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With the release of her new book, I decided to interview the author of the Good Life Lab, Wendy Jehanara Tremayne, about her DIY journey with her partner to live a more intentional, post-consumer life and be happier with less money. This inspirational story details how they ditched their high-pressured careers in New York City to make a better life in rural New Mexico, where they made, built, invented, foraged, and grew what they needed to live. Not having jobs meant more time to be creative and discover the abundance that already existsed around them, even in the middle of a desert.

With no steady income and a small budget of $10,000, Wendy and Mikey made their dream homestread come true by buying an old trailer park and reusing abundant local waste. Alongside their personal story are lots of practical tips and tutorials to guide you in your own journey towards a more self-sufficient life. More than just being a maker of stuff, through this book, Wendy reimagines the American dream from it's foundation with profound spiritual insight into freedom, a meaningful life, interconnectedness and relationship with nature.

Wendy is also the creator of Swap-O-Rama-Rama, a model clothing swap that started from a Burning Man grant and takes place in over 100 cities across the world, including many Maker Faires. It includes a series DIY workshops in which a community explores creative reuse through the recycling of used clothing. Instead of selling this viral event idea to the highest corporate bidders, Wendy made Swap-O-Rama-Rama a non-profit, Creative Commons project, free for anyone to replicate.

What led you to this dramatic lifestyle change?

Since grade school I have been aware that my life was consumer-oriented. I paid attention to the ways that money shaped culture. As I settled into my career, the American standard to grow ideas and turn them into profit wore away at me. I started to take inventory of what I was trading for money, things like time, energy, sleep, and less obvious things like maintaining artificial business relationships, lying for employers, doing things I didn’t believe in or want to do. Noticing that the best of myself, my creativity, I traded for money, I got fed up.

What have been your biggest challenges and how have you dealt with them?

One of the biggest challenges I faced was learning to say no to tempting offers. I received offers to commodify my projects and myself. For example, I made Swap-O-Rama-Rama so that I could offer an alternative to shopping. The green movement was just taking off back then and Swap-O-Rama-Rama was repurposing textiles in cities all over the world. Corporations from car manufacturers to power companies have wanted to align with it to greenwash their image. It was hard saying no to six-figure cash offers and more than once these came while I had no other source of income. I had offers to do work that I believed in too, work that would ultimately be a distraction to what I set out to do.

What have you enjoyed the most about the journey?

The greatest reward has been reconnecting to nature. I used to think of nature’s wisdom was an abstract concept. But once I took the time to reconnect to nature by slowing down, foraging, and growing I noticed that nature’s wisdom is real and tangible. Because we are alive we are able to intuit its knowledge. This happens through our senses and by connecting to life. In living patterns, activities, and cycles we connect to the common sense. In contrast, acculturated knowledge about the commodified world, things like banking, communication, and media are not natural. We go to schools to learn civilizations knowledge. This knowledge can’t keep us alive. It is not essential. People are meant to intuit the world. And I have found being able to causes us to feel calm, safe, and happy.

What advice would you give someone considering a similar path?

Though my lifestyle seems to be about making what I once bought, about being a maker, it’s not really about stuff. It is about bringing stuff into our contemplative life. To learn anything we must consider what we trade and do for money. Being makers gives us insight because we have to follow materials, learn skills from people, make discoveries, but ultimately that leads us to the real questions like who are we? What’s our nature? How can we do all this better? My advice is dive deep. A good contemplative question requires a lifetime to unfold. Savor it! While we’re all tied to this economic system and we can start by simply inquiring. We can wonder about what an alternative to money might look like.

What role has community played in your life and getting your needs met?

The formula that I see working best is self-reliant people who share with one another = a stable and happy community.

How do you feel about money?

Money masks abundance. You can see this by noticing that the commodified world is a limited world. It is smaller than the real world. For example, civilization reduces infinite colors to the pantone color wheel, and unending shapes to the mason’s angles. It turns unlimited natural resources into scarcity by turning raw materials into product and leaving behind weakness in natural systems and waste. This artificial mimic world it makes has no life of its own so it uses ours to sustain itself. We call this employment.  

Money causes our lives to be an illogical patterned loop. We go to work to earn money to buy back the world that we already own, our birthright (the natural world), from the very same people who employ us. The abstracted world sold to us and made out of products causes destruction to our lives. When we reclaim our creativity, energy and inspiration we learn that we are unlimited and discover that we can build a world of our own design, one that is based on what’s actually true about life’s essential nature, it is abundant.

It seems like this choice took a lot of faith and trust in the universe, can you tell me about your beliefs?

I trust myself because I see myself as the universe. The unique sensory set that humans carry has taken billions of years to evolve. Not just senses like sight, smell, sound, taste and touch, other senses too like inspiration, ideas, creativity, impulses, and feelings. We are how the universe knows itself. There’s a saying, for transcendence freedom is form. I have imagined that our collective senses make the common sense. I honor my response to the world and what my common sense tells me because I consider it to be the only real knowledge I have access to. I’ve always had the feeling that if I didn’t listen to it I’d be marooned.

Can you tell me about your decision to not commercialize Swap-O-Rama-Rama?

At some point it felt necessary that I prove my belief in abundance through action. This was right around the time I created Swap-O-Rama-Rama. Since SORR solved a real problem I knew that it was the right thing to make it easy for the world to adapt it. Money would have slowed it down. So when the event started to do well I knew I had to make it a gift. It felt great! Of course as soon as I gave it away I found another good idea in cue and realized that there’s no such thing as a last good idea.

How have you learned the skills needed to survive so self-sufficiently?

I make some stuff well, some OK, mostly though I am a generalist. What I am really good at is doing stuff that I don’t know how to do!  I don’t think I could survive without others, thank goodness!

How has the maker/DIY movement inspired you?

It has inspired me but I also worry that it won’t get past being about stuff. Being about stuff does not really change the world. It’s the difference between a trend and movement. For example, I made a pledge to live on waste and this is not a solution. It does not escape the problem. People who were treated unfairly have made most of the stuff in the waste stream that I lived from, these are people who can not afford to buy the things they’ve made.  If we make the making of stuff contemplative than we get beyond the stuff and we reach the meaning. This is more exciting because we learn how the world really works and what is needed to repair it.

New Yorkers are known as a tough, angry, unwelcoming crowd, and also known as an open-minded, diverse, and future looking group. These two visions of New Yorkers have collided over the new bike sharing program which launched yesterday. The New York Post complained incessantly about the presence of the new bike stations, predicting it would be a dangerous traffic apocalypse, and many Facebook posts were circulated where New Yorkers hysterically compared the coming of the bike stations to infamous historical tragedies. Other New Yorkers were excited by the prospect of NYC joining the dozens of world capitals that have a bike share program.

The New York Post, the reactionary rag of note in NYC, ran stories about bike-shop owners who thought the bike share would be death for their business, and covered any anti-bicycle protest they could find, which were tiny and largely held by residents of wealthy neighborhoods. But this is just the newest volley in another “war” in New York between bikers and drivers, one which the Post has gleefully fomented: bikers are bad for business, they argue, a nuisance and dangerous to boot.

Bikers, on the other hand, argue that they have just as much a right to the road as everyone else, and that drivers who are unaware put their lives in danger, not the other way around. For the last ten years, the bikers have been winning this on the policy side, with a massive expansion of bike lanes and the number of bikers (which has also been encouraged by the fast rising fare increases of the bank-indebted MTA and the broad damage to New Yorkers done by the recession). According to the DOT, bike commuting in New York has doubled since 2009, and the bike sharing program can only increase this trend.

I can’t refute all of the Post’s arguments here, but in traffic-choked Manhattan, the presence of the bikes may well be a blessing. In Denver, where the B-Cycle sharing program was instituted, there were 102,000 rides in the first 7 months: and 43% of Denver users reported they were replacing car trips with bike rides. Paris saw a 70% increase in bike use and a 5% reduction in traffic and congestion thanks to its Velib’ program—and those changes happened in the first year of its operation.

Although it’s incredibly hard to quantify the direct effects on businesses of any small change in transportation availability, it’s hard to imagine this will kill bike shops. The number of bikers has been increasing steadily in New York City, and bike sharing programs tend to encourage people who don’t consider riding—tourists, short-distance commuters, and people running errands tend to be their main users—to take a bike.

It seems highly unlikely that having more people regularly biking will decrease demand for bikes and bike services, or that the bike sharing program will create a monopoly. It seems just as likely that these former non-bikers, after using CitiBike but unhappy with the clunky bikes and occasional inconveniences (New Yorkers are a status conscious bunch after all) might well buy bikes of their own.

In any case, the bike program is up and running. In classic NYC style, a bike was stolen Sunday night, before the program had even begun. Yesterday riding around Brooklyn I saw three people on the bikes, including one guy going the wrong way on a one way street and looking a little concerned. We will have to wait and see what effects it has on the city, but it seems to me it can only be good news.

At least, as long as those damn tourists don’t clog up the Williamsburg bridge bike path!

Author Katharina Frosch (Germany) is an innovation economist working on social innovation in urban agriculture, Co-Founder of http://stadtgarten.org and http://mundraub.org which won sustainability awards in 2010 and 2011 from the German Council for Sustainable Development.

In a rural area in the former East Germany, late summer 2009: Shimmering heat, the intense odor of fermenting fruits is in the air. A tree covered with hundreds of juicy pears, and a foot-high layer of rotting fruit on the ground. A stone’s throw away – plums, mirabelles, elder bushes and every now and then an apple tree along the path, maybe of an old, rare variety. An abundance of fresh fruit – in normal seasons, much more than needed to feed birds, insects and other animals – forgotten, abandoned, unused.

Is this our common fruit? Are we invited to harvest it? Today, at least in Germany, unowned fruit trees formally do not exist. Orchards situated outside human settlements are mostly in private hands, even if there is no fence around them. The mile-long fruit tree alleys characteristic of many regions, particularly in the former East Germany, are state- or region-owned. Fruit trees in parks belong to the cities. Harvesting apples without asking the owner amounts to stealing.

The clash between abundant but forgotten fruit in the public space – and the lack of information about property rights – calls for action. Whom to ask if we see an apparently forgotten fruit tree, full to bursting? The mundraub (1) website invites people to tag forgotten fruit trees on an interactive map and to locate existing trees that can be harvested. The website sets forth basic rules to respect private property and prevent damage to the trees and the natural environment, and calls for fair play in general.

In the first two years since the website launch in 2009, more than half a million people have accessed the site, and several hundred are actively contributing to the fruit tree map. The map currently lists about 3,000 “find spots,” which roughly correspond to 20,000 – 30,000 trees. So is the rediscovery of common fruit based on the mundraub map another confirmation of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning theories about community self-management of common goods?

Some prophets of doom warned that the mundraub website would incite swarms of reckless, hungry urban dwellers to savage private fruit plantations in the countryside and drive local farmers to ruin. However, there is no evidence that tree damage or stolen fruit have increased since the launch of the website. Users seem to intuitively adopt a responsible attitude. More than once, a “find spot” was taken off the platform at the request of users, lest it get over-used.

While most of the 150 press articles about the mundraub initiative focused on “fruit for free,” most users are strongly committed to the idea of sharing and crowdsourcing.(2) They are far more concerned about contributing than in getting something for free. They tag trees, discuss botanical issues and recipes connected to local fruit. Perhaps most importantly, fruit-pickers tell splendid anecdotes about the find spot.

Indeed, the information about the location of free fruit trees, property rights and some how-to rules provided on mundraub.org helps Mundräuber to jointly overtake responsibility for the fruity abundance. It’s wholly self-organized, and beyond the market and state in the very ways described by the Ostrom school. Nevertheless, we still have a long way to go: To conserve common fruit trees in the long run, regularly cutting the fruit trees and replanting young ones will be necessary. But the first move towards our common fruit has been made.

1.In German, “Mundraub” – literally, “mouth robbers” – refers to the theft of something edible in a strict legal sense, but the term has friendly, joking connotations, as implied by “filching” or “pilfering” in English.

2.In this context, crowdsourcing means the collaborative and self-organized collection and management of information about common fruit trees by a large number of self-motivated actors interacting on mundraub.org, most of whom are unknown to the website operators.

by Hillete Warner

Global Innovators is a 10-part series that celebrates the remarkable work of social innovators from outside the English-speaking world. Twice a month, we will be profiling the stories of inspiring community pioneers from across three broad cultural clusters: change enthusiasts from Italy, France and the Spanish-speaking world. The series, inspired by the multilingual editions of the Enabling City toolkit, will focus on a rich variety of themes that explore 'enabling' frameworks for participatory social change.

“Open” and “participatory” are words that seem to have become almost synonymous with design lately. From open source software to co-creation, the process of collective brainstorming is stronger – and more inspiring – than ever. Yet one element that is often overlooked in the process of collaborative design, one that we don’t maybe think much about, is something essential to the process itself: “open” communication. Cultivating the art of effective communication requires a capacity to listen empathetically, a strong sense of emotional intelligence, an insatiable curiosity and, of course, a willingness to share.

The result is what is often called “collective intelligence,” the skilful blending of diverse insights and ideas into a coherent whole. So just like successful ‘open design’ is helping us make the shift from closed to open systems of production, learning what makes ‘open communication’ successful can help us shift the emphasis away from the celebration of individual insights to a creative process developed for and by the commons. For almost a decade, Cristiano Siri has been working to encourage just that. We spoke with him today to learn more about how he went from being a user experience designer to a participatory process facilitator, and what inspired him to investigate the path towards personal and community resilience along the way.

Enabling City: Cristiano, your work is known for bringing people together and bridging inter-sectoral divides. What are some of the formative experiences that have defined your work over the years?
Cristiano Siri: I first started as a user experience and service designer in Italy, and later decided to train as a participatory process facilitator in Italy and abroad. For the past ten years, I have practiced, taught and disseminated the art of listening, of co-creation, and community-building. These experiences are what compelled me to co-found The Hub Roma and to be a founding member of CoDesign Jam, an event format that organizes regular co-design gatherings (such as the Global Service Jam) here in Rome.

At the moment, however, my main project is finding my true ‘mission’ in life. In May 2013, my backpack and I will set out on a “mission finding” journey to explore places where people are prototyping new ways of living through resilience, relationship-building and inclusive community practices. I am inspired by job titles like: Transition Host, Transformation Doula, Community Gardener and Healer, Global Cross-Pollinator and Resilience Agent. I will visit eco-villages, intentional communities, transition towns and groups who are using different sharing economy models to learn from their stories and see how I can use the values of active listening in support of resilience-building.

EC: What motivated you to make the jump from being a user experience designer to becoming involved in co-design, co-working and the world of social innovation?
CS: I entered the “working world” fresh out of school and quickly realized that the workplace culture was encouraging us to pursue our tasks individually, that we were being separated into silos. Even in a creative environment, the value of listening to one another was missing. I wanted to do something to create a culture shift, to encourage the cross-pollination of skills, experiences and viewpoints so that they, in turn, could be applied to the emergence of eco-logical solutions. I found these engrained work habits to be stifling opportunities for co-working, so I created workshops to introduce co-design to as many stakeholders and team members as I possibly could. What emerged was an experience of deep engagement, one that gave way to new forms of collaboration and communication.

Then, in 2009, I met Dario Carrera and Ivan Fadini who invited me to join their team and open The Hub Roma with them. This was my first encounter with social innovation. Through my involvement with the project, I realized that the skills I had developed could be wonderfully employed to support a community of social innovators, people who are working to substitute negative externalities with long-term, positive ones.

EC: That must have been a rewarding, if challenging, transition. What have you learned from working with social innovators in Italy?
CS: In Italy, we are currently hearing the loud crackling sounds of a collapsing social, cultural and economic system. A large number of citizens are suffering from this collapse but, to this day, the institutions and the entrepreneurial system have failed to provide any tangible solutions to move the country forward. Luckily, citizens are leading the way by self-organizing and prototyping change through innovative social practices, showing us that change is indeed possible.

The practice of ‘social innovation’ is still new in the country, but I believe the strength of this community is precisely its ability to offer tangible, new ways to address old (but very real) needs. There is no support from formal institutions, and much remains to be done to network these co-design initiatives more broadly. The Hub Roma was established for precisely this purpose: to offer spaces and events that encourage encounters and networking while providing visibility to social innovators. We also use the space to explore relevant and common themes through public workshops, like our recent event series called "Money 4 Good" where we explored alternatives to the current financial model.

EC:As a seasoned facilitator, what are some of your favourite ways of bringing people together?
CS: To create positive change, I like to invite all stakeholders into the same room to facilitate the emergence of a shared view of the system they are in. This experience enables a shift in the participants' ways of thinking and acting so that, together, we begin to co-create and prototype solutions that have the collective long-term interest in mind. To do this, I use principles, methods, and tools from the Art of Hosting, Theory U, and Appreciative Inquiry. This is my favourite process design sequence:

1. Listening practices (eg. Council Circle, Sensing Journeys, Open Space);
2. Practices to collectively envision the system (eg. World Café, Multi Stakeholder Change Lab);
3. Co-design and co-creation practices (eg. Design Jam);
4. Prototyping practices.

EC: When blending these approaches, what are the values that guide your ‘open communication’ work?
CS: I will let my guiding values emerge from four quotes that I love:

Every leader is continually making an invitation, but often they are unaware of the invitation they are making. Some leadership is an invitation to shut up and some leadership is an invitation to speak up.  We focus on the invitation it takes to get people to a conversation where they are willing to participate as fully as they can.

Mary Alice Arthur – Art of Hosting Steward

Not just any talk is conversation. Not any talk raises consciousness. Good conversation has an edge. It opens your eyes to something, it quickens your ears. And good conversation reverberates. It keeps on talking in your mind later in the day; the next day, you find yourself still conversing with what was said. The reverberation afterward is the very raising of consciousness. Your mind has been moved. You are at another level with your reflections.

James Hillman

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Victor Frankl

And those who where seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Friedrich Nietsche

EC: You mentioned the importance of bringing communities together and creating a system of mutual support. How can we encourage ‘networked’ co-design to thrive?
CS: To empower the emergence of a global community of change makers, I first like to focus on developing a process that supports, at the local level, the:

• Visibility of innovative local experiments and prototypes;
• Sharing of experiences (both successes and failures);
• Wisdom and capacity to adapt models to different contexts;
• Ability to listen to emerging signals, even when they are weak and local, to predict global changes in advance;
• Capacity for dialogue, and
• Connections that can be fostered between local initiatives and global institutional reform.

This dynamic is already developing and accelerating and I believe the most important factor, today, is that social innovators are aware they are no longer alone, that there is a multitude of them changing the rules of the game and giving birth to a new paradigm.

The rest will depend on how well we respond to the signals we hear when we actively listen to the world around us.

Find Cristiano on Twitter, or read his blog here. You can read more about The Hub Roma here, or visit the CoDesign Jam page to learn about upcoming events in Rome.