curious patterns #24
On whether evaluation can be anti-impact, why garment production is not necessarily creative, and the curious potentials of multi-species design.
curious patterns is an email newsletter on all things culture, impact and sustainable development, written by Kai Brennert.
→ By the way, my consultancy website for edge and story just got a facelift 😊
Cheers to new subscribers at Chapter54 🇬🇭, EnergyLab 🇰🇭, Quantico 🇸🇬, Foresight First 🇺🇸, ARTCENA 🇫🇷, Andani.Africa 🇿🇦, POLA ORBIS Group 🇯🇵, Dutch Culture 🇳🇱, 17 Triggers 🇰🇭, and the Geneva Graduate Institute 🇨🇭
Here’s a crazy idea for you all: with all the advancements in AI happening left and right, how about we all get together to provide input (i.e. open our vaults) to train a model on culture in/as/for development projects and their evaluations, and see if it can provide contextualised insights into the impact we have and the issues we face. Maybe we can even try to harmonise indicators with the help of AI? Let that marinate for a second, and let me know if you think this has legs. For now, please enjoy curious patterns #24, and subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
👕 Dear UNCTAD, I argue that fast fashion produced in exploitative garment factories and then shipped abroad does not count as creative goods exports. Harmful narrative!
🇮🇳 India’s Ministry of Culture hands over 1,000 heritage monuments to the private sector, which will CSR the hell out them, it seems. I’m intrigued, but also a bit scared.
🎮 I’ve been a big fan of Football Manager and Tropico-type simulator video games. And soon, I’ll be able to take multinationals to court on climate change. BRING IT ON!
🇦🇷 While we’re on the topic of video games, Argentina is training inmates in video game development. Solving wellbeing and economic challenges at the same time.
🪧 Please meet my oxymoron of the day: Earth Day Advertising Summit. But hey, let’s give it shot and try to use the tools of evil to do some good instead, shall we?
🇧🇩 Singapore had Natasha, Dhaka has Bonna. The Dhaka Art Summit hits all the spots, it seems: climate change, war, genocide, and all with a community focus.
💣 Who would have thought there are so many different aspects to money laundering and terrorist financing in the art market? Seriously eye-opening report by the FATF.
📚 Here’s a nice little something different: Beth Perry’s introductory reading list on culture in urban sustainability. Number 6 sounds great, and it’s open access.
🇳🇬 I did have to chuckle a bit when I read this Guardian headline. IYKYK. Other than that, the articles outlines the potential of Nigeria’s CCIs and the British Council’s role.
🇬🇩 Welcome to Grenada, island country in the Caribbean and champion of the orange economy. Arianne Richardson put together a neat analysis of its latest policy move.
🕳️ Map yourself against six Global North sustainability industry archetypes in The Sustainability Industry’s In-built Asshole Culture. Ready to get a bit uncomfortable?
💥 The Funding-Evaluation Conundrum
You all know that I am a cheerleader for evaluation. If you see me at a conference, you might just discover that I am a walking broken record going on and on about integrating creative ways to monitor what we are doing and assess the impact we are having where we want to have it (and perhaps also where we don’t) so that we can collectively learn and be better. You would be forgiven to think that I would want to integrate evaluation into everything. The reality is no, only where it makes sense. And now, after listening to this podcast with Estelle Raimondo, I also have words for this vague gut-feeling of “yes, but.” Estelle, who is currently with the World Bank, calls what I am increasingly critical of the institutionalisation of evaluation which risks evaluation becoming a mere performative practice.
And that, dear reader, is a problem indeed. Especially cultural programmes within the wider development complex funded by third parties often have to submit to streamlined monitoring frameworks and evaluation questions that simply don’t make sense. We jump through due diligence hoops just to be met with structures that are indifferent to the cultural and often intangible nature of our impacts. When Estelle is talking about the skepticist turn in evaluation, I’m all with her. Evaluation only makes sense if we centre learning, if we are method-agnostic, and if we acknowledge complexity. We must acknowledge that there are very real and actively harmful implications for over-institutionalising evaluation beyond just wasting resources.
Here’s a scenario, which may or may not be true: You are a funder, create an open call, and select projects based on your cultural and social impact criteria – great. Since you consider yourself an impact-driven grantmaker (not an investor, mind you), you decide to make a third of the grant payout dependent on achieving a set of outcome targets. No outcomes, no monies. Sounds reasonable, right?
What’s wrong with withholding funding until your grantee has achieved their intended outcomes, you wonder? Three things really (possibly more – let me know!):
Your funding is unfair. If you make grants, make them unrestricted. Pay for work and the people that do the work. If you are concerned about outcomes, make sure that your grant pays enough to do the work properly. If you are concerned about measuring these outcomes, make sure that your grant pays enough for an integrated monitoring and evaluation approach. Easy.
Your funding creates unnecessary risk. You want culturally and socially impactful outcomes – but who delivers these kind of programmes? Correct, organisations, people, and initiatives that are likely already underfunded. If you like the work, why put these vulnerable implementers in a situation that could endanger the whole operation? And I am not even talking cashflow here.
Your funding is unintentionally anti-impact. In two ways. Initially, your grantee will try to negotiate the least aspirational outcome targets you have ever seen. Why? See point 2 above – risk. Can’t blame them. More importantly, though, is that you take away an organisation’s ability to learn and adapt. Say, you realise your approach doesn’t work because of a variable you hadn’t considered or an unexpected event that occurred. If your implementation is dependent on the funding, your agency to improve the impact of your project has been taken away and you’re stuck with a mediocre something when it could potentially be awesome. And awesome is what we really need to strive for!
No need to tell you the moral of the story. Stay ethical, stay vigilant, stay curious!
And as a bonus resource, here is Dark Matter Labs’ most recent and entirely open resource for reimagined funding and partnership agreements. Those folks are fire 🔥
IMPACT
🔉 Data sonification is a thing, apparently. And my latest obsession, too. Dataviz for music nerds? I mean, come on! Data sonification studio Loud Numbers is doing this work for hire, but they also got five little taster songs for you in their podcast / album / pitch deck (?): from decreasing living insect species via beer tasting notes to EU law making frequency. Admittedly, it’s a bit hard to ‘read’ the data without the legend, but I love this approach to thinking about and presenting data.
😱 You are a geek and you want to play a game with your geeky friends. If that is the case, read on, because we are talking about Evalophobia – a game to unearth all the good reasons not do an evaluation. Or, if I understand the gameplay correctly, you could use this collaborative (?) card game to convince your colleagues that their excuses to avoid conducting an evaluation are dumb, I suppose. Now go and geek hard! Or annoy your colleagues. I can’t tell you what to do.
🎥 Mystery shopping is a valid data collection method. That’s what Dr Vishalakshi Roy, a former instructor of mine at Warwick University, says. She’s the director of the excellent Earthen Lamp cultural consultancy that focuses on evaluation and strategy. Her video introduction to monitoring and evaluation skills is a very accessible and encouraging resource for cultural organisations taking first steps in that field. In that same video series is also an introduction to creative monitoring and the secret life of post-it notes by Kirsty Hillyer. So if your partners or colleagues usually exhibit a good deal of evalophobia (see what I did there?), share these videos with them. They might just change their mind.
🌟 Bonus Round:
recently published Unlocking the power of feminist data cooperatives, and it's a great introduction to the benefits of, you guessed it, data cooperatives. Seems like a brilliant concept – will explore more.ART IN BETWEEN
💧 The beautiful marriage of traditional craft and climate change response. Beauty meets utility. Tradition in design. I think I’m just gonna leave you alone with this artistic-architectural terracotta water cooling system NAVE by Yael Issacharov.
RESEARCH | REPORTS | TOOLKITS
🦅 Experimentation at its finest. Why? Because…
[…] creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures.
Yes, please.
[…] impact and value of creative practices are of high interest to policymakers, creative practitioners, researchers, and others.
Also yes.
The experimental productions (ExPs) […] are evaluated in generative and systematic ways […]
👀 I’m listening.
[…] a critical investigation into how evaluation might, itself, be a leverage point for change.
NOW we’re talking!
First of all congratulations to the CreaTures team for not just developing a theoretical tool but actually trialling it through implementation in its own twenty experimental productions. This makes it an extremely valuable contribution to the discourse around evaluation of artistic interventions for positive futures. You can read about the projects’ synthesised insights here.
At the core of the CreaTures evaluation framework are nine dimensions that help frame our thinking in what ways transformative change might occur.
And I really like them. You can click through each dimension’s theoretical grounding, background literature, and helpful framing questions on this page. I might have missed it, but I couldn’t find actual indicators that would make the observed changes comparable, however. I think these dimension rather functions as categories to envelop indicators individually developed for each application. In any case, you can see all the hard thinking that has gone into it to distill an approachable framework to better understand our work, and I am keen to deploy this framework and experiment with it myself. Rationalising the impact we can have through the changes we can make is generally the hardest part of working in the space of arts and culture, don’t you think?
WHAT ELSE?
🎙 I love that you can travel through a podcast. And the Afrika Design podcast is literally taking me on a creative tour of Africa (that’s also their tagline – so, spot on!). I really enjoy the many perspectives, the depth of topics, the calmness of the conversations. And when you’re talking about design, you inevitably talk about social issues as well as philosophies, you talk art as well as community and politics. It’s really all there, so add it to your podcast rotation if you wanna get the occasional input from the continent.
🐝 We’ve been designing for humans only for far too long. Seriously, we need to shift our mindset and make the planet our biggest client. This includes animals and other life. So when I discovered Dani Metcalfe’s fascinating Multispecies Design Cards, I was instantly transported to a client event I attended last year. As part of Circostrada’s annual theme of living body/ies, there were thought-provoking discussions about performing for non-human and even non-living bodies. You can find more in their publication (the interview on page 23 is 🦆ing awesome, literally).
💬 I know ya’ll love to get concise summaries of all the reports out there. Turns out the current AI craze has some pretty cool applications for us. Check out ChatPDF! Here I used it to peak into Geoff Mulgan’s recent book Prophets at a Tangent. Next time I’ll check how it deals with statistics. Exciting times ahead.
🎧 And since I don’t have any opportunities in this issue, I am sharing with you my constantly growing 2023 playlist: