Cooperative by Design

Reconnecting for Regenerative Businesses

Melike Kaplan’s PhD project explores how Participatory Design can build the conditions under which regenerative cooperatives emerge and thrive in Copenhagen. Her particular focus is the concept of “reconnecting,” which in this context refers to how participatory design can bring actors with varying backgrounds and common interests together to collaborate toward a common goal. Since she introduced this project to ICDE last spring, it has moved through three phases: mapping the existing cooperative ecosystem through 22 interviews, reconnecting actors interested in entrepreneurship and from degrowth, feminist, cooperative, and anarchist backgrounds through a Participatory Action Research process, and collectively reimagining cooperative technological futures through the Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures workshop series she is co-facilitating as part of her ICDE fellowship. In this talk, she shares what she has learned from the ecosystem mapping phase and how those findings are shaping the interventions now being built.

Readings

Melike Kaplan, “Work Shouldn’t Be a Dictatorship,” ICDE blog — https://platform.coop/blog/no_dictatorship/
The project introduced through the four reworlding capabilities: retracing, reconnecting, reimagining, reinstitutioning.

Donella Meadows, “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System” (1999) — https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
The systems framework behind the search for small, well-placed interventions in the cooperative ecosystem.

David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” (2013) — https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant/
Why so much paid labor feels pointless, and why that matters for how we design the organization of work.

Daniel Christian Wahl, “What Are Regenerative Cultures?” — https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-03-22/what-are-regenerative-cultures/
Short interview piece on moving past harm reduction toward restoring the systems you depend on.

The World After Amazon — https://afteramazon.world/
Speculative anthology from Max Haiven’s Worker as Futurist project, the model for the workshop series.

“What is Participatory Action Research?”, Participatory Methods (IDS) — https://www.participatorymethods.org/?p=409
The method behind the Reworlding Business Lab.

Reworlding — https://reworlding.eu/
The Participatory Design research network.

Stories from Cooperative Tech Futures — https://platform.coop/blog/stories-from-cooperative-tech-futures/
The three-part workshop series: worldbuilding, zine, game.