Sensing place: shared sensemaking — Insights from Do Fest 2021 Time Rebel High Street experiments

“What questions does this raise about different forms of knowledge? … [Imagination] Infrastructure that seeks liberatory ends must bring together the heart, the mind, and the body by valuing embodied knowledges and experiences alongside their rational and intellectual counterparts.” [Olivia Oldham, on Imagination Infrastructure]

“Place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered”
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Welcome to our shared Do Fest 2021 detectorism treasure.

These lessons and insights have been captured in three stages:

1. in the preparation and co-design of the festival experiments (you can read more in the lab notes written by Time Rebels);
2. during live experiments on the High Street at the festival;
3. and in shared and individual reflections and ripples that have flowed post the festival.

Do Fest 2021 detectorism treasure has been shared by local festival participants, Time Rebels and lab team members via a multiplicity of sensing and sensemaking mediums that have included:

• oral histories
• sound recordings
• photographic images
• audio interviews
• video interviews (listen to Time Rebel interviews recorded at Do Fest)
• directed observation
• illustration
• walking
• mapping
• collage
• play
• poetry of place
• shared reflection

Do Fest 2021 detectorism in the wild

This Do Fest we invited Time Rebels to devise and share their detectorism for their own experiments. Inviting this wider range of perspectives and ways of knowing into the lab learning is part of the latest iteration of detectorism, called ‘detectorism in the wild’, that seeks to disrupt usual hierarchies of knowledge.

[Note: For those new to detectorism we have added a little footnote at the end of this note that outlines the what and why of a form of shared learning we call detectorism.*]

Before the festival we came together in a series of detectorism focussed Food for Thought gatherings. In these spaces Time Rebels:

• shared their detectorism superpowers (we know everyone has one!);
• we thought about the ‘why’ of our High Street experiments and the questions we wanted to explore as part of our doing and learning;
• the range of creative ways we might capture those insights, including the detectorism treasure that would already be created through the experiments (like collage or poems).

After the festival we came together again to:

• reflect upon the insights captured,
• to lift up linkages between the experiments (in terms of ideas, people and practices),
• to share post festival experiment ripples,
• and began to consider what the festival story catching and story sharing might look like

The initial insights from our shared Do Fest learning fell broadly into two categories.

• Firstly, there were lessons in terms of Time Rebel process and practice and
• Secondly, there were insights regarding the way the experiments invited new narratives of place and so new relationships with the High St that might begin to reveal new forms of stewardship.

For much much more on the evolving Time Rebel process and practice please dive in here. However, in this learning note we want to lift up the second area of insights in terms of what the Time Rebel experiments invite, provoke and inspire around:

* building new narratives and relationships with/ on Dudley High Street

* how Time Rebel experiments might begin to inspire and reveal new forms of stewardship of the High Street

Building new narratives and relationships with/ on Dudley High Street

Do Fest 2021 and Time Rebel experiments to imagine a new future for the High Street have begun forging, or perhaps revealing, new possible narratives and relationships with Dudley High Street.

During Do Fest the High Street was so much more than a sad and decaying place dominated by individuals just buying stuff.