Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Because of its inherent complexities vis-à-vis decision-making, commoning is a well-suited field of study to explore the potential of humanities-driven experimental design (media) research to provoke critical reflection, problem-finding and productive complication. By introducing two different agent-based models, the interdisciplinary research team discusses their experience with setting up parameters for modelling, their implications, and the possibilities and limits of employing modelling techniques as a basis for decision-making. While it shows that modelling can be helpful in detecting long-term results of decisions or testing out effects of unlikely yet challenging events, modelling might act as a discursive practice uncovering hidden assumptions inherent in the model setup and generating an increase of scientific uncertainty. The project “ThinkingToys for Commoning” thus argues for a critical modelling practice and culture, in which models act as toys for probing alternative modes of living together and exploring the constructedness of methods. In countering late forms of capitalism, the resulting situated and critical practice provides avenues for enabling more self-determined forms of governance.
Highlights
This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations
A third line of technological critique, which developed sometimes disentangled from common-based economies and commoning, are techno-optimistic communities of interest such as those formed around the Free/Libre Open Source Software (F/LOSS) movement
ThinkingToys for Commoning explores, together with them, a computational modelling technique, called agent-based modelling,2 applied to situations specific to their ways of living and commoning such as mutual aid, infrastructure maintenance, voluntary work, time-banking, bottom-up decision making, or self-organized information sharing in a playful, critical and non-solution oriented way
Summary
This article explores the use of agent-based modelling as a critical and playful form of engagement with cooperative housing organizations. Decentralized, local and self-organized forms of communication appear to have further explorative potentials, we are currently investigating the manifold channels, networks and affordances of information storage, transmission, and processing for a cooperative, that could unfold by programming and experimenting with additional agent-based models.
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