The value is in the quest
Is inclusivity a way of being or behaving? Is it something in people, or in between people? Do we need to learn to be inclusive or unlearn to be inclusive? (The simple answer would be yes to all the questions. But behind that simple yes lies a complex web of seemingly innumerable connections.) Also, must we find a definition for inclusivity in order to promote it?
How does one go about answering these questions? And is it really about finding an answer or is it about uncovering a process that can be used by everybody? It seems like a daunting task. This was exactly what the Embassy of Inclusive Society set out to do throughout 2022 with the goal of using Dutch Design Week (DDW) 2022 as a space of collective learning and sharing.
The value is in the quest
One of the starting points was that a question is not necessarily about an answer. The word question contains the word quest, which in my opinion is the most important element. A question is a ticket to go on a quest.
A quest of discovery, of insight, of realisation, and more. The question merely gives a direction, but says nothing of the destination. When going on a quest it is best to not go alone, but to collect a travelling party to join you. Questing needs as many senses, hearts and minds as possible. On your own it is difficult to process everything that is going on. All of us are programmed with ways of looking at and engaging with the world. We only experience a fiery fragment. We need others to have a fuller experience and understanding of our world. People that will be enchanted, scared or inspired by different things. Another important aspect of a quest is to record what you encounter, and what that does to you when and while encountering it. Recording is a way to share, but also to bear witness to your thoughts and feelings. It creates a map and localises, so others can join the quest, learn from the quest or guide the quest with their own experiences and insights.
A series of gatherings was planned where all of this was done. The Embassy team conducted thorough research to arrive at the story of the Embassy. For this, they invited different people from different communities and the creative industry for three lunch dialogues and four design sessions.
De Voorkamer in Utrecht, the Afrikaanderwijk Coöperatie Rotterdam Zuid and Bureau Ruimtekoers in Arnhem were the settings for those lunchtime dialogues. Each lunch dialogue had a different theme, for example, about what you need to feel welcome in a room and about your own thinking patterns and stigmas. During lunch, there was room for everyone to speak from their own perspective. Everyone has their own story to tell, and everyone is an expert of their own experience. At these sessions maps were made of part of the quest. Notes from these sessions found their way in the DDW expo in prints or even handwritten on pillows that were placed in the space.
Unlearning
A common misunderstanding of inclusivity is that we see it as something that we are, instead of something that we do. As if inclusivity is a quality instead of an action or an identity instead of a way of doing things. That is the first part of unlearning: stopping to look at inclusion as a form of being, because that is a static approach. It presupposes that you become inclusive and that you stay that way, as if that does not depend on your actions. It has become a property of an individual instead of a capacity. A capacity to include means that your behaviour is context dependent. It takes into account the situation, space, power dynamics, etc. and then produces a certain outcome that can be described as inclusive in that moment. I would suggest looking at inclusivity not through the lens of ‘being’, but through ‘continuous becoming’.
Unlearing sounds like a fancy theoretical concept. In some ways it might be, but in essence it revolves around the continuous questioning of presuppositions and adjusting according to the situation. Unlearning is a sensitive and introspective act. We all find it difficult to be confronted with things that we might have done wrong or that have hurt others or ourselves. But we all go through it. This is why sharing these inner confrontations was an important aspect of the quest. By sharing our insecurities surrounding our thoughts and thinking patterns we experience the ubiquity of this insecurity in others. It is a way of finding common ground. This is the second part of unlearning and as it emerged from the Embassy dialogue sessions, it was chosen to be the focus of the quest. Inclusiveness can be seen as an invitation to shape our society together. What matters is that we are open to that invitation again and again. We should continue to practise that. If not, we may fall back into deeply entrenched patterns of thinking.
The architecture of belonging
In order for this sharing to take place, space is needed. Space where the sharings can roam and exist unjudged. The creation and maintenance of such a space is a meticulous task. This was an important point of focus in this Embassy; the creation and maintenance of spaces where people feel free and safe to share their possibly painful thoughts. Whether it was the conference, the exhibition or the preparatory sessions, every time care was taken to construct a space that would accommodate sharing and reflecting.
At one of the sessions held at De Voorkamer the theme of being at home was discussed. The idea being that one of the conditions for feeling included is to feel that you belong somewhere. A lot of people in the dialogue had to leave their homes due to different circumstances, be they war, violence, poverty etc. Leaving your home is something few of us want to do, but a lot of us have to do. To quote poet Warsan Shire: ”No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark.” Where the house is the material space that we inhabit, the home is an emotional space. It is built of memories, feelings, relationships, hopes, but also, disappointments or fear. Being at home might be described as when the material and emotional space are in balance. The facilitation of people to feel at home is the architecture of belonging. It means designing a scaffold where people can bring their own building materials (the stories, memories, smells and sounds) to construct the home.
The exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum during Dutch Design Week 2022 could be seen as an exercise in prototyping this architecture. While there was an “exhibition”, it was set up in such a way that it was a space where dialogue could emerge, space to be and become, a space to feel comfortable and rest.
Spaces of emergence
One of the examples of an element of such an architecture is Haptic Room Studies #1 Porcelain Membrane Wall and #3 Conservation piece. This is a collaboration of OtherAbilities collective: Adi Hollander, Andreas Tegnander, Eva Fotiadi, Ildikó Horváth, Sungeun Lee and Yonatan Cohen. The works are part of a long-term artistic exploration into the ‘sensory translation’ of visual and performance art. For example, by converting the sound of a film or translating a piece of music into a tactile experience.
Migrant women shared their stories in ‘How to Tell a Herstory’. This is a platform that creates space for a critical reflection on gender, migration and family power structures, through the lens of everyday photography. Each story begins with a few photos selected by the narrator and uploaded to the Herstory Tool, a learning tool specially developed by Affectlab in collaboration with developer Babusi Nyoni. Ebru Aydin, who among other things took the photos, and textile artist Marjolein van der Wal, also worked on this project.
The exhibition also included objects by designer Asefeh Tayebani. With her objects, Tayebani offers insight into life with autism. The designer herself is on the autism spectrum. She wants to show people with autism that their disability is not a ‘box’ in which they have to hide.
Two tables inlaid with wood offered an invitation to come together and exchange thoughts and ideas. This piece comes from De Voorkamer in Utrecht, a place where different cultures meet. The tables are part of a series of five designed by Pim van der Mijl, Sapin Makengele, Maher Sobhea, Alaa Khweis and Shurooq Al-Qasemi.
The installation ‘Design Anthropology in the context of social issues’ was also to be experienced during DDW22. On the one hand, this installation invited policymakers to become acquainted with design anthropology as a new approach to inclusive citizen participation. On the other hand, the installation offered new insights and tools to designers who want to create in a participatory way. Bureau Ruimtekoers, together with design anthropologist Tina Lenz, developed a five-step process based on the principles of design anthropology.
The selected works were thought provoking in themselves, but they also functioned as vectors of thought for several workshops held in the space. There were a total of fourteen workshops and sessions in which to engage in discussions with one another. For example, ‘Inclusively Wired’ was about the talents and qualities of people with neurodiverse brains. Neurodiversity is often labelled from the perspective of a disorder, at the risk of losing sight of the person with a neurodiverse brain as a person. But also that neurodiverse people, often young people, often feel different or even excluded. Are we able to look beyond the labels and embrace neurodiversity as a game changer? Organised by Studio Junctuur, iDROPS and Daisy Dawson, the Inclusively Wired session was a follow-up session to a talk at Design Fest Ghent and the summer school organised by iDROPS in July.
Press photographers, journalistic researchers from the Journalism and Responsible Innovation lab at Fontys University for Applied Sciences’ school of journalism, designers and experiential experts explored how we can better highlight the problems surrounding homelessness. This happened during the workshop ‘Het Beelddepot: a better perspective on homelessness’. Why is this imagery and representation important and what responsibility do journalists have in this?
Power at the tabel
A much used metaphor is the one of giving people a seat at the table. The table being the place where decisions are made. But when inclusivity is really at stake the question should be asked of who gets to decide who gets to sit at the table. Power dynamics play an important role on many levels. Not only is it about who gets to decide who gets a place at the table, but also who decides what we are talking about, who gets to talk, which talk is valued, and what is done with all the input. These aspects of power became a key element that emerged in the Embassy conference.
One of the ways in which power was discussed albeit implicitly was in the Design Perspective on inclusion. Architect Lyongo Juliana, the designer Myrthe Krepel from Studio Smelt, Neele Kistemaker, founder of Muzus, and Aurore Brard from FysiekFabriek showed the audience how they used inclusivity in their design process. Questions of power popped up in the different presentations. In Lyongo Juliana’s presentation the question arose around the perspective of elderly Caribbean people socialising in the street. A common practice in the Caribbean, but also in the south of France, was seen by the people in power as loitering and something that had to be designed away. Having an architect that understood the social practice helped to destigmatize the citizens who were living their lives according to their cultural values. In the case of FysiekFabriek, power was handed over to the people in need to change their environments in order to live autonomous and fulfilling lives. The solution was to give people with disabilities access to a maker, who would co-design interventions that the clients thought up themselves to make their lives better. This example showed that the disability was in the environment and not in the people. With relatively simple hacks life was normalised. The person with the needs was in the lead and the designer gave the clients access to their skills and knowledge. The designer became a power tool, instead of a tool of power. Who the designer is serving, was also prevalent in the case study of Studio Smelt. In a kind of parallel to the story by Lyongo Juliana, Studio Smelt was also asked to deal with safety in public space. Myrthe Krepel realised that the people who were being seen as the perpetrators of the unsafe climate in certain public spaces were being stereotyped. By investigating her own thinking patterns, she was able to approach the stereotyped young people and discover that they themselves did not always feel safe and welcome. This showed the power of engaging with your own thinking patterns and daring to accept that you could be wrong, but you are able to change.
The question of power can be contentious, but it is the element that ties all the elements of inclusivity together. It is what takes the theoretical into the practical. It puts the responsibility on those with the ability to change circumstances. This does not mean a special class of people that are deemed powerful. The more power you have the more you can do, but with vulnerable reflection we all can find pockets of power in our lives. The question then becomes what do we do with those pockets? Do we use that power only to advance our own goals or to give others access? Do we make space for others when we realise that all the space we take up is more than we need? Do we hold each other accountable when misusing power? Are we using our power to destroy the architecture of exclusion and build an architecture of belonging?
Constructing constellations
In the end it all feels very basic; to be seen, to be heard, to be acknowledged, to be respected, to be loved. And it feels basic, because it is. These are all needs that humans have. Across cultures and time people needed these things to feel whole. A question linked to the aspect of power that was not directly addressed within the Embassy in 2022 is why is it so hard to fulfil these basic needs? In a capitalist world where scarcity is a tool to create (economic) value, we are all competing for resources. Not only material resources, but also emotional resources. The daily grind for material resources leaves us depleted and disconnected from others, as they are not our fellow citizens but competitors. If there is little, including others would mean there is even less. Not everyone is seen as competition though. A hierarchy of others exists. People who look and behave like you are high on the list. People who do not, are lower. The hierarchy is not a binary, but a gradient. The axes stretch along gender, class and race, dividing us in atomized spheres floating through capitalist space. Whenever these fragile bubbles collide they burst. As a result everybody tries to fortify the bubble in order to survive collision, making us bounce away from each other. But there might be another way. As a kid, I loved blowing soap bubbles. One of my favourite things to do was to try to make bubbles I already made and that were floating in the air, connect and form these soap bubble constellations. It was amazing to see these fragile spheres form structures. It was not easy and it took practice but it was intensely satisfying.
Connection takes effort and daily drudgery makes it hard to expend the little energy left. But even in these circumstances people still manage to make connections and build communities. For me, this was one of the most beautiful things of the Embassy of Inclusive Society 2022. All the efforts by all these different people to build and maintain relationships with one another. Carefully and emphatically constructing constellations floating ever gently. My hope is that the Embassy keeps making space for building these structures and that it also investigates what keeps us from building them.