The Force That Like A Green Fuse Drives A New Kind Of Diverse Economy On Our Doorstep…

Featured image: John Spencer’s Different By Design Classroom Makerspace

Like the people who think that the sale of council houses should have been followed by the building of more, the green energy maker movement has been incredibly successful in making people think about investing in tomorrow, today.

Ideas of sharing, giving, learning, understanding and learning about digital and physical tools, playing, participating, supporting and changing stereotypes also can create a richer economy where digital and DIY complement and support everyone throughout their lives.

Hybridisation of digital and maker tools can significantly extend the geographic, social, economic and cultural economies over demographics, segmentation, time, space and place. We can reach, teach and learn across the world but we need also to be brand ambassadors for a new kind of quality of life, relationships and products.

Co-Creation means getting closer to resources, thinking, designing and making with others. It’s looking with others at problems and lobbying until you have a brand and then the possibility of a new product and service that everyone agrees is better than what has gone before.

Say, for example, a union of private hire drivers for example, a community based service that has suffered from the viccissitudes of funding for development.

Taxis have always been at the heart of what is good and bad in our economy and society as they develop to meet a local need, supply that need and when local councils are able to support, supervise and train their community interaction and disability service, they are a real regenerator. When council services are cut and privatised and airports then impose charges for picking up and dropping off, for example, that vision disappears in a cloud of UBER based technologies that have very little vocational, community based aspects in their business models.

What if….everyone who joined the union in Nottingham, for example, created an issue based company? Would you support them? Fair wages, conditions, training, community development? We’ve got Cloud Cars in Nottingham who are trying to change the  travel landscape and we need more cooperation, collaboration for a broader, safer, healthier view of community and transport…

Co-Creation needs to be inside the primary, secondary, apprenticeship and university curricula about asking hard questions about the way we live, eat, dress, finance, make and consume, otherwise it becomes like a brand, used to promote anything you like really. Every generation needs to be able to question quality, value and built in obsolescence in the things they buy and use at every age.

The idea of a hyperlocal logistics service such as Ashmita Mangharam and Faraz Sabzwari’s Pucho, an all-in-one delivery platform in Nottingham that runs tasks and errands for people. The idea is to create coverage of ever wider but richer value in a city, making the city a grid to serve the co-creative economies. 

As manufacturers, companies and governments become closer to the public they also come closer to possible solutions, to rethink what value is and might be now in the future. In Britain, we need to move away from the gig and gang labour economies into much more reciprocal, hopeful and creative visions of work, making and human potential.

If we start to think about relational creativity and manufacture, then we start to move away from the old  war, mining and plantation style economies of slave times. There’s a lot of economic, cultural, social history and knowledge from across the world in our economies and we need curricula that reflects that better. People who know how to do things, make things who can share and learn and develop new products in our communities.

With advanced manufacturing technologies we can reduce the distance between the need, the product and the customer with a decentralised network of cloud computers serving additive manufacturing printers connecting a blockchain supply chain.