Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The potential for DG-ML is to liberate the human heritage of knowledge and design, so that communities and people anywhere have the full array of technologies and capabilities to address their living economic and ecological challenges. If we want to accelerate the human capability to enact sustainable development strategies across the world, the right to global designs and concrete support for building local livelihoods are fundamental pillars.
The programmes that we deliver in the museum, whether they be from schools to life-long learning, to graduate start-up businesses to whatever, how do those empower the makers of the future? And we understand how making makes us feel better. This is a building that was run in the early 18th century off one power source and produced 300 million yards of silk thread, a day, off a water source. And now it’s run off a power station. So it’s to open up that conversation about what is the future of that?
What animates you? What is the spiritual or religious impulse underneath the work you do to save those parts of our world that you want to protect and nurture? Is there a spiritual or religious teacher or movement that inspires you to do the uncomfortable work of politics or social change? What role, if any, does faith play in whatever you do that brings you out of your private life and into the public square? How do you “keep the faith” as commentator Tavis Smiley often says in signing off?
To counter poor labor practices, gig workers and entrepreneurs are now taking matters into their own hands by launching their own digital platforms for various services. Called “platform cooperatives,” these businesses bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance, to the digital world.
What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing.
Mari Margil says there are many communities across the U.S. that are pressing the issue of rights of nature through law making, community mobilization, and within the court system. The communities are building a movement and advancing a new paradigm for protecting the environment. “It’s a movement that in the past 10 years has accelerated rapidly,” she said.
Living in a city, it can be hard to relate to where your food comes from, with a majority of produce in supermarkets having limited provenance information. With research suggesting that within a decade the UK will need to import half of its food, the idea of eating locally can seem challenging.
In our current political climate, there is little appetite to build and resource huge new bureaucracies. Talent, expertise and the funding already exists within most transportation agencies. We simply have to re-tool the apparatus that was so successful in creating the high-speed network in the 20th Century.
Celebrating the collaborations that transform materials from soil to skin, we set out to visit each designer creating a full look for the Climate Beneficial Fashion Gala. Here we share excerpts from three conversations: read on for inspiration from their design practices and pathways to sustainability, and how each consumer, designer, and the fashion industry as a whole can take part in environmental restoration.
Local currencies of the kind described here are more revolutionary than may first appear, not least because they amount to a rejection of the most fundamental neoliberal principles – the primacy of the market and the monetisation of human values.
Hillery founded Harlem Grown to address the health and academic challenges facing public elementary school students in Harlem. In 2011, he began volunteering at a local elementary school and witnessed first-hand the lack of resources allocated to the schools and the poor nutrition of students. He transformed an abandoned garden, essentially a junkyard, into a thriving community garden.
So sometimes you meet people who say, “Oh, I’m involved in a local cooperative and we’re developing open source software,” or “we’re setting up a complementary currency in our neighbor.” It can all sound a bit small and marginal and kind of niche activity. I often think it gets dismissed as that, hooky stuff around the edges of the economy. What I wanted to do with that quote is say, actually, this is the creation space of a new future.
