Translator: Sibel Villalobos Reviewer: Neide Freitas
Thanks so much for having me here.
I really appreciate being here.
This is how it's going go down
for the next couple of minutes.
What I thought we would do is:
We talk about the agenda for a minute,
I introduce myself,
give you a little backstory,
present the problems,
cite the examples, give you some tools,
or at least talk about tools,
proffer conclusions, and then,
I'll try to get out of here...
Andrew will come on and do
really ackward Q and A's for about
one minute at the end.
Hi! (laughs)
You guys are just too kind
I'm Rick, I'm a designer and I feel like
I should be sitting in a
twelve steps program.
I'm a designer and also a commissioner of
Culture for the City County of Denver,
which means that we green light all the
public art projects and that we work
in teams in order to create works of art
arround the city and county of Denver that
are designed to delight and surprise
the public, wether or not they have a
relationship with art.
It's in those teams that I want to
talk about some of the behaviours that
we are in, and some of the, sort of new
provocation that I have.
I was born and rised in England,
You knew that, because
I call that a "pram" (laughs).
My mom is from Trinidad and Tobago,
My father is from British Guyana, which is
in the main line coast of South America,
next to Venezuela.
And I identify as a black man. (laughs)
Thanks... (more laughs)
I don't care which one... trust or
subject matter expertise... whatever...
When I moved to the United States,
I was dropped in to the suburban
Washington DC Area in the 80's
which ment that I was fortunate enough to
be a part of the incredibly queer positive
punk-rock scene in Washington DC
and this is pretty much how i looked like
and yeah, it's a weird reversal thing...
You can write a script better than that,
that's just ridiculous...
In the 90's I moved to New York city
where I met a wanderfull jewish girl
who was a feminist, who also
liked the outdoors, and we wouldn't
last very long in NYC, so we moved
to Colorado. And that was about 20 years
ago. We raised a couple of beautiful
children, I think they're up there,
somewhere... Hi, I love you...
And three times I've been through therapy,
without even thinking about "Oh, my god,
I got to go, I got to go, I got to go...
I think of that as a kind of privilege.
So, let's talk about the problem:
My feeling is that people are afraid
of conflict. I think they think that
is physical, they think it's loud and
they think it isolates people.
And, you know, for me, because I'm known for
conflict being kind of my love language,
I'm sort of : "Hey! Let`s get in some
conflict!, let's have a pillow fight,
let's have a good time together"
And it doesn't face me at all, It doesn`t
bother me, because I know there is a lot
of trust there, or at least that's the
idea that I have going into.
This is why, I mean, I think we are sort
of conflating two concepts: one is that
conflict equals violence, and really the
problem is that, linguistically, over a
fairly long period of time, things that
we used to call wars, got called
scurmages, then they got called
engagements, then they got called
conflicts, and things like shell shock
got called PTSD, and any one can have
PTSD about any trauma.
I mean, linguistically, we've been
batting arround this notion of conflict
so long, that it feels like a crime.
That it feels like people doing bad things
to each other, and I'm here to say
that conflict has always been
an instrument for social good.
Remember? Agenda. Examples.
So, Henry Rollins, back to the DC
hard-core scene, Henry Rollins, with an
incredible amount of agression, has given
genertion after generation an opportunity
to have a voice. A voice that is poetic,
a voice that is loud and optimistic.
In fact, Henry Rollins is one known for
saying "My optimism is loud and
wears boots"
Perma Chodron, if you follow her at all,
provides us with a kind of contrast, a
life contrast that says: "Do you want to
learn to be groundless, or do you want to
carry the ground that you make arround you
with you every where you go".
Grounded ... or groundless... which is it?
Lames, tells us about the nature of
collaboration, and reminds us that, from
the information age, that is profoundly
collaborative, we also have to go to the
age of choice. We actually have to be in
conflict to make choises and decisions
about what we're willing include and
exclude in our lives,
and the people that we want to include or
exclude in our practices.
And Carl Marx is the author of what
we would call conflict theory, and
he is pretty clear about the way that
it works. It's not a new thing,
it's an old thing.
Dubois and Sanger, both in their own
movements dealed with notions of social
justice and social equity, with conflict
... Key... really dialed into their
universe, really, how to manage conflict.
And then, there's this guy Horst J. Rittel
Horst J. Rittel was also a designer, but a
different kind of designer. He thinks of
enginering, planing and policy making as
forms of desing, and he also talks about
policy making and planning and talks
about the types of problems that people
engage in, and coined the term called
"the wicked problem".
the wicked problem is a problem that has a
lot of people in it, moving targets and
lots of people and human concerns.
Things that you have to, sort of, get into
in order to undertand the leverages and
the pullies. He talks about wicked
problems and says, ans insists, in fact,
that there must be argument and conflict
in order for us to resolve any of this
type of problems. And they call it social
messes too, so the nick name for the
wicked problem is "social mess".
So, that's conclict in a sort of a pretty
large scale, but what I would like to talk
about is, how we, sort of turn towards
each other and disagree well, fight well,
argue well.
A super important tool that we use to
collaborate, we use this concept of
diversity. I want to encourage you that,
in this sort of tool, this germ of
brilliance, is also sort of another idea
which is that we are sort of not talking about
gender, and we are not talking about your
skin color. We are talking about the
diversity of ideas, and the diversity
of purpose. We are talking about how you
see yourself in the work.
There are two black man, or maybe three
in this room (laughs), and right here,
who have very different oppinions about
how to approach the work that is in this
conflicts, and they both have to exist,
and they both have to be vocal, and they
both have to do the work to be successful.
Another tool that I'd like to offer you
is this notion that there is only really
one kind of empathy required here.
Just one. There are lots of kinds of
empaty. The empathy I talk about, is to
accept that at any given time, the answer
to the problem could be well lodged in the back of
the throat of the person who doesn't want
to speak up. Our only commitment in these
groups is to listen to each other. We have
to be present. That's the very special and
singlular kind of empathy that I'm trying
to put forward in this.
There must be goals. Two people that
desagree, if they don't have goals, it's
just ugly. It's nothing to it. It happens
all day long, people with parking tickets
or parking spaces... It's not interesting
In fact, watching democrats and
republicans alike, desagree without goals
is sort of boring, it's not they higest
and best use at all. And there must be
rules. Remember I was talking about it
at first, as like conflict and here are
some examples of how it works on this very
large scale, for groups of people, large
groups of people, but down here, where we
make differences, and challenges and
accept challenges of our own goals and
rules, there's super important tools for
us to work with each other.
And there's a template of some rules that
like I've come up with in our practice.
It's a sort of way of being
with each other.
I mean, there are not hard and fast,
but is a good way to work inside of my
business, or my practice, with me as the
attendant. And everybody who works with
me, understands this ideas.
Zooming in a little bit, you'll see some
of the contrasts or the sort of implied
conflict here: know the price for your
best work. First of all, know its value,
secondly, it's going to be your best work
you know what I mean?
I'm not paying for your shittiest hour,
you know what I'm saying? And then, the
other part is don't cheat and practice a
kind of piety or humility with each other,
right? Just know that that's on the table
for everybody. And then, the last part
of this, which to me is super important,
is that we can't forget the opportunity
to not know with as much confidence when
we do know. Just because you don't
understand it, quite frankly, it doesn't
mean it won't make sense.
We have to embrace the unknown, we have
to come towards the kind of roundlessness...
The conclusion. I'l be out of here
in a minute...
Embrace conflict, to increase your
emotional fluency and promote civility.
Let's look at each other like human beings
with purpose. Let's be with each other,
let's argue... I hear that
make up sex is amazing...
Thank you so much for having me,
I'm out!