Method: Journalling as Eco-Social Compass

Long-term tracking, transformation and strategising around the value practices* you want to have contributed to the world.
 
1. Get a notebook you want to keep for all your life.
2. Take time to sit in a place where you feel calm and/or that connects you to one of your key concerns.
3. Start to think and make notes around the following four questions:
 

a. What would I want to have done in my life? Try to get to the root behind your desires – especially if you sense that they neatly line up with conventional expectation of what a person with your background should aspire to.
b. Who will be positively or negatively affected by what I want to have done? Think of human and more-than-human others, near and far, past, present and future.
c. What keeps me from doing it? What are the constraints, fears and struggles that keep me from doing what I really would like to be doing in life?
d. Who can I do this with? Think of a wild mix of humans, non-human and more-than-human others that can be allies.

 

4. Freely supplement the four questions with a few others that might emerge and are important for you to keep track of.
5. Use the answers as guide for your practice over long periods of time:

 

a. What do you want to try?
b. What do you want to unpack in more detail?
c. How do you want to invite others into those questions and your world(s)?
d. Be inventive in how to invite others to ask these questions, individually or collectively.

 

6. Come back to those notes from time to time, for example when you are disoriented but also when you see/feel with clarity. Integrate, modify, transform and comment over time.
7. Every couple of years, re-answer the questions from scratch. Re-read what you thought a decade (or more) ago and check in with yourself and the world.
 
 

* “By value practices I mean those actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn (re)produce it. These are, in other words, social practices and correspondent relations that articulate individual bodies and the wholes of social bodies in particular ways. This articulation is produced by individual singularities discursively selecting what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ within a value system and actually acting upon this selection. This action in turn goes through feedback mechanisms across the social body in such a way as to articulate social practices and constitute anew these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ or, given the nature of feedback mechanisms, to set a limit to these ‘goods’ and ‘bads ‘. To talk about value practices is therefore to talk about how social form, organisational reach, mode of doing, modes of co-producing and relating, forms of articulation of powers, are constituted through social processes.”
De Angelis, Massimo. 2007. The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press, p.24.

 

Journalling as eco-social compass while exploring our bioregion: at the delta of the river Adige that moves through our valley, on a plastic littered beach at Lido degli Scacchi, 5 April 2026

Method recorded as part of the Design Circles coordinated by the team of Design After Progress. Method in use by Bianca Elzenbaumer since about 2000.