
Design practice leads the way
The conceptual framework is excellent, the 7 prototypes selected heavily skew towards cutting edge
We are an association of artists and designers committed to cognitive justice. We honour humanity’s creative spark. All over the world, peoples have their own ways of making, doing, creating. Recognizing this plurality of creativity and its manifestation is the first step.
Meaning-making, ‘mattering’, and motivation for transformative change – our collaborative and participatory creative practices explore the landscape of social and cultural attitudes to an ever-changing natural environment.
Our projects are designed to center the agency of groups and communities as the drivers for self-determined changes to their own circumstances. We aim to facilitate people’s own capacity for transformative change through creative practices from the arts and design. Everyone can innovate.
Cognitive Justice
Responding to the rigidity of normative academic and science-based assessments, which often ignore “traditional” ways of knowing (i.e. situated, generational, indigenous, and the colorful range of embodied knowledge), we aim to support, reframe, recontextualise and expand an indisciplinate, accessible, and embedded process of gathering and producing knowledge, and shift the paradigm in favor of articulating a more inclusive approach which recognizes and includes intangible ways of knowing and lived experiences. We seek to formulate and develop a creative and research-based methodology grounded in the concept of cognitive justice, which acknowledges the plurality of knowledge and expresses the right of the different forms of knowledge to co-exist (Visvanathan, 1997).
Visvanathan, S. (1997). A Carnival for Science: Essays on science, technology and development.
Transformative Creativity
By aspiring to create more caring ecologies, communities, and narratives of change through artistic and participative design experiments, we embrace the possibility of failure, recognizing our inherent vulnerability as interdependent living beings in an entangled world. Reconnecting to the notion of “experiment”, we encourage speculative thinking and doings, unconventional ways of sensing and archiving, and participatory experiences aimed at multiplying perspectives and points of view in a polyphony of stories.
“Creative actions carry our agency by shaping the self, others, and the environment (Martin & Gillespie, 2010). While our actions -including creative actions -are always constrained, they are never fully determined. The latter is captured by the notion of creativity, which comes to show that we can act in novel and surprising ways even under highly constraining life situations.” (Glaveunu, 2018)
Aesthetic Statement
We, at Ymmärys ry, recognize a dissonance between the formalized, urban-tethered institutional artistic and cultural scenes’ outreach and marginalized areas’ accessibility to arts and culture. We advocate for the revitalization of local cultural centers and the decentralization of artistic events and activities to the outskirts of cities and to rural areas. As practitioners fluent in the language of innate creativity, we seek to disseminate our own knowledge and expertise to foster marginalized communities’ sense of their own agency for creative expression and intervention. By acknowledging people’s latent, pre-existing knowledge (experiential, embodied, generational, lived expertise), we aim to stimulate their own sense of creative agency and collaborative sense-making, and to generate new values and more sustainable ways of living together otherwise. Art, we believe, provides us with creative and cognitive tools essential to critically reflect on our society and the challenges that we are currently facing. It allows for an altogether aesthetic engagement with one another and the world that we live in, creating pathways and connections between disciplines, and fostering a renewed capability for wonder, resilience, and imagining futures.
Our projects reflect contemporary social issues and cultural change. Our core values are inspired by cognitive justice and fostering agency and skills. Our projects are designed to reflect place-based and community-centric sustainable values and attitudes. Resilience and transformation through the judicious introduction of creative practices are a common thread in our work.
On Nature’s Terms
Making a living on nature’s terms implies less technological and industrialized economic ecosystems (or microsystems) such as all the occupations, formal and informal, that are dependent on nature’s living resources for their livelihoods. These are communities that we collaborate with to facilitate their capacity and skills and foster agency for transformative innovations in their daily commercial practices. This begins with understanding of their own interdependency and relationship with the natural environment.
Narratives of Change
“What kind of stories do we tell about a changing climate, about extreme weather, rising sea level or changes in the seasons? Which story is the most workable to locally make sense of a global phenomenon and its effects?” (Krauß & Bremer, 2020)
“When confronted with changes, people –as individuals–and local communities–as groups– make sense of them in the light of their own knowledge, beliefs and experiences.” (Vanderlinden et al., 2020)
Storytelling, sensemaking, narratives, all of these help us make sense of changes. And help us make changes. Communities facing massive change – be they systemic shocks and disruptions, or slow-moving transformations – need stories as waymarkers and guideposts. Using collaborative creative practices, we help them surface and make visible their own experiential and embedded narratives and stories, facilitating their tangible manifestation in their own voice.
Intangible Heritage
Finland’s existence is wrapped up in one man’s explorative journey across the rural Finnish landscape of word songs and sagas as spoken poetry, and the flourishing of a globally recognized and respected scholarship in folklore. However, scholars raise concerns that these are representations of the Finnish rural culture by academics and researchers (Mikkola, Olsson, & Stark, 2019).There is still a gap in documentary evidence of traditional oral knowledge in the people’s own narratives, in their own temporal and spatial context. Our work seeks to use the creative practices from the arts and design to facilitate the agency for creative expression, in order to co-generate the knowledge to be representatively shared with respect and recognition of its embodied and experiential knowledge. What has been called phronetic wisdom (Jentoft, 2006), after Aristotle’s phronesis, i.e. practical wisdom is rapidly disappearing as rural entrepreneur’s average age rises every year. One of our aims is to capture the sensory and embodied ways of knowing with a robust and tested operating model.
Jentoft, S. (2006). Beyond fisheries management: The Phronetic dimension. Marine Policy, 30(6), 671-680.
Mikkola , K M H , Olsson , P J & Stark , E K 2019 , ‘ Minority Cultures and the Making of
Cultural Heritage Archives in Finland ‘ , Ethnologia Europaea , vol. 49 , no. 1 , pp. 58-73 .
Weaving Knowledge Systems
Creative practitioners play a crucial role in building more accessible and sustainable futures. Recognising the necessity for processes of deceleration and decentralization, we advocate for radical care practices and eccentric ways of co-creating and disseminating knowledge, fostering exchange and emotional engagement among human and more-than-human communities.
Mainstream environmental sciences have already begun recognizing the relevance of braided (Tengö et al., 2014) and multiple-evidence -based ways of understanding ecosystems; we aspire to elevate this understanding of entangled knowledge and apply it in our project-based methodology, to build bridges between the sciences and intangible forms of knowing, and formulate alternative, more encompassing modes of research.
Tengö, M., Brondizio, E.S., Elmqvist, T. et al. (2014). Connecting Diverse Knowledge Systems for Enhanced Ecosystem Governance: The Multiple Evidence Base Approach. AMBIO 43, 579–591
Creativity
is the heart and soul
of our philosophy
Ymmärrys ry believes that creativity is an innate quality of every human being, which can be expressed through experimentation and practice. Given the right tools and the right encouragement and guidance, one can develop and cultivate the ability to use this innate quality. We collaborate with groups and communities to nurture and harness their own capacity and agency for creative expression, by engaging with storytelling practices, oral histories, narratives of change, intangible heritage, and local knowledge. All of the different ways of knowing, making, doing, and creating can be manifested tangibly through participatory and inclusive activities informed by art and design. All we need is a little helping hand to uncover and make visible our own stories and share them in various creative ways.
Explore Further
The conceptual framework is excellent, the 7 prototypes selected heavily skew towards cutting edge
The arts provide alternative explorative means for approaching reality and expanding our understanding
Ymmärrys ry team member Zita’s master’s thesis abstract and link to full PDF. MA
Agency
Agency is the motive driver of our collective creative practices: we believe that experiencing a sense of our own capacity for creativity and innovation fosters agency for self-determined changes. Through our projects and activities we are motivated by the experience of sharing the creative spark and energy of collaboration; collaborative sensemaking guides and directs the roadmap of our transformation journey, while exploration and discovery of our creative selves in a safe space brings to light our own stories.
We are the agents of our own transformation journeys.
Explore Further
The arts provide alternative explorative means for approaching reality and expanding our understanding
HEX Tampere researchers introduce the concept of “communities of experience” – people bound together
It’s about putting a different perspective forward. It’s about putting the voices of
Innovation
We conceptualize sustainability as collective social change (Aguilera et al., 2007; Hargrave and Van de Ven, 2006), and have developed social processes that are place-based and community-centric. In our projects and activities we aim to introduce creative practices for collaboration and cooperation to foster capacity for learning and experimentation. Our aim is to accelerate our capacity for transformation in a resilient and sustainable manner on an individual and communal level, through custom-designed methods and tools, to bridge the knowing-doing gap.
Explore Further
The conceptual framework is excellent, the 7 prototypes selected heavily skew towards cutting edge technology integration. Eco-social renewal does not equal technological intervention by unquestioned
Solarpunk is a literary and artistic movement that envisions and works toward actualizing a sustainable future interconnected with nature and community.
HEX Tampere researchers introduce the concept of “communities of experience” – people bound together through sharing their experiences and relating to each other through them.
We’re actively seeking out collaborators and cooperators to codesign novel and impactful social interventions that are inclusive, democratic, and participatory in the best Scandinavian traditions of collective work related innovation.
Futures
In building a positive future, art and design plays an integral role in social harmony and innovation thinking. Our collaborative and cooperative creative practices and innovation methods provide the social infrastructure for self determined roadmaps for transformation.
Cognitive Justice: the right of different knowledges to coexist so long as they sustain the life, livelihoods, and life chances of a people. (Visvanathan, 2021)
Creative practices allow us to manifest the unseen and the unknown, the embodied and experiential knowledge, the senses and the emotions: they make visible and tangible a narrative of change that meets our deepest needs and reflects our own, self-determined vision of a better future.
Explore Further
The conceptual framework is excellent, the 7 prototypes selected heavily skew towards cutting edge technology integration. Eco-social renewal does not equal technological intervention by unquestioned
In New Delhi, a month ago, I purchased this just published history by Sumit Guha for less than 10 euros. India gets special pricing for
The arts provide alternative explorative means for approaching reality and expanding our understanding of qualitative experience (Eisner 2002). Research demonstrates immense untapped potential at the interface of arts and sustainability science.