Here’s an excellent written version of a talk given by Adrian McEwen (in 2015), one of the co-founders of DoES Liverpool, which is “(sort of) a makerspace (and more) in Liverpool.” His talk, The Dark Matter of Makerspaces, covers quite a bit of ground and offers some great tips and insights, not only for people running makerspaces but any kind of community space, or even many community-focused organisations.
One way of dealing both with consumerism and tighter budgets is to have access to shared resources. In this interview with Gene Homicki, co-founder and CEO of myTurn, we can learn a bit more about how people are starting and running libraries of things.
In the field of pastry, there are different flavours of doughnuts, in the field of economics, it seems there are various sizes of doughnuts. The original idea was for planetary and country-sized circles, “the goal of the Doughnut is to meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet, but what does this mean for the neighbourhoods, cities, districts or nations where we live?” Last year we looked at how Amsterdam is circling, how cities, in general, can do it, and at doughnut reading clubs.
To change a city, one should first better understand it, right? That’s the premise for this post about a thesis project by D.J. Trischler, a master of design student at the University of Cincinnati. Graphic design and branding might not be the first things we might consider changing in a city, but Trischler’s idea for, and exploration of neighbourhood-centred design is a great short trip into one way of understanding a neighbourhood and its citizens. His process was quite thorough.
There are a lot of ways to transform cities, and people often focus on new technologies, changing streets, adding parks, building differently, and all of these can work. However, there’s a way that might sound simpler but can actually have a huge impact and change how all the other ones are implemented: governance. How are governments run, by whom and for whom? A growing number of cities and nations are hoping to repair dysfunctional democracies with citizens’ assemblies.
