Grow your own Worlds

mission

FoAM is committed to growing inclusive, resilient and abundant worlds. We do this by providing a context and a structure to research, design and reflect on transdisciplinary creative practices. By seeking out and connecting people in the interstitial spaces between professional and cultural boundaries, we are smoothing the way for a community of ‘generalists’. This diverse community enables its members to tackle complex challenges, in the cultural, as well as technological environments. While facilitating multi-stakeholder workshops, or mixing digital and physical realities, FoAM steers the creative practices towards ethically and environmentally sustainable practices. Our motto, ‘grow your own worlds’ alludes to our mission; to move from wasteful consumption and mindless dependence to responsible participation in all aspects of our lives.

core principles

All FoAM activites are derived from three sets of core principles. [1] FoAM should, through all its activities, foster interdependence between people and their disciplines through transdisciplinary collaboration. We believe that the world is an intricate tangle of realities, which cannot be understood by hacking it into a heap of single issues. By collaborating with various disciplines, we believe that we can better grasp the world in its elegant complexity. [2] Our actions and their outcomes should nourish our cultural and natural environment, as well as sustain ourselves. This can only be accomplished if we foster a culture of sharing, rather than commodifying, where prosperity doesn’t equal property. FoAM is therefore an avid supporter of open-source and copy-left movements, advocating the view that free access to resources stimulates collective creativity and innovation. [3] Working with a diversity of people and sharing resources allows us to discover new things and be amazed by the world on a daily basis. We cherish this curios approach to the world, spicing it up with a hint of irreverence, playfulness and humility.

vision

We live in a world whose social, environmental and economic systems are fundamentally out of balance. From education to politics, from science to arts, cultivation and culture, most these systems today are based on segregation, reductionism and homogeneity. We see a world, not too far in the future, in which building bridges between separate disciplines, cultures and beliefs will become not only a desired talent, but an essential survival skill. Once the bridges are built, we can work together to design a fairer and greener world, that can thrive on interdependence and diversity. Amidst turbulent climate, wasteful consumerism and xenophobic security measures, FoAM is a haven for people who are committed to finding creative solutions to these intricate problems.

organisation

As with foam (the preparation), FoAM (the group) is a dynamic entity, able to change shape and scale as required. We can be a transdisciplinary organisation in the morning, a tightly knit family at lunchtime, a learning facility in the afternoon, a loose bunch of philosophers in the evening and a dedicated designers collective by night. Most of our activities occur in FoAM-Labs, our trans-local bases; hybrids between research laboratories and creative studios. FoAM-Labs are designed to encourage reciprocal exchanges of ideas, techniques and experiences. We are organised as a distributed laboratory, with bases and nodes (people, projects and partner-organisations) spread across the globe. This distributed structure allows us to keep the bases (FoAM-Labs) as small and flexible organisations able to incubate and spawn experimental initiatives, while the network can support and develop activities on larger scales.

activities

FoAM develops its activities in a layered structure, as long-term initiatives, yearly thematic projects and short term experiments. This structure allows us to touch on 'burning issues' as they arise, as well as be engaged in projects concerned with slower, long term tendencies. Our activities can be loosely categorised as [1] research and creation, [2] education and learning, [3] dissemination and archiving. In diverse teams of generalists and specialists, we research and create experimental situations, responsive environments, active materials, generative media, culinary performances and other forms of participatory culture. We encourage shared learning and development, by facilitating workshops and hosting public events. We disseminate accumulated knowledge in co-authored publications, on-line and on-site libraries and archives. We are equally inspired by sciences and arts, nature and culture, engineering and design, physical and digital, upholding the values of complexity and whole systems thinking. We create hybrid realities by infusing knowledge with imagination and routine with magic.