Greengaged

photo by Chiara Terraneo

Our second curator, John Grant kicked off Tuesday's session on "Co-opportunity", proposing the question; "How can we create (banking and financial) systems, for the common good?"

With speeches from Josh Ryan Collins of the New Economics Foundation, and Chris Wise & Ed McCann of Expedition Engineering, John led an interactive morning session. Beginning by sketching the agenda of the day into a flowchart, John quickly split the attendee's into smaller groups, asking them to discuss and brainstorm ideas on how, using models/examples of present day service design and system thinking, could they redesign a new system for banking.

Following her participation, Phd student Lauren Tan, offers Greengaged a great summary of John Grant's morning session...

photo by Chiara Terraneo

Extract from Lauren Tan:

"The event attracted an interesting mix of people. From designers, to entrepreneurs, to educators, to people in advertising and a former banker. The agenda was sketched out by John, and peppered with presentations for example we heard about the Brixton Pound project from Josh Ryan Collins who's been working on the project at the New Economics Foundation. Josh (about to undertake a PhD himself next year on the subject) spoke about the concept of money and what its functions were in the real world. I had never really thought about it much before so they were interesting questions to reflect upon. Josh also stated how, "everyone has a skill that is valued by other people" but went on to say that our currency system is unable to effectively value those skills. After Josh's presentation, the (potential) combination between local skills and local currencies was swirling around in my head.

But the day moved on at pace and continued with was lots of brainstorming of ideas and issues and John shared many stories of systems for common good that he's been identifying and researching for his forthcoming book, Co-opportunity (by the way, the book is being co-authored in a similar way to Charles Leadbeater's book We Think, which was done where people could access the progress of chapters and feedback to the author).

We also shared many examples, of systems for common good, among ourselves. One of our tasks of the day was to come up with new ideas for banking and finance using existing systems/models and connecting them to a banking and finance context. Some ideas from the groups included:

• Mortgage pooling: An idea inspired by babysitting credits among a community of families where time credits are exchanged for babysitting each others children.
• Banks as museums: Thinking about the experience of banks like one might think of designing a museum to appeal to the five senses.
• Facebook transparency: Making banks more transparent, in the way Facebook is transparent with providing insight into the lives of our friends.
• Peer-to-peer recommendations: (for banks). Which reminded me a bit of Tripadvisor, Ebay or the way one can leave comments on Amazon.com.

Read Lauren's full post here. 

photo by Chiara Terraneo