Bangkok’s Pop Up Civic Experiment: The Circular Design Lab 2. 0 — from leverage points to zero waste cocktails

We call ourselves the ‘<a href="https://www.circulardesignlab.org/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Circular Design Lab</a>’- a 100% volunteer, citizen driven, ground up (experimental) open innovation “platform”. We aren’t technically registered, we don’t have a director, we don’t have sustainable funding sources, we don’t have a manifesto, yet we have been able to run on the energy that civil society idea and social capital offers. In <a href="https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/why-so-many-uprisings-why-now/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">today’s political economy mobilizing energy is evermore dynamic </a>when anger, inspiration, curiosity or frustration is latent- at best inspiring non-violent change optimism, at worst sparking massive uprisings that don’t always evolve well. Since inception in early 2019 we have been focused especially on complex and locally problematic challenges, in Bangkok where we live. We wanted to investigate the core drivers of entrenched climate and social justice issues, and be brave enough, perhaps naive enough, to assume that it is our collective civic role to tackle ‘badly managed commons’ challenges? We started with with waste management in our 1.0 lab cycle (<a href="https://www.thaienquirer.com/7028/trash-mountain-a-story-of-severe-waste-mismanagement-2/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">more here about the complexity and corruption</a>). Despite being organized ‘just enough’ and not having capacity to document all of the details of our initial March-May workshop series, we had so much turn out and momentum that it became clear that our team of four now had 20 others wanting to craft the next generation of the lab. Long story short, and many summer evening meetings later, this organic nature led to a 2.0 re-launch last September. <a href="https://medium.com/@courtneysavie/bangkoks-pop-up-civic-experiment-the-circular-design-lab-2-d323d56252ae">Website</a>