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Rethinking the arts ecology through health care
  Posted: February 27, 2006
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The Design Council of the United Kingdom has been rethinking the structure and goals of health care systems, particularly as they relate to chronic health issues that require constant and personalized attention. If you squint a bit, the results of their work, published in this report and others, could also be a conceptual map for a more connected and grounded cultural ecology.

The report suggests that a more effective and responsive system would have the following qualities:

• Distributed. Know-how, tools, advice and finance needed to be distributed out of institutions into communities and households to allow user-centred solutions to be assembled collectively and locally. In economic terms, each package of solutions would not only be particular and personalised -- just as the contents of each supermarket trolley are a personally assembled package -- but would comprise locally available and convenient resources. This was an allocational proposition about moving resources (information, advice, finance, technology and tools) into the hands of citizens/users as producers of their own well-being. It was also a geographical one of dispersing those resources spatially.
• Collaborative. There are great benefits from maximising the scope for collaboration -- through self-help groups for example, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, or the National Childbirth Trust, or through collaborative sessions with professionals, peer-to-peer mentoring, or on line forums. These benefits are both those of sharing information, experience and advice, and of being part of social networks that are so important for good health.
• Co-created. Users, as producers, should be central to the design, production and development of services. This is not just a matter of the service package itself, but of many elements of the package and what is most appropriate. The concept suggests a creative and interactive process between users and professionals around the needs of the user.
• Peer-based communities of co-creation. The distributed networks of collaborators would be organised not through a top-down hierarchical structure, but through light shells that set down rules and ways of operating that allow free peer-to-peer relations. The models evoked were from software (Linux and the free software movement), e-Bay, computer games, astronomy networks linking amateurs and professionals, and the Grameen micro-finance bank in Bangladesh. Each of these is a problem solving network, whose systems develop through the sharing and filtering of distributed knowledge.

Okay, maybe you have to squint a lot...but there's something in there of value. What would an arts ecology in a community look like if it followed the same principals? And how is the current structure and behavior of our arts organizations contrary to these principals?

NOTE: One particularly cool recommendation from the health services study was ActivMobs -- a newsletter, website, and social networking system to encourage small group fitness activities through existing mutual interests. Hmmmm.