original project team, all of whom have since moved on from the City, nonetheless continued with some desperation to work in the area. While the Engagement Center shut down, we moved our attention to the City’s biggest night shelter right next store, where we worked on a new courtyard and series of murals in the inhospitable outside space of the shelter. The courtyard included such seemingly novel things as exercise equipment, walking spaces, grass and trees, and more of those things that made a place where one would simply want to be. I mean, who would want to be confined to a bed if they were on meth!
The point is, though the institution of the City did not, a small informal innovation team “stayed with the trouble,” as the philosopher Donna Haraway writes. The moment we stop fanning the new, the different, the uninevitable, is the moment inevitability takes over and we are no longer bringing the pragmatic joy of fresh, life-affirming newness to the public. But if we are to be in the privileged position of civic innovators, to work with this public, we must pay a toll. This price is different for everyone. For me, it was burnout and it took me years to regain my footing.
There is a cost.
Chapter 3. Design. Me.
What’s included in the weird machine of stephen walter?
WHAT’S MY DEAL?
We are all, in this sense, the unchosen, but we are nevertheless unchosen together.
- Judith Butler
I believe a reason for living is the absolute fact that unpredictable things will happen. Whatever state the world and I find myself in one moment will be qualitatively different the next—perhaps better, perhaps worse, but never exactly what I could have predicted, or what any one person’s will could have put into place. A kind of salvation lies in the fact that we can’t control for all things, that no one person or system (or part of ourselves) can ever fully control for all the ways we might be able to find or practice our freedom from one moment to the next; that no matter how bad a spot we’ve put ourselves in, change will undo the constructions of our control; we are given a way out.
With this, there are experiences to be had - and to be given - no matter what. And that clings me, somehow, still, to life. It’s not the best life that matters, to paraphrase Camus, because it is a fool’s errand to think you know what that is; but the most life. The most caring act one can do for themselves is to give oneself time.
And what do I do with my time, with my life? At first, when I was a kid, it was about making those around me feel better, especially when they were sad. Then, when I realized I could make things up, I told stories to make people feel, no matter the type of feeling, as long as it moved them and welled-up something in their bodies. Then at some point it became about design. Maybe because, becoming an adult and looking at the world, I felt stories, at least coming from me, weren’t enough - that action had to be done. And design, it seemed, could tap into those very qualities about me that made me a good storyteller, that made me affect how people could feel. This sounds an awful lot like manipulation, and why isn’t it? But I hope I design things that give the better angels of our natures an easier time of existing in the real world - or at least, for us to be connected, to care about each other, for each other, with each other.
But who’s going to
let you out of that
dismal bluepurple notion of what you are
now? and I'm the one who's scared
C. Bukowski
WHY TRY?
All real living is meeting. - Martin Buber
If we accept that change exists beyond human will, for better or worse, we must also accept the responsibility that we play in helping to determine the “better or worse”: we are the mediators of the change that we cannot stop. And if we embrace unpredictability not as a bug in the universe to be designed out, but as an important feature to be designed with, we might be able to abandon the oppressive fallacy that we can somehow control reality through our technologies and instead focus our collective efforts on how we can more effectively embrace it (to more resiliently snuff out the precarity that unpredictability can cause while retaining the vibrancy it can offer). In embracing the wellspring of ultimate unpredictability while at the same time owning the culpability for how we design and deploy mediated practices and technologies with it, we find both a joy and a responsibility.
This is not a particularly original thought. “Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a straight jacket,” the writer Ralph Ellison once said, “its definition is possibility. Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos—or imagination.” And so it’s a continual source of surprise to me that the dominant values still underpinning many of the design processes for our new media and social technologies in the 21st century aim toward the collapsing of the possible into the knowable, and therefore the controllable — the comforting embrace of the straight jacket.
In our increasingly automated, yet interconnected, world, we could use a new technology of experience, one not solely focused on increasing the efficiency of routine functions, but also on increasing social and political connections, opening up the quality and range of experiences people can have as part of a collective process, and designing elements of human experience—not just predictive analytics—into the fabric of our civic and social systems. By intentionally doing this, we can create environments where it’s easier to experiment, productive to take risks, and safer to fail. We can design spaces and technologies that parallel the effective chaos/control patterns that agile systems in nature employ in order to remain resilient in the face of social, political, financial, or natural vulnerabilities.
By not focusing so much on the ends of a technology, and instead on what citizens can begin with technology, we foster a world where civic and social action, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt reminds us, is about “beginning something new… an ever-present reminder that [humans], though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.” This is the closest to anything spiritual that I have. This has kept me going in the butterfly-stomach certainty of those moments that I can’t escape being me, even though that’s all I want to do.
WHAT NOW?
So what do I design now and why do I think design is important and how can it be ethical? This quote by James Baldwin summarizes everything I think about good design [just substitute “Moses” with “good design”]:
“It is not my impression that people wish to become worse; they really wish to become better but very often do not know how. Most people assume the position, in a way, of the Jews of Egypt, who really wished to get to the promised land but were afraid of the rigors of the journey; and of course, before you embark on a journey the terrors of whatever may overtake you on that journey live in the imagination and paralyze you. It was through Moses, according to legend, that they discovered, by undertaking the journey, how much they could endure.”
What’s next? Someday I’m going to write a book called How to Get Fired from an Innovation Team. It will be based on a true story. For now, I think about a line from a great book from Alcoholics Anonymous (the largest and longest-running anarchy in the world by the way) called Living Sober: “We discover – but can hardly dare to believe right at first – that we are not alone. We are not totally unlike everybody, after all.” Do we dare to believe? Do I? Sometimes it is really tough. I don’t mind failing in this world.
And still a light moves along the river. - something i think i heard once, somewhere
-Stephen Walter