I’m delayed posting this update because I was trying to cram too much into the final question/response.
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What did you accomplish last week?
Last week, Danielle was traveling on a client project, so I was on my own. I did a lot of reading and spent an enjoyable amount of time reviewing past SoP content and PILL projects.
The prior week, we spent our time in deep discussion about how to refine our output from this project. (I also attended an event about community-led design for climate adaptation that was excellent food for thought.)
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What do you plan to do next week?
Next week:
- A few more conversations with folks in the space we’re working in.
- Prepping for our first jury meeting.
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What (if anything) is blocking your progress?
- Nothing.
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Fun insight/tidbit, link, or idea?
Over the past few weeks, Danielle and I have been zooming in on a pair of related issues/opportunities that we think need to inform our approach to improving coastal adaptation planning protocols. I would describe them as:
- Defining and framing the problem or risk that sea level rise poses for cities, an issue I wrote about in an earlier forum post.
- Created space and informal activations that build feeling and curiosity about the water, which Danielle wrote about in our last update.
We’ve also been trying to figure out what form our output — which we’ve envisioned as a tool — should take, and trying to figure out what our toolkit might do to support transformative action on these two points, specifically.
Over the past week or so, there have been some really interesting discussions in the Telegram and in the PILL project presentations that helped me knit together these pieces with the larger protocol research framework. I want to try and braid together a few things that seem like they’re coming together for me. I am eager for folks to chime in with comments or questions; I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of so many recent learnings. I’ll share thoughts on three things:
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Yuemin Huang’s “Protocol with uncommunicables” project, and specifically her insights into the importance of affect to disrupting and improving protocolized spaces.
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Venkat’s musing about the ‘protocol for rizz’ on the Telegram chat:
“This usage of ‘protocol’ feels a bit weird. Most people wouldn’t try to develop charisma in such a structured way. It’s similar to why “non-violent communication” (NVC) feels like a bit off. But now I’m thinking these are both cases where ordinary intuitive behaviors need unintuitive levels of protocolized structure because either the person is unusually awkward and needs more structure to figure things out (the link I posted) or the context is extra sensitive/risky (NVC). It’s a bit like being in social outer space. In space, all ordinary intuitive behaviors need to be protocolized.”
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Efforts to engage indigenous communities in adaptation planning
I think there’s a really important thread tying all three of these things together that has something to do with the relationship between protocols and how they relate to the ways on knowing.
“It Is Feelings That Give the Shape of the Problem”
Yuemin’s project really excited me, because I think it helps articulate, in a playful way, the fact that protocols structure action-taking in a way that assumes knowledge of the problems we are trying to solve through compliance with the protocol. However, a problem, as she reveals through her project, always has an affective dimension: feelings inform my understanding of the problem requiring action; I am always part of the problem I intend to solve. As her presentation says, “It is feelings that give the shape of the problem, not the logic.”
Intuitively, as Danielle wrote two weeks ago, we know this. It’s why, in our own projects, we each work on cultural interventions and try to form created spaces that spark questions and draw attention to alternative framings of the problem.
This resonated with me as I have been thinking about our deepening sense that coastal adaptation planning is a great example of a dangerous protocol: in almost all cases, coastal adaptation planning begins in a place that assumes the shape of the problem and seeks to gain compliance by emphasizing threat and building a social consensus that the desire response is to seek protection, increase fortification, or retreat from a rising sea.
But through our research this summer, we more clearly can see specific protocol design flaws, many of which are being actively debated and discussed by organizations and agencies worldwide. For example:
- Coastal flooding is typically measured through a limited set of data — tide levels and projected sea level rise for these measures — that often undercounts other related sources of urban flooding.
- Risk from sea level rise is calculated on data set of economic costs, which typically fail to account for social, cultural, or other softer experiential measures of the impact of flooding.
- Planning timeframes often require low-frequency, high-investment decisions that fit into capital planning and long-range thinking, viewing incremental and adaptive planning as wasting money and time or ignoring the long-term realities of climate change.
Feelings and perception influence each and every one of these framings. In all cases, there other ways of knowing that can open other ways of framing the problems and imagining opportunities. Many of these ways of knowing are about affective and experiential knowledge that help us reframe value and risk. (I found a particular resonance between the planning timeframes issue and the recursive nature of Yuemin’s proposed approach, which forces a re-evaluation of the problem as both the facts and the feelings change through protocol.)
As Yuemin suggests, a multi-sensory validation of the protocol can be a powerful tool for better understanding — and perhaps even improving — the protocol outcomes.
It’s a Bit Like Being In Social Outer Space
Venkat shared a link in the Telegram to a newsletter on a protocol for developing ‘rizz’ that he found somewhat confounding — and after engaging with the Uncommunicable project, I got more interested in his comments. Building social relationships is a skill, and there are a ton of implicit protocols for how we relate to one another. This group often uses the handshake greeting example in talking about protocols, but there are so many others that are within the social functioning space: small talk; ritualized behaviors around how to end a meal and show appreciation to the host; how to start and end networking conversations in a professional context. These are all social skills that have fairly strict, intra-community rules. Of course people need guides and teaching — but often it’s seen as somehow gauche or awkward or declasse to need them articulated.
My own personal theory here is that it’s only OK to teach such protocols to people when you’re thereby gaining compliance with a larger social order that you want to uphold. (I’m thinking of examples ranging from things like Love on the Spectrum, which explained normative dating protocols to folks with autistic spectrum disorder, to the programs at universities that help first-generation college students, students of color, or otherwise disadvantaged students learn about the social and cultural (aka class) aspects of college life.)
This is precisely what I found interesting about Uncommunicables. It is a way of interrogating knowledge systems through affective experience that makes you aware of your own assumptions, your own ways of knowing/what is legible to you, and can reveal how those things are implicit in the intended protocol outcomes. I think making assumptions explicit can destabilize them and open up new possibilities for the outcome.
Mātauranga Māori
The final thread here, and I’ve gone on way too long already, is that this reading of Yuemin’s project also helped me understand the difference between kinds of efforts to incorporate indigenous knowledge into official resiliency planning practices.
One piece that I read this week was a Climate Adaptation Report from the Cree Nation in Canada (the website seems to be down currently, so I’m not linking to the report), which was dramatically different than any other such report I have seen. While most climate adaptation reports center on data sets of temperatures and precipitation and other hard metrics, with experiential and narrative elements used to bring data to life for readers, the Cree report inverted this model. It is rooted almost exclusively in community observation, narrative, and experiential knowledge, with climate data playing, at best, a supporting role.
We’ve encountered a lot of writing over the summer about the way that planners are learning from indigenous communities, e.g., to learn water management techniques that were lost under colonial control or learn about the ecological history of a place to inform understanding about flooding risk. But this was something different; rather than planners incorporating indigenous knowledge into their existing protocol, the Cree seem to be transforming the very nature of the protocol.
I haven’t fully synthesized these ideas into some clear direction for our project, but in the ongoing effort to work in public and share my ideas in progress, I welcome responses!
Note: Any good ideas in here are attributable to Danielle, as well — but the lack of a clear thesis and half-baked or amateur ideas are entirely my own.