7 scenarios for the future of enkel
By Adam Jorlen
I’ve put on my futurist hat and looked at some scenarios for us in the enkel collective.
People join enkel for many reasons, and in conversations over the past month we’ve dug a bit deeper into these reasons. A few weeks ago, our member Andy Thomson ran a session where we explored three questions:
1. What do we love with enkel?
2. How has enkel changed us?
3. What don’t we like with enkel?
Whenever we talk about these things, we realise that we have different expectations of enkel. Some of us see it as a type of social club, where we can exchange ideas, learn, be inspired and connect with other changemakers in Perth. Some of us have very high expectations and see enkel as a pioneer in co-creating the foundations for the next economy, together with similar collectives like ours across the world.
So there’s a large spectrum in what we as individuals expect from enkel. This of course creates friction. And with the limited resources that we have (time, energy, money) it becomes even more frustrating. We want so much, but have to remember to be realistic. Being real, as our one of our new side-projects is called. And being real and authentic also require us to understand our limitations. Once we identify our limitations we can work on ways to change or “hack” these. Creativity is one of our core values in enkel, and I think many limitations or shortcomings can be overcome with creativity.
Last year I posted some thoughts about how enkel works in a space in-between paradigms. We work to support changemaking during the transition to the next system… whatever it is. As a futurist I naturally think a lot about what this next thing might be. So I started a list of some things we’ve talked about that enkel could be in a new paradigm.
Here are some scenarios, some stories of where we might head, what the future of enkel might be. We have discussed them all in the collective, some more than others.
1. Community of practice and “sandbox” for changemakers.
This is pretty much what enkel is now. A magnet for those in Perth who believe that we need new approaches to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow. A place to learn about new trends and changemaking initiatives here in Western Australia and elsewhere. A “sandbox” to test workshops or get feedback on our ideas and start-ups. A place to meet others who understand us, who share our thinking, who worry about the future of the planet, and who want to do something. A changemaker community of practice.
In this future scenario our enkel community is more impactful than today though. We have tentacles all over Perth, and we support, inspire and connect changemakers in business, government, academia and local grass roots organisations.
2. Co-Learning Space - A New-Paradigm Learning Institution
This is a scenario that enkel U — our school for changemakers — is sort of working towards now. Here, students are also teachers in a democratic, peer-to-peer or co-learning environment. Masterclasses, longer programs, incubators and workshops in any discipline or subject can be hosted in this institution.
This is a university adapted to how we will learn in the future.
When you join this institute you’re welcome back whenever you want for the rest of your life. Here you will always meet explorers and teachers focused on education for whatever future emerges.
3. “Real” Coworking Space
Coworking has been around for a while now and the original idea of “collaborative working” has been replaced with something more like a shared office space, where cubicles have been replaced with better design and nicer furniture, and the water cooler have been replaced with a good espresso maker.
The original intention with coworking was for people who worked in these spaces to collaborate on each others’ projects, build community, innovate and learn together. There was often also a “changemaking” aspect based on certain values like sustainability, inclusion or social impact. But the majority of coworking spaces you enter around the world today aren’t about these things. They’re more about people working on individual projects next to each other, rather than on collaborative projects with each other.
This is mainly for financial reasons. Most coworking operators would love to keep the original coworking ethos, but to create community and collaboration you need great hosts, community catalysts and event organisers. These cost money which doesn’t fit with most coworking spaces’ budgets burdened with high rents.
enkel is all about community, so in a scenario of “real coworking” in our upcoming space The Naval Store, we’d have to be creative and rethink the whole coworking business model. How can we catalyse the community and create deeper connections between people in a “real” coworking space?
4. Changemaker Network
The opposite of concentrating all our activities to one physical location such as a coworking space, would be to spread out in a networked model. With the Vic Park MiniLab in East Vic Park, and the new spaces our members are working on in Fremantle and Midland, we’d start to build a network of hubs across metropolitan Perth.
In this scenario, enkel also partners with our friends and collaborators in the Perth changemaking ecosystem such as Bloom, Spacecubed, fSPace and Perth Artifactory in a “changemaker passport” initiative, where members of this network could cowork, learn and play at any of these spaces if they are a member of one of them. This could even be extended to other services, like learning, growing food at the Perth City Farm and other urban community farms and gardens etc.
5. Local Marketplace
In this scenario enkel has created a new local economy as a response to (or a complement to) the unequal, environmentally and socially destructive global economy, which sucks money out of our local communities to other parts of the world.
This is very hard and have been tried with various models; community exchange systems, local currencies, LETS etc. The challenge here is to get enough people on board and enough relevant products and services on the marketplace. So far, most of these models have had problems scaling up, as they haven’t included key services and products that people spend money on, like transport, housing, energy etc. Most local community / currency initiatives are also less convenient to use than trading in regular money.
With new technology it is however easier for small communities to create new local economies. Blockchain technology makes it easier to create tokens for exchange between people without a need for banks and other middle-men. Online platforms for sharing products, services and skills are easier and cheaper to build today.
I wrote a post about enkel as platform earlier, where some of these ideas were explored.
In this scenario, enkel members can trade virtually everything we need on this local platform: transport through car and bike sharing, energy through solar/wind micro-grids, food, tools, skills etc.
A local marketplace is a local effort though (preferably walking distance between participants), and consequently in this scenario, enkel bases all its operations in one local community (likely Fremantle).
This local economy platform is part of a new “cosmo-local” network of collectives like enkel, building a new system to replace the current unsustainable one. It’s “characterised by the balance between being localised (rooted in a place and in the community related to that place), and open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things and money.”
6. Village of the Future
This is a similar scenario to the local marketplace above, but instead it is physically confined to, or rather designed as a whole “village” in our upcoming 1400m2 space the The Naval Store. People from the local community set up businesses within the Naval Store.
In this village, we design, prototype and test modules for how we live, work, learn, make, eat&drink in the future. People experiment with, and showcase sustainable and innovative products and services at the forefront / edge of society.
Here, the Naval Store is divided into a number of 20m2 lots for rent, some are air-conditioned and soundproof, some are only empty, raw space. Each unit is modular and can easily be replaced if the business model doesn’t work. The tenant is responsible for their own finances, but supported by enkel and other tenants.
Carefully and skilfully curated, the enkel village is a place of serendipity and collaboration where citizens, community groups, research institutes, businesses and government come together to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Our village can have a theme, for example the Circular Economy — so that the Naval Store becomes an ongoing experimental centr for circular practices in industries such as construction, energy, water, textile, finance, food, mobility and more.
7. Image of the Future
This is a pretty abstract idea, but it is a possible future that already exists in other cities. It would be mostly relevant for our work with organisational clients.
In the field I work in, futures or strategic foresight — we use images of the future to shift peoples’ thinking, as visions or stories of the future can “pull” us towards a future we desire. Futurist Rowena Morrow writes:
“images of the future are essentially the manifestation of our expectation that transformation is possible. Creating a vision, be it as an individual or organisation, taps into the deepest desires of the people involved and allows them to express how they wish the world to be. Polak (1973) argues that using images of the future as guides for present behaviour is a very old human practice. “Once he (man) became conscious of creating images of the future, he became a participant in the process of creating this future”.
Belgian foresight & design studio Panopticon has a really cool business concept, where they combine futures with design thinking to create such “images from the future”. They use these in their consulting and presentations to help their clients to prepare for the future.
I’ve thought about how we could use the Naval Store for illustrating the future. Most these overseas design/foresight firms use websites (like Panopticon’s Reburg site in the image here) or immersive workshops in their work. Dubai recently created a museum of the future.
We in enkel have got something pretty good too; the luxury of having a blank canvas of about 1400m2 to create an image of the future that you can step into. We can design and redesign our own physical space for such experiences, depending on what clients want. With the fast development in virtual and augmented reality tech, this can be done cheaply and very effectively, as we can create impactful blended virtual/physical experiences of the future.
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As a futurist and systems thinker I see links between all these scenarios and they could even all co-exist. We’re sort of working on all of them in enkel and its side projects, and perhaps in 10–15 years we will be all of them. But for now we have to focus. We can’t be all.
So perhaps we need to reflect on as individuals and as a collective:
- Which scenarios excite us most?
- Which scenarios should we steer away from?
- What actions can we take to move towards those that excite us and away from those we don’t want?
Recently Bill Gates wrote;
The potential for these advances is thrilling — they could save and improve the lives of millions — but they’re not inevitable. They will happen only if people are willing to bet on a lot of crazy notions, knowing that while some won’t work out, one breakthrough can change the world. Over the next 100 years, we need people to keep believing in the power of innovation and to take a risk on a few revolutionary ideas.
Gates obviously talks about scientific advances, but I think we need to work much more on social advances too — especially on a small local community scale. How will we work together, learn together and live together in the future?
No matter how much technology and how many amazing scientific breakthroughs we have, we still need to figure out how to collaborate, share and help each other develop and thrive.
So we need to bet on a lot of crazy notions and experiments in Perth too. As Gates says; most of them won’t work out, but one might change our world.
