DM Note #2 — Scaffolding Mental Wealth and Humane Development
Key insights about scaffolding mental wealth and humane development in the 21st century
This is the second in a series of DM notes that we will write about the insights from our work on the ground, which follows internal learning sessions called the DM Downloads that are organized every two weeks or so. The aim is to make our practice more legible, for us as well as for you.
DM Note #2 is a preview of our international portfolio around mental wealth in Sweden, Dubai, England and South Korea as well as some of the learnings that are coming out of it, externally and internally.
What is mental wealth?
Remaking our institutional, environmental and cultural contexts will be essential to the development of people’s cognitive, emotional, and social capacities. In a time of complexity and uncertainty, these capacities provide foundational infrastructure for our 21st- and 22nd-century society and economy. We call this societal scale intangible infrastructure — Mental Wealth and scaffolding this will be of the highest priority during our nascent rebuilding phase after COVID-19.
However, already four years ago Dark Matter Labs started exploring Mental Wealth’s relations to our build environment, our ways of learning, the technological advancement, society’s changing demographics, the development of our ecological systems and how our deep codes (financing, contracting, policy making, regulating, governing) impact these. Below we share a summary and key insights of various streams of work on the ground and we invite you to join the continued conversation and exploration.
Invisible Landscapes:
We Are They
We Are They was an exhibition by DML as part of the Invisible Landscapes series at the RA in 2018. The animation is based around the idea of the built environment as an infrastructure for health and wellbeing, and tries to outline how technology is allowing us to both understand and quantify the effects of the modern city, as well as how we might democratize the power to analyse and update it.
Logic Model of ‘Viable* conditions into thriving society”
*viability: ability to work as intended or to succeed/ability to continue to exist or develop as a living being
Our shared timeline to become aware of and act for our planetary future is limited and we realise the need for a radically different thesis in order to unlock our current lock-ins*. Our current version of the world has systems optimised for minimum viability for the whole and maximum viability for the few. For instance, The average income of the top 10% in Sweden, was 6.3 times higher than that of the bottom 10%.* In an age of complexity and uncertainty we recognise the need for a multi-dimensional and multi-actor transition that sees the unprecedented opportunity to create a hyper-viable world. The fundamentals of this transition will be rooted in the way we realise and recalibrate the values on which our ecosystem of relationships is based on. Humane relationships that rely on trust and our sense-making ability to separate signals from noise. In this sense, Viable Cities and Dark Matter Labs have developed the logic models of hyper viability to understand multi dimensional conditions of humane thriving and viable cities.
Logic model:
We often use a logic model to understand complex relationships between resources, activities and impacts and to comprehend the underlying logic behind visible data. In other words, the logic model tends to fail (despite its usefulness), because there are always gaps in details & interrelational logics. The logic model of ‘hyper viability’ had various iterations:
- The 1st logic model identified three key economies: technology, health and natural systems at the centre of transitions towards a thriving society. There are differences between dimensions of time and speed in each economy.
- The 2nd logic model explored key trends and drivers influencing economies impacting humane thriving.
- The 3rd logic model discovered that transitions require tapping into multiple layers of the system by understanding new forms of relationships — to self, others, nature and the future, instead of putting humane development as the ultimate aim of a thriving society.
- The 4th logic model proposed that the transition towards a viable thriving society requires a thriving life for all within planetary boundaries. This requires a fundamental shift in the way we understand and make sense of our interconnected ecosystem, ranging from our relationships, culture, institutions, psychology/sociology and environment to technology.
In order to collectively move towards a thriving society, we need to understand what kinds of transition capacities and capabilities we need to build. The 5th version of the viability logic model is in the making, which emphasises the need to enable our shared sensemaking, innovation and democratic fitness capacity and capabilities towards transition, alongside an investment into our underlying human development contexts.
Mind//Shift:
Towards a 21st Century Caring Economy
Our 21st century will require us to look at mental health and wellbeing beyond treatment, to systemically embrace prevention and most importantly enable thriving. In 2019 Dark Matter Labs joined the creation of MIND//SHIFT to better understand and drive deep code experimentation that address Sweden’s most important intangible infrastructure for long-term sustainable development — Mental Wealth. For advanced knowledge economies where high levels of cognitive, emotional and social functioning are a key advantage, looking after this infrastructure is critical to ensure that people can be creative, productive and imaginative in a rapidly changing world.
But how do we work towards rebuilding people’s cognitive, emotional, and social functioning when COVID-19 has triggered increases in depression rates, suicides, domestic violence, and unemployment? How do we rebuild public good and the ability to imagine another future when hope seem lost? These are the challenges we are facing as we embark on a year of experimenting and campaigning together with the our partners at MIND//SHIFT.
RewirEd:
Rethinking Education Models and Learning Environments
The project involves partners based in Dubai, but the reach (i.e. experimentation) will involve multiple countries. RewirEd stands for “Rewiring education for a prosperous and sustainable future” and we have been developing this global platform for education with our team in Dubai — Radicle. In the past year, we have engaged with various stakeholders in education (and beyond) to develop a system map charting the interconnected issues in education and human development. Drawing on these insights, we have begun to develop a set of provocations that would serve as both an anchor and trigger for collective action towards education systems change.
There are 6 provocation areas relating to: sustainability, well-being, lifelong learning, ‘humane’ education, coalition building and education financing. The first four areas prompt us to imagine — if we put the human being at the centre, and ask what kind of conditions and support do we need in order for humans (and other beings) to collectively thrive — they would revolve around:
1. Learning with Nature: building more capacity for consciousness and action on issues of sustainability, as well as incorporating wisdom from indigenous communities and orienting schools towards principles of circular economy
2. Well-being in Education: measuring mental, physical, emotional health and making them a part of critical school outcomes and community objectives
3. Learning Beyond School: creating new incentives and infrastructures for lifelong learning and learning beyond the boundaries of the school — such as in communities and cities
4. Humane Education: nurturing humane values and capacities such as relational intelligence, creativity, empathy, storytelling and sensemaking
The last two areas are centred on the how — “how can we create the conditions necessary for large-scale, system transformation?”
5. Collaboration for Impact: representing the need for cross-sector coalitions, innovation partnerships, and mechanisms to ensure collective commitment.
6. Novel Financial Infrastructures: creating new incentive mechanisms, innovative funding modalities, and decision-making apparatuses that can allow actors in the system to pursue radical transformations.
Main partners: Dubai Cares, Expo 2020 Dubai
Key insights
- Provocations must address both the what and the how. Many of our ideas are centred on the what — proposing new learning models, focus & content — however, it is equally important to address the question, “how can we create the conditions necessary for large-scale, system transformation?” because this capacity at the system level needs to be nurtured in order for change to happen.
- Radical imagination requires a legitimate foundation. System mapping process engaging multiple stakeholders enables discovering, analysing, cross-validating the challenges together, and strengthens the credibility in the process. This foundation builds legitimacy and reinforces radical imagination.
- Through conversations and research it has become clear that the taxonomy of mental health is largely associated with treatment, failure to treat and the clinical space of operation. This reality has structurally limited our capacity to systemically perceive and allocate resources to preventative initiatives and perhaps more critically thriving.
- It is often said that we make what we measure. If this is the case, there is a risk that investment in mental wealth could be under-prioritised as a result of missing metrics. Without the metrics that look at mental wealth in a systemic way, we lack the data to build a case. More importantly, we are deprived of the ability to account for, drive, and value the co-beneficial results and spillover effects of a mental wealth portfolio.
- Building the human capacity to collaborate horizontally is central to building mental wealth, at the same time as it is dependent on our mental wealth. Without developing people’s social and emotional capacity, it becomes difficult to unlock complex collaboration. It is necessary, therefore, to design capacity-building processes that incorporate social and emotional training. Without it, we will struggle to implement co-beneficial solutions where the human is no longer optimised to be a ‘bad robot’ but, rather, a highly cognitive, emotional, and social being.
From the Inside Out:
Our Internal approach to Human Development and Wellbeing
We are in the process of exploring what mental wealth means for us as an organisation and how that can be realised and nurtured in our context of increased uncertainty and psychologically demanding work. We are hoping to share a blog post with our take aways and learning towards the end of the year.
Get in touch
If you enjoyed this DM Note, please also read DM Note #1 here, follow us on Medium for more to come and “clap” the article to show appreciation. And please feel free to reach out and share your thoughts on this as we continue to grow a community of interest / practice / impact around the world.
Linnéa Rönnquist
Dark Matter Labs Sweden
linnea@darkmatterlabs.org
