Roisin Markham

Seven continuous days of greyness in Ireland locally recording only 0.7 hours of daylight, as per Carlow Weather, we did see the sun this week. Respite was needed.

It was not an easy week.

I am seriously considering putting in a high Lux sun lamp or just converting all the light bulbs to a version of sunlight ones. Curiously as I dipped into that rabbit hole some of the reviews of lamps implied they improved focus and energy. Sleep was also a factor in the assessment of those lamps which brings in managing circadian rhythms. A theme for a 2025 client piece of work, more on that later.

Even the weather report after the news on Friday stated Saturday will be bright sunshine, a day to get outside.

So I spent as much time outdoors as I could. It is manky today, howling a storm and lashing. I’m planning on banking some hours of work.

So if you are new to my studio notes Welcome! They are written without AI as I recognise the cognitive process of thinking, reflection and writing to be what I am valuing. As is editing. Process and practice has always been a part of my work.

Also I’m Irish talking about the weather is a cultural standard, join in!

If you are looking for exciting reads try reading last weeks, Studio Notes week 7 2025. But perhaps this week has more insights.

Reflections

As I mentioned it was not an easy week.

Work was frustrating, two steps forward one step back…

Some themes

• universal design of a workshop to be wheelchair accessible & fully inclusive
• ongoing enquiries & meetings about new economic thinking
• supply chain, procurement, LCA and circular economy educational workshop and tool design
• new social imaginaries & Irelands 5th province training & exploring spaces to share, experiment test and play with this work, I’ll begging actively looking for invitations to share this work
• making space for others in the work, trying to be generous but in reality this causes more work, dilutes my time and is creating issues for me
• when being paid for a piece of work with time & a fixed budget manage the clients team
• in fractal business services there is always a risk in third party client work at the client delivery site.
• laptop had water damage and I hope to welcome it back fixed & fully functional
• prep for the DTNI conference next week, reducing slides to bare minimum while trying to ensure I land what new economic thinking brings, the deep design of business and change in the commons, especially about land use, ownership and governance
• Co-design, service design, non-extractive design research, relationship building, fair practices of place & sector praxis
• some excellent and one weird business development conversations
• invitations to play along with explorations of working together in a relational way
• managing my diary needs careful planning especially when I’m not in Dublin much and people want to meet

In my curious wandering some of what caught my attention & in general I’m giving energy to

• failure and not getting it right, composting, not looking away, staying with the work, a look into shadow
• democracy & technology, the absolute train wreck that is the political landscape in the US & EU. The impact of behavioural economics, dark design patterns and manipulation at scale. Propaganda, media and reality, civic and citizens engagement with local politics and land use development. Ties into the social foundation in doughnut economics ~ political voice. Plus ecological foundation of land use. if we want to live in a democracy we need to make it more functional , relational and accessible.
• how artist and culture is being commodified to bring new stories to public consciousness about climate chaos, adaptation and mitigation
• my thinking & development of new economic platforms for regenerative futures in Ireland, from the ground up…
• lack of critical media analysis at this current time – this is a huge issue in Ireland where main stream media touts business as usual because it’s double edge funding from public money & advertising
• for a while I’ve been thinking about grief, loss, hospicing modernity … in what ways am I complicit in the systems I live in? does my work and how I organise my business attend deeply enough to regenerative practices. So this week deep in frustration I wondered about the essence of the work. What if I could flip the script lean back into more creative artistic and social research practices I used 10 years ago? Can I define a new artistic direction for my efforts? what if the answer to my quest was in grassroots social cohesion creativity and only there we might develop real solutions to society and place based economics?

Insights

When work is not working, STOP. Sometimes it’s better to get up walk away, do something different. Stop pushing. Even if it means changing the project plan.

Not all work was frustrating.

Don’t pollute all the good stuff with overly giving energy to a piece of client work that is shaping a little differently.

Managing a clients team is not typically in the fixed price don’t open up that can of worms unless you are prepared to manage putting the lid back on or dealing with the rainbow.

Also the rainbow should be embraced because I am not always right. Even if more experience. Making space for others, it’s the right thing to do. So I’m building a bridge. The outcome will be better. I’ll learn something in the process. oH but the risk…

When I meet an academic or someone with a PhD I ask them about their work and what they would recommend I read as an introduction to their research. I’m enjoy that extra dimension. Academia has huge amounts of thinking & research already done. How are we surfacing it?

Don’t waste time where there is no energy. Free up other people from investing energy or guilt, we all have busy lives. We get to choose where we volunteer our time. I also think there is a rhythm to our lives sometimes it flows and other times it says no.

It’s ok to say “no” that’s important in the system and it allows redirection or concentrated energy and effort.

Note to self: when you need to do something different get up from your desk and move, go outside if at all possible.

People tell you who they are and how they work in the way they treat you, no matter how much you might respect them don’t underestimate the evidence.

So what things did n’t go to plan. I was clear on my commitment, value and cost. It’s not matched so manage the short fall or walk away.

Schedule time with your client the garden even if it’s raining.

On AI, I still read a lot of surface level think pieces about it. Following its path of destruction and cultural swathes. I came across two brilliant piece of writing, shared below in resources, they really resonated & had me linking some ideas I had about International Womens Day and Paddy’s day. Ultimately asking on Linkedin of all places

What if AI was an intersectional femnist? Could you imagine on the 8th of March if all the AI’s were asked by half the population to think and act as a woman. Let’s be clear that’s a campaign we should be running and framing all day everyday except should we be using AI at all? With is heavy extraction on earths resources and hidden human toil. In March 2023 I did have that conversation with ChatGPT you can read it in here.

I was also interested if anyone was exploring if AI was an intersectional femnist topic for international women’s day? I think we could really push a challenge to the marauding algorithms of our times. I also think it would make a great Guilty Femnist Show. I emailed them a pitch.

The second question I asked on that Linkedin post was

What if AI was Irish?

Now I can’t be the only one who is thinking about this? We could have a field day about this in the broadest sense of Irish wit and wisdom, mythology and culture, storytelling and magic. It could be hilarious and poignant. A curious way to celebrate Irish culture, 40 shades of green across the globe. Imagine what our comedians, story tellers and activists would do with that?

But again the dilemma of not using extractive AI to play to have cultural fun to poke at itself because it’s burning the planet and those data centres are using so much water, land and where is that value going into private shareholders pockets.

There is an EU Creative fund open, I’m going to explore it, carve time to see if creating a future worth living into is in fact an emergent regenerative art practice whose time has come.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

Bell Hooks

Sitting with this I’m choosing to go move, so off I go dancing in the shed in the rain.

I noticed this Dan Savage quote from an amazing post by Trailblazery on Instagram during the week.

A question for you?

What has been catching your attention this week?

Have you ever applied for EU funding and been successful? Love to hear what your experience was.

Resources

Found myself reading about the life Václav Havel ~ a dissident playwright and Czech Republic’s first President.

“There are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something new is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting itself, while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble”

We have many lessons and stories in our periphery that can inform us and our work now.

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From the Green European Foundation ~ Post-Growth Future)s): New Voices Report

Growth is no longer a viable path, yet the idea of a post-growth society is still struggling to enter mainstream politics. Despite mounting ecological and social crises, policy discussions remain locked in outdated economic paradigms. However, recent years have marked a turning point, with post-growth thinking gaining momentum in European institutions, civil society, and academia.

https://gef.eu/publication/post-growth-futures-new-voices-novel-visions/

I’m really enjoying reading this.

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I also loved this post from Holly Doron, CoLab Dudley, Stories of Place 2024 Composting #2 | Principles as a compost bed. It resonates so much with my own thinking and work in the complexity of Living Systems and it being needed to be embedded in our collective everyday thinking.

From this extract of her post:

These lab notes are a way of processing and sharing praxis (learning/research + doing/practice) as I go along, rather than hoarding it and editing detail out for a much more concise report or thesis another couple of years away. Writing is a thinking process for me, and I’ve found that unexpected connections and futures can emerge from sharing unpolished thoughts. So, you are welcome to delve into the depths of the compost below, or just look through the skimming guides at the beginning of each post. These lab notes are a process of sharing practices, rituals, tools and resources which you are welcome to borrow, iterate, adapt in your own unique contexts and places. We use language that might be unfamiliar, so here is a glossary that the CoLab Dudley is gradually adding to and continually updating.

Great to see Bridget McKenzie’s work mentioned. Bridget and I connected during the Tools for the regenerative renaissance course.

Love the use of hand drawing style and writing to illustrate.

We discussed community history as a “single snapshot moment of now, everyone who is in that place, it’s all of their histories”

This is so useful for a conversation coming up in Courtown and Riverchapel Towns First Plan where I’ll be presenting my Courtown Community Circular Economy Plan in early March, unpaid labour but an act of being in right relationship with the land and sea.

This piece of writing is so connected to care of and with, co-design and spaces I long to open up and be in. It is by its very nature the path to our just transitions.

I’ll end here with the idea and intention of enabling the practice of the futures we want.