Today I had the pleasure of sharing some insights based on previous work on innovation, experiments and learning, and linking this to my more recently begun work on thinking otherwise. The seminar was held as part of a series of “Out-of-the-Box” seminars organised by Nora Geirsdotter Bækkelund at the “Section for Innovation Studies” of the “Faculty of Technology, Environmental and Social Sciences” at HVL.

Experimentation and innovation are ideas – and buzzwords – that are increasingly capturing attention in both research and planning/policy practice. This has perhaps been going on for a decade or more, but interest seems to grow continuously, perhaps with experimentation gaining more traction, while innovation is receiving slightly more nuanced treatment. These ideas tend to aim for the encouragement of sustainability transitions, or other forms of transformation towards more environmentally and socially just futures. This seminar zoomed in on these two concepts from an explicitly critical perspective, suggesting that, while both concepts can be highly revealing when studied academically, both of them can also have very problematic consequences if applied as policies or planning directives. The seminar then used this critical perspective to briefly introduce the idea of ‘thinking otherwise’, the challenges and potentials this provides, and possible ways forward.

The seminar was strongly inspired by three of my previous strands of research: on sustainability transitions, (street) experimentation, and (social) innovation. I went into some detail on my critiques on (street) experimentation (see this commentary) and on the “innovation paradigm” (see e.g. Sveiby et al 2012), and on the “space of possibilities” beyond innovation, which I represented in the triangle figure shown below (and published in my article on this subject with António Ferreira in 2021):

The idea here is that “pure” innovation does not exist, and the same counts for pure retrieval from history or pure retrieval from the established (status-quo) – this is represented by the thick lines cutting off the corners of the triangle. However, what we call “binding policy paradimgs” can emerge (represented by two thin lines in the triangle corners) which focus policy making on the rhetoric of one of the corners, and severely limit the space for action, thought and research by doing so. Currently, the binding policy paradigm is at the innovative corner of the triangle. What Ferreira and I propose in the article, and the idea I presented today, is that we let go of these binding paradigms, and explore the triangle as a whole in terms of possible actions. During the debate, it was also suggested it could be interesting to use the triangle to explore where one would place one-self when doing a certain activity or using a certain philosophy, and then also where others would place us.

This strand of thinking also led to the question of thinking otherwise – can we broaden our thinking not only in terms of considering levels of novelty, but also to consider various ways that people are perhaps already thinking otherwise? Also in their daily lives, and in terms of mobility? I shared very briefly some key insights I’ve gained from Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory (second edition), James Bridle’s Ways of Being, and Carina Keskitalo’s Rethinking Nature Relations Beyond Binaries. And with this, of course, I introduced the idea of Mobile Worlds, and what this project aims to do – which is already sufficiently described throughout this website – go ahead and explore! 🙂

Thanks to all the listeners and avid participants in the subsequent time for questions and debate! And thanks again to Nora for the invitation!