Here we are at the last week of online workshop.  Sara and Agata in their last posts give us their point of view in relation to the other participants ideas. I’ve found that very useful and interesting: the most significant ideas during the design process usually are reinterpretation of someone else drawing maybe just seen upside-down.

I took a lot of time thinking about the participative process that is behind Dreamhamar and I finally summarize it in this drawing representing Ecosistema Urbano team (EU), online workshop participants (OWP) and Hamar inhabitants (HI) putting together all their ideas or simple thoughts on Stortorget square. And as I’m a curious and eager person, I’m asking my self what will happen then? Stimulated by Agata last question “What are other possibilities to maintain a participative process?” and by the idea of the open ended square, I’m trying to figure out what does it mean to keep ongoing the participative process.

The first image that came to my head is this one:

Stortorget square full of models in little thecae like the rose in Beauty and the Beast cartoon. Like a museum of participants outcomes. But this freezes only the final act of all the process. As Andres Walliser reminds us, one of the participative process actor are the politicians, and the long lasting plan for a politicians is 4 years long. The first step for having a long lasting project is to impose politics to have long term programs that cannot change every 4 year with a different city administration. This shift will be necessary to give a con-create and solving answer to urgent and important matters as global warming, financial crisis and immigration, but also will bring us back to a certain frame of mind that was more common in our grandparents generation.

Going on with our considerations on time and participation, here a quotation by Brain Eno, in Eternally Yours Time in Design, 010 Publisher, Rotterdam 2004.
I was reading recently about Marco Polo’s travels, where he passed a little village in China that made a certain kind of porcelain that required the makers of that porcelain to weather the clay that they dug for 40 years. So one man would dig clay, leave it in a pile to be rained on and blown by the wind and so on, and after 40 years the clay would be ready to make his vary particular beautiful kind of porcelain. Of course nobody put down the clay for themselves: they did it for the next generation, for their sons and their sons’ sons. So obviously somebody in that frame of mind is thinking of ‘now’ as including several generation of hands and the generations before that provided the clay that they’re working with. This is what we mean by the idea of ‘the long now’.