Food for Thought Tuesdays @ STREAT / 2020 (2 months) / Systems-led Design / Volunteer
The experiment
This experiment was about ‘the art of noticing’ the world around us. Seven participants, including five STREAT staff, voluntarily walked the blocks of Collingwood and Docklands, capturing what they saw, felt, heard and sensed, in response to stimuli questions to:
Understand place and how people and natural systems have co-evolved
Draw upon these understandings to build economic, ecological, green futures.
Objectives
Inspired by the work of Regenesis and Alexandra Horowitz, this experiment was about making space to probe, sense and respond in the field to help us:
Connect to source
Uncover of patterns, structures, biases
Identify and celebrate of shared values
Shape vision and intention for change as we step into the field of the future.
“...how humans perceive their environments does more than open our eyes... it opens our hearts and minds, too, gently awakening us to a world—in fact, many worlds—we’ve been missing.”
What was valued
Need for nature + space
“I was craving the greens... was trying to seek for greenery.”
“I saw two native trees, looking to escape up through the concrete.”
“I saw trees trying really hard.”
Feeling safe + secure
“I was relieved what I came back to STREAT. I felt safe, I breathed out. I felt calmness. I wouldn’t have felt safe [on the streets] after dark.”
“Lack of cars and other threats make you feel safe and relaxed.”
Familiarity, access, belonging
- “...had to pull the layers back to feel that you belong.”
- “Niche language, signage... it’s accessible, but only if you are given access.”
“Seeing the area start from almost nothing... makes me feel I belong.”
Self, local + historical awareness
“I realised I run on assumption and ignorance about my surrounds. What came before, and where and how would I find that information?”
“It’s made me think about the privilege I have living there, and what I could do to make the area more inclusive and green.”
Calling out what’s broken
“I focused on what had changed... how humans had affected the environment.”
“I saw hope without promise... intention and the promise of community development without it actually being realised.”
“Slavery is in every one of those [fashion] businesses.”
Making space + time to notice
“It was refreshing, a circuit breaker, just to get out. It directed me to think about the environment around me.”
“Walking past things I’d seen before, I looked at them in a fresh light.”
“Permission to meditate.”
“Narrow definitions of evidence and knowledge risk holding us in the patterns of the status quo, which often reinforces particular kinds of western world views and value systems.”
