We came into being with one foot in the future – not just the future as it was shaping up around us, but a future that we could be a part of imagining and building. Instead of treading the path of policy reform, we allowed ourselves the courage to ask, “what if?”.
Over the past 13 years, this way of asking questions has been our guiding light as we walk towards countless futures and possibilities. With partners from diverse landscapes, we have been building tools that help navigate complexity without losing out on the nuances of the problems they are addressing.
Our tools have addressed a variety of problems across domains, including but not limited to civic issues, energy provision, transportation, and waste. The common thread holding all our work together is that of building resilience – of materials, people, and systems.
In the last two years, we have started to look at our tools as components of an interconnected suite that enables groups, organisations, and institutions to collaboratively navigate their contextual needs, aspirations, and constraints.
Today, we are building tools to shift the needle on how various actors engage with vulnerability. As always, this phase of our work started with us asking “what if”:
- What if policies are co-created with the groups that they impact the most?
- What if different stakeholders work collaboratively to address shared concerns?
- What if we can make trade-offs explicit when making decisions?
- What if there was a way to assess the real-world impact of policies on people?
All our work happens in collaboration with organisations that work on building resilience. We rely on their data and their relationship with the communities they work with to help policymaking become more nuanced.
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We have seen some interesting trends in the policy and advocacy space over the last few years. Civil society organisations are using data on communities’ responses to shocks to demand greater consideration of their shifting needs. Local governments have been responding to this demand by trying to include more people’s participation in policymaking.
In the coming years, we hope to see a surge in this trend of community members articulating their aspirations from governments, and policy makers engaging with the dynamic nature of vulnerability.
Armed with the confidence that comes with years of watching our approach make a difference, over the next five years, we are committed to enabling better engagement between decision-makers and the people they represent.
There are three ways in which we want to do this:
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Entrenchment
We want to embed our approaches and tools in existing processes of governments, civil society organisations, and private actors. We want to equip those who have their eyes and ears closest to the problem with the necessary tools, without reinventing their ways of working.
Collaboration
We want to intersect our approach and tools with other actors in the vulnerability space. We want everyone involved and invested in building resilience to speak a shared language around vulnerability and find ways to further one other's work without replicating it.
Research
Research is at the core of our work, enabling us to address the “hows” of the changes we all agree are required, and ensuring that our tools can deliver the impact we promise. We want to rigorously show the impact that these tools and our approach can have on policymaking.
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None of this would be possible without the giants we walk with: our partners and collaborators who deeply engage with the process and the outcomes; our asset makers and printers that go the extra mile to make our ideas a reality; our interdisciplinary team that actualises our shared vision day in and day out, and our friends who make themselves available at a moment’s notice to help with assets, tests, and perspectives.
To everyone that props us up – we cannot thank you enough. We could not have asked for a better group of people to push us in the best of ways. Thank you for seeing us through these thirteen years, and thank you for the years to come.
Thank you,
Fields of View
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“The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
-Alfred Tennyson (Ulysses)
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