The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary studio that engages with rules, regulations, market standards and cultural norms through art and design media and practice.
I was hired alongside Joëlle Dubé to carry out their creative research project, “Inviting Future Generations into Present Negotiations.”
Design
Research
Writing
Facilitation
November 2019 – September 2021 (part-time)
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal & remote
Amongst deliberations where hyperrational modes of knowing dominate, short-termism proliferates. This near-sighted focus on the here and now threatens the very existence of the unborn. How might we help decision-makers better connect to the not-here and not-yet?
Process As an initial starting point, we were given the task of interviewing international thought leaders whose projects constituted inspiring case studies for our research, determining how and why creative deliberation practices are being used.
At the same time, we were encouraged to look at indigenous approaches to governance such as the 7th Generation Principle of the Iroquois Great Law, unpacking how caring traditions and cultures of kinship foster long-termism.
Beginning as a study, the project evolved into a participatory policymaking workshop, in which one group speaks to a future issue from the present while the other speaks to a future issue from the future (as if they would have traveled, without aging, through time in a time machine). Facilitators found that participants who assumed the roles of future generations felt more empathy for the potential realities those people might face, which motivated them to advocate for more radical, effective solutions.
Collaboration In addition to conducting formal interviews for our case studies, our process included informal interviews with various scholars and practitioners, as well as regular meetings with Sarah Brown and Jonathan Lapalme from ORN and Fang-Jui Chang, Chloe Treger and Konstantina Koulouri from Dark Matter Labs, a strategic design lab and one of ORN’s partners. Dark Matter's work on long-termism is documented here.
Mapping Four months into the research, we pulled together all our notes, broke them down into individual post-its, then did some mapping to uncover emergent themes and patterns. Our notes encompassed not only what we learned from the case studies, but also insights gathered from various books, papers, meetings and events. This session resulted in our gaining a deeper recognition of the ontological dimensions of short-termism, and also generated the first iteration of our “relational mediums,” the set of concepts uniting our two vectors of research.
When it comes to the slow-moving, broad-reaching crises that threaten the lives and livelihoods of future generations (ie. climate change), one can cite statistics all day without gaining anywhere near the level of response that a less severe but more immediate threat generates (ie. a kitchen fire). While there are many reasons for this, one we’ve identified is that nothing motivates us quite like direct experience. Herein lies the challenge with accounting for distant others – it is impossible to have a direct experience with them; the relationship is necessarily mediated. How that relation is mediated is where things get interesting.
We use the word “simulation” to refer to creative practices that mediate these types of encounters in processes of decision-making. Simulations have the ability to trick the senses, suspend disbelief, and in doing so, extend reactive capacities beyond temporal or terrestrial limits. These arts-led experiments carry two distinct advantages: First, art can help us tap into the mind’s effervescent flow of images, feelings, plots and ideas without judgement, facilitating engagement with a greater range of knowledge and possibilities. Second, art’s media and methods constitute a diverse menu of mediation tactics, all of which leverage our susceptibility to storytelling and preference for direct experience to make abstract issues easier to grasp and ultimately respond to.
Iconography For ease of reference in our case studies, I developed a set of icons illustrating seven tools that can be used for crafting simulations.
Another way to allow future generations to be present in today's decision-making is to rethink how we perceive the other. How might we relate to alterity in a way that is non-destructive and that fosters respect and understanding? Here, we are indebted to indigenous philosophies for facilitating a sense of radical relationality. Indigeneity, and especially indigenous feminism, place relations at the center-stage of their ontology. Instead of seeing the world as populated by a plethora of subjects and objects that encounter one another at given times and spaces, radical relationality posits that the very relation that unites them is what brings them into existence, into being. We exist interdependently with others, humans and more-than-humans alike.
Relationality can help us invite future generations into our debates by posing an alternative to speaking for them. In working with negative spaces and letting room for life-to-come to decide for itself, the subtle agencies of the not-here and not-yet can be brought to the fore.
Our research into relationality and its overlap with simulations led us to isolate a few key concepts which offer ways of understanding and working within the relational worldview. Unlike the simulation tools, these “relational mediums” are not meant to be systematically applied. Rather, their value is in helping to explain and inform one’s direction intuitively as a guide more so than an instrument.
To test our growing body of knowledge and tools, we developed a virtual workshop titled “Relational Future Visioning for the City of Montreal,” held twice in November 2020.
The workshop invited participants to explore utopian visions through narrative exercises and “mental time travel.” Using present-day trends as a starting point, participants mentally traveled 40 years into the future, where they gave voice to the realms of possibility that lie beyond the short-term imagination using narrative fiction.
The year is 2060 and you are living an ideal life as [ROLE] in Montreal. Describe your experience.
The year is 2060 and I am living an ideal life as a Material Consultant in Montreal. Be they left-over from the era of industrial capitalism, or newly produced in the contemporary era of eco-construction, I volunteer information on the various qualities and quantities of materials found across the city, exchanging information with people on why certain materials should or should not be reused, mixed, burned, recycled, or used for specific purposes, as well as what, where, or who they might look to for alternatives. I pick things up, look them over, run my hands over them, hold them up to my nose, and generally try my best to glean as much information from the senses as possible, though I do occasionally need to forward items onto the Material Chemists or Design Historians to properly identify something. When an item is deemed useless for the intended task but useful for something else, I’ll send it off to a Material Depot for greater ease of redistribution.
I fell into this line of work out of a love for making and the tactile and a desire to be involved with construction processes, despite being small, frail, and more on the studious side. As a Consultant I often travel from site to site, advising, assisting, learning, reclaiming and rearranging the myriad materials and makers that cross my path. While I also sometimes work out of a shared studio with other Material Specialists, I appreciate the traveling because it lets me meet new people and get some exercise, as well as some much-needed time outdoors. I find it both relaxing and energizing to traverse the many newly-established greenbelts as they weave their way in and out of the urban fabric, keeping a close look-out in case I spot discarded materials, or occasionally fruit trees and wild edibles along the way. The second is rarer than the first, since the trails are very popular with the city’s growing number of Practical Ecologists. Quick as they are to beat me to wild harvests, I still love them. They’ve done a lot to bring biodiversity back to the city, which has greatly improved physical and mental wellbeing among both human and nonhuman inhabitants. We Material Specialists also work quite closely with them to develop plans and reports regarding material properties and environmental interactions – a complex but essential line of work that neither of us could do on our own.
From these visions emerged an assortment of patterns, commonalities and colorful outliers that carried over into our final exercise: “backcasting” for the years 2020-2060, where time-traveling participants disclosed the history of events and interventions that led to their dreams becoming reality.
Report In September 2021, we released a digital publication containing research and practical guidance for strategic designers interested in developing creative bureaucratic experiments.
While the report mentions relationality, the content leans more towards simulations. Joelle and I felt that we needed to do further research into relational philosophy before we could do justice to this angle.
As of 2024, we are working on a follow-up to be published under the title Relational Mediums: Connecting with future life. Stay tuned!
