As we enter the Transition 2020s, all over the world citizens are taking over. They set up cooperatives, start community gardens, trade among themselves and organise their own energy supply. They are doing things differently so our communities can overcome these exciting but challenging times of change and transition.  
 
The Community Coins project is part of this “commons” movement. Like other bottom-up initiatives we are building a new society from below. With Community Coins we are rethinking the traditional dichotomy of paid work versus volunteering. What if we could create a new domain of work, somewhere in the middle? Our well-being largely depends on volunteers and citizens doing good. Yet, the problem is that many people experience a lack of time or money to become active for causes they care about. People get stuck in what the American anthropologist David Graeber calls bullshit jobs while daily costs and commitments prevent them from becoming active.

Diana Kretschmann (1974) is a sociopreneur from Eindhoven. She considers herself a social hacktivist and a radical optimist. She is convinced that we have all that we need to start building the new economy and create a better world in which more people can do meaningful work on a sustainable basis. She is the chairwoman of the Possible Today Foundation. This foundation aims to empower local communities and increase social resilience by introducing new ways of working, living and consuming. To this purpose, the foundation uses social co-design (i.e. designing together with the target groups) and tech for good.

How can design research contribute to both democratize and enrich the debate on alternative economic models and find out what relation between work and income are desirable?  

How can design research contribute to both democratize and enrich the debate on alternative economic models and find out what relation between work and income are desirable?  

Martina Huynh (1992, Switzerland) is an independent designer based in the Netherlands. In early 2018 she graduated cum laude from
the Design Academy Eindhoven with her project Basic Income Café, which was nominated for the Dutch Design Awards 2019 – category Design Research.  

With a strong conceptual focus, Huynh playfully translates research on societal developments into interactive experiences and multimedia installations. Since 2018 she is co-founder of design studio Cream on Chrome together with Jonas Althaus, where they explore the social and political implications of emerging technology. Their newest project 4-D News was shown in multiple European countries.

As increasing numbers of jobs bring no added value, could that mean that the money received in return brings no added value either? The proverbial equality of time and money must be questioned. The nascent discussions regarding unconditional basic income suggest money without work. The unprecedented increase in monetary supply (e.g. ECB stimulus program) is out of sync with the largely constant (labor) time-supply. The classical demand-supply model would suggest that the value of time must have increased. The economist’s explanation of the effects is a matter-of-fact one: wages rise, prices rise, and inflation increases. However, I suggest to use this moment as a pivot to depart from this line, and to redefine work as an activity of investing time, not earning money.  

Investing time means to be aware of its scarcity. Time cannot be manufactured or accumulated as easily as money. Investment also means, as Bernard Stiegler and Rudolf Steiner suggested, a capital of confidence in the future; a desiring projection of imagination. Using time as the decision-making currency and relegating money to its historical role as a medium of exchange is a vital transformation needed to thrive in a society which focuses on well-being rather than wealth.  

Josef Bares dedicates his work to the semiotic investigation of consumer transactions and cognitive labor. He received a degree in international business and economic history in 2009 and a degree in intermedia arts in 2010. His art-practice based research into decision making under cognitive capitalism lead to the award of a doctoral degree in philosophy in 2016. He has contributed to books published by ISEA in 2016, Baltan Laboratories in 2018 and RIXC in 2019.  

How do you queer the spreadsheet / developing a queering accounting manifesto? This presentation aims to explore the language of modern economics and business – accounting – through queer lenses. This will be done by focusing on roundtable discussions occurring between queer artists, accountants and academics on how we might go about ‘queering the spreadsheet’ and culminating in the presentation of The Queering Accounting Manifesto.  

This manifesto represents a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Shining a light on heteropaternalism and destructive binaries to provide the momentum for fundamental change in accounting, accountability and the accounting profession dominated by today’s heteronormative, paternalistic and patriarchal ‘norms’. By taking economic thought and accounting logic as a playground, this newly formed queering accounting manifesto seeks to prepare us for the new types of governance and accountability the world requires under an economy of the commons.  

Alessandro Ghio Assistant Professor in Accounting, Monash Business School (Australia). Alessandro holds a Ph.D. in financial accounting from ESSEC Business School and a Ph.D. in management from the University of Pisa. His research focuses on issues surrounding the sociology of the accounting profession and corporate social media communication. He is the co-instigator of the project “Queering Accounting” and has led and/or taken key roles in competitive research funded projects to study social mobility in education and practices supporting women accountants. Alessandro received the Best Paper Award at the 2018 IAAER World Congress and the 2019 Aspen Institute Award ‘Ideas Worth Teaching’. Prior to joining Monash University, Alessandro has been a controller in a large telecommunication organization, a consultant for the Italian Ministry of Education on social mobility in education and a visiting scholar at Indiana University.  

Nick McGuigan Director of Equality, Diversity and Social Inclusion and Associate Professor in Accounting, Monash Business School (Australia) as well as Co-Instigator of The Accountability Institute1. His work revolves around student conceptions of learning, Integrated Reporting, innovation, systems design and regenerative economics. He has led and taken key roles in Federal State level grants in both Australia and Germany. Nick has published widely in international accounting and education journals and been invited to present at research centers and professional organisations all around the world. An award-winning educator, he instigated Monash Business School’s newly created Artist-In-Residency program, conceptually designed the world’s first ever accounting perfume and together with the accounting profession is embarking on research that investigates a Queer perspective of accounting.  

Lisa Powell Assistant Professor in Accounting at Monash Business School (Australia). Lisa incorporates creativity, innovation, and interdisciplinary aspects into accounting education. Lisa’s research interests include empathy and emotional intelligence, psychology, design thinking, and diversity and inclusion in accounting education. Lisa believes in challenging heteronormativity in accounting education to create a more inclusive educational environment for students and faculty.  

The economy and the financial system would have indeed much to learn from Nature.  
 
In order to imagine an economic and financial system which would optimally allocate resources, one doesn’t have to go any further than examining how their own body functions. If one thinks of each human as being one cell inside a global, collective organism, then central banks and private banks are like the respiratory and circulatory systems in our body. The respiratory system is in charge of regulating the “overall” available basic source of energy (oxygen) by breathing slowly or fast (raising or lowering interest rates, buying bonds), the other (the circulatory system) is in charge of distributing that available energy in (normally) an efficient way, depending on the needs of your body. At the present time, QE can be understood as hyperventilation, that is, the act of breathing deep and fast, while doing nothing “productive”, the result of which can be dizziness or even passing out (getting too much oxygen while not consuming it for a concrete physical “need”). In today’s economy, a lot of money is created, but only for speculative purposes, not based on the needs of the overall economy, and actually threatening to crash it (the same as passing out from too much speculative money overheating select areas of the economy in unsustainable ways).

This presentation examines ‘ecomedia curating’ as an approach toward eco-sustainable cultural production and reviews the new genre of ecomedia art that facilitates and challenges representations of environmental concerns and the Anthropocene through praxis. Compared to the traditional curatorial process, ecomedia curating gives artists more control of their creative activities and the exchange of artifacts. Curators and cultural leaders have a unique privilege to communicate participatory alternatives to hierarchical and resource-dependent modes of cultural production. Through ecomedia curation, cultural leaders can generate reflective activities in technology-based art and media practices. There is a call to action augmenting this paper for curators of media art to develop means of sharing agency through technology and environmental communication for supporting ecomedia curation. 

Kimberley Bianca is a PhD student in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices and is investigating ecologically sustainable media arts. She completed her master’s thesis “Innovating Electrofringe: A Distributed Curatorial Platform for Electronic Art”, while directing the arts organisation and festival, Electrofringe. She has a BS in Art and Technology from Saxion University, where she co- developed the software-based public art project “KaleidOk: Visually Communicating Emotions from Spoken Word”.

1. 1. ‘Replacing the “natural,” that is age-old, processes that have survived trillions of high-dimensional stressors with something in a “peer-reviewed” journal that may not survive replication or statistical scrutiny is neither science nor good practice.’ (Taleb, 2012) 

   This presentation aims to explore the use of biomimicry[1]and General System Theory (GST) in creating urban narratives with a design and governance inspired by living ecosystems[2]. Biomimicry (e.g. social insects) provides case studies that can inspire new urban narratives. GST provides a framework that can scale up these narratives. For illustration three case studies have been selected Rotterdam (Netherlands), Chandigarh (India) and Auroville (India). 

   Mr. Diojdescu’s work experience encompasses marketing and communication, financial service, education and research. His research has a trans-disciplinary dimension encompassing biomimicry-digital governance-the commons; sustainable lifestyles and well being; the role of disruptive technologies in building an ecosystems of non-monetary, non-reciprocal interaction in harmony with the environment and the self.

   Mathias Lehner is Research Director at nextcity.nl and Program Manager of the Next Step Program at the BNA.

Concluding the Economia conference with a recap from moderator Koen Snoeckx and time for discussion and conversation.