The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is a transdisciplinary art studio that engages with rules, regulations, market standards and cultural norms.
In January 2021, ORN awarded me a fellowship to continue developing my class project. The project was further expanded on through multiple design competitions.
This culminated in the launch of the Value Collective [Pilot] in 2022.
Design
Research
Writing
Facilitation
January 2020 – November 2021 (2 years, part-time)
Tiohtià:ke/Montreal & remote
Some work is simply not lucrative, and many activities that promote joy, wellbeing, and purpose won’t generate a penny. In a time when care and reciprocity are manifesting themselves as key components of social and environmental resilience, we must find ways to realize valuable work despite financial constraints.
Value Collective aims to support people whose desired work is valuable, but not profitable. It proposes rent-free living and workspace for a rotating cohort of self-organized residents, alongside other forms of support. This structure functions like an incubator, only rather than businesses, Value Collective incubates relationships, values, motivations, knowledge, efforts, and unforeseeable possibilities. The broader goal is to act as a living lab for alternative economic practices.
January - April 2020
Value Collective first emerged from a final paper for the experimental seminar Excess and the City, offered by The Office of Rules and Norms at Concordia University in winter 2020. The course invited artistic engagement with a systemic analysis of the housing crisis.
Titled “Creating societal value through rent-free living arrangements: How might we leverage rent savings as an economic instrument to generate non-financial forms of value?”, my paper opened with a fictional news article about a speculative institution for non-financial value creation called Value Collective before delving into an argument for more diversity in economic thinking and practice.
January - May 2021
In November 2020, the C40 Students Reinventing Cities competition was launched. Hoping to continue developing Value Collective, I approached former classmates Thomas Heinrich, Gabriel Townsend Darriau, and Maya Jain about forming a team. Our submission, Futurs Possibles, includes Value Collective as a measure for bottom-up urban development.
March 2021
Design for Change (DFC) was a user experience (UX) hackathon organized by Wilfred Laurier University. Participants had 30 days to develop a response to the following question: “How might we create social transformation that shifts users towards greener behaviour and sustainable practices?”
Similar to C40, I joined the challenge to give myself a context to work within, drawing on methods from UX and service design to test my concept and round out my ideas.
Research My hypothesis was that the desire to respond to impending ecological collapse far outweighs the range and depth of actual opportunities to do so. The problem is not a lack of interest, nor a lack of ideas, but rather a lack of capability due to systemic constraints. Many people are already doing what they can, and want to do more. By removing barriers to their process, we can widen the scope of what they can do, activating latent agencies and bringing unique knowledges and capabilities to the fore.
Though rent-free residencies was my proposed solution, I wanted to use UX research to challenge this theory, learn more about my intended users, and evolve the design accordingly. For this, I developed an interview method to determine the motivating factors, enabling conditions, and systemic constraints experienced by people undertaking personal projects/voluntary work.
Personas Using the digital mapping software Miro, I performed 5 in-depth interviews with friends who I felt were doing the kind of work I envisioned Value Collective supporting. The resulting data influenced Value Collective's structure and offerings, and formed the basis of 6 personas I created to represent Value Collective's potential users.
Design fiction As an early experiment with non-financial value exchange, I drafted a bill for my own personal time-based currency, which was vehemently rejected by the first interviewee. The exercise revealed the tension and discomfort that arises when transactional modes of exchange infringe on domains traditionally governed by gift economies.
For the remaining interviews, I shelved the currency in favour of asking interviewees how they might like to be compensated for their time, and was met with a resounding, “Nothing.” Interviews thus concluded with an exchange of gratitude.
Slides Based on everything I’d learned, I developed 5 ‘pillars’ to guide Value Collective’s development. Each corresponds to a foundational premise and productive question.
More concrete elements of the proposal are summarized in my submission slide deck, which also includes a summary of my rationale.
May 2021
By spring, four proposals had been shortlisted for the redevelopment of 4000 St Patrick, the site of the C40 professional category and the building that modeled as Value Collective in the initial paper. I organized a meeting with one of the leading developers to pitch the inclusion of Value Collective in their proposal.
The discussion revolved around how non-financial value exchange might be used in place of monetary exchange (ie. rent). For the developer, this raised questions around legality and liability. She also stressed how the need to recoup financial costs is very high in new builds or extensive reconstruction projects. This led me to conclude that Value Collective would be more feasible for an existing building with low maintenance costs and for which the owner had no mortgage.
Given the tension with 'unearned increment' – a term referring to the financial value captured by a landlord as a result of the non-financial value creation of its inhabitants – I also felt that Value Collective was best suited for a publicly-owned building that could eventually transition to a land trust/coop model.
Floor plan In anticipation of this meeting, I designed a speculative floor plan, integrating it into a pamphlet for ease of sharing. This was also a way to circulate the new research and content produced for C40 Students Reinventing Cities and Design for Change.
January - August 2021
Shortly after forming a team for C40, Thomas Heinrich, Gabriel Townsend Darriau and I were contacted by The Office of Rules and Norms. Along with another former classmate, Christine White, we were offered a fellowship to continue developing our class projects with funding and mentorship from former professor Marie-Sophie Banville.
In addition to Value Collective, projects included Thomas’s Concrete Capital, Gabriel’s Highest and Best Use, and Christine’s Statements of Sounds and Emotions. The four of us agreed to work together and realize our projects as a collective, calling ourselves Shock Value after the name of the fellowship.
Interventions The sequence was consciously chosen to build an argument through practice, as Concrete Capital kicked off with a well-researched critique of financialized cities, HBU and Statements facilitated a more embodied and emotive engagement with notions of value, and Value Collective ended with a concrete proposal for how we might experiment with alternative value frameworks and systems of organizing.
Office hours The Office of Rules and Norms organized a number of “Office Hour” events throughout the fellowship to publicize the interventions and provide insight into our activities. The following video is from mid-June, shortly before the official end of the fellowship. In it I summarize my engagement with the three design competitions mentioned above.
Though I had yet to determine my own intervention, I was interested in organizing a participatory finale to the solo design process, opening it up so others might be able to join and make use of my conceptual scaffolding.
August 2021
One month after my conversation with the real estate developer, I learned of the official launch of la Cite-des-Hospitalieres (CdH), a project inviting community initiatives to participate in the transitional occupation of a repurposed convent recently acquired by the City of Montreal. Phase one, ‘Project Hotel,’ accepted applications for short-term occupancies of 1-30 days.
To do justice to CdH’s unique vocational heritage, 7 directives were outlined in collaboration with the religious order who sold the building to the city. Occupants are selected for their relevance to these directives: reconciliation, female leadership, healing and reconnection, teaching, hospitality, creativity, and the common good.
Given its open-ended yet purposeful nature, I felt Value Collective had the potential to relate to most, if not all, of the directives. The convent’s unique communal residential architecture also struck me as ideal for the residency program. I applied in July and was accepted for a week-long occupation in August.
I prepared a full week of events: 3 structured workshops and 2 semi-structured “open houses,” including presentations to contextualize the activities.
Visual Identity To publicize the event series, I created this illustration based on the one from the first pamphlet. Where the first featured a magenta warehouse reminiscent of 4000 St Patrick, the new one featured CdH in bright blue.
Pamphlet The schedule was posted online and incorporated into a new informational pamphlet about Value Collective.
To encourage people to come for more than one event, participants were invited to pick up a pamphlet on their way in, keep it for the duration of the week’s activities, and leave notes in the margins for organizers to collect at the end.
Collaboration Realizing the week-long event series was a team effort. I received support from teammates, friends, and friends of friends alike. Sarah Brown of ORN agreed to cover the cost of the rental fee. Coordination and facilitation was where Shock Value and my team for C40 converged, becoming the 5-person team now known as the Value Collective Development Crew. A special thanks goes to Maya Jain and Thomas Heinrich for helping to develop and refine the workshops.
Reflection My goals for this event were to invite a wider audience into the design process and to start the relationship with CdH. I was also aiming to build enough confidence in the project that momentum might continue beyond the scope of the fellowship, which concluded at the end of summer 2021.
The occupation saw the Value Collective network expand considerably, and generated much interest with the CdH selection committee, who requested a report of our activities and expressed support for our intention to pursue a more permanent occupation. From this perspective, I feel the event was a huge success.
November 2021
Mid-August, my teammate Gabriel passed along a funding opportunity called the Housing Supply Challenge, organized by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. This government-funded innovation challenge invited applicants to identify a barrier to the development of affordable housing and propose a solution to address it. Selected applicants received $75,000 in incubation funding.
Our application identified financialization as a barrier to affordable housing, and proposed a rent-free residency program in the context of a living lab for alternative economic practices as a measure to address it. I contacted Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella, one of the leaders of the Next-Generation Cities Institute, to request she partner with us for the next phase of the project. Carmela agreed to bring our project aboard, provide support and stewardship, and receive the funds through Concordia University’s Office of Research.
I prepared the application in August and received word of our selection in November.
Pilot Value Collective spent the following year establishing a network of partners, developing operational protocols, and prototyping offerings with friends, collaborators, and members of the public.
You can find documentation about the pilot project here.