Doughnart!

A co-creative event where we made art and discussed how to bring Doughnut Economics to life in artful ways

Posted by The DEAL Team January, 04, 2021 7 likes

On 17th December, over 30 members of the DEAL Community from around the world gathered together over zoom to explore how to bring Doughnut Economics to life through art.

We started with a thought-provoking introduction from Kate Raworth, looking at the visual framing of mainstream economics and how the seven ways to think like a 21st century economist might be expressed beyond the standard diagrams and text, and some of the ways in which they already have.

You can see all these animations here.

We then shared all the various forms of art we enjoy making, using the free online webapp mentimeter.

Here are the myriad of ways we came up with...

Also joining the event were members of the Bristol Artist-Led Forum who had just finished the research phase of their project looking into how to apply the Teal paradigm & Doughnut Economic thinking to an artists network and beyond.

Here's a short video of some of the project members creating a chalk Doughnut for artists. And you can keep updated about their unfolding project on the BA-LF blog.

Next we did a creative warm-up, whereby we used zoom's annotate function to turn a blank page of doughnuts...

(the template can be found here)

...into THIS!

Then once our artistic annotation skills were honed, the next creative challenge was to turn a blank townscape into a kaleidoscopically colourful vision for the future.

And here's what it looked like...

It was great fun to watch unfold... no sooner had King Kong emerged, than someone else had added a rainbow road of love hearts. And after a 5-10 minutes of annotating, A very simple and very fun activity for everyone to join in with - we thoroughly recommend it!

Then after we had warmed up, we invited everyone to choose a theme to discuss in the breakout rooms and come up with artful ideas around the prompts.

Groups then had about 40 minutes and some of the breakout groups recorded their notes in a google slides document, which they then shared back with the whole group at the end.

Unfortunately we didn't have time to go into any more discussion this time, but this being DEAL's first co-creative event meant were learning throughout the event and will adapt for next time.

All-in-all, it was a great start to how we as the DEAL community might begin to co-create ideas and tools for putting Doughnut Economics into action, as connections were made and ideas seeded.

So watch out for more events like this in 2021 as we open spaces for co-creation across other themes, such as education. And if you have ideas for co-creation events you'd like to see, do let us know.

And why wait for us? If you want to run your own event using some of these ideas, templates and prompts as inspiration then please do, and share back how it went. You can find the templates and prompts in the google slides document.

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