Praxorium is a place for global praxis, for active, open, and transparent collaboration on complex (wicked) social problems of our time. See the main website (www.praxorium.org) for more information.
"Praxis (from Ancient Greek: πρᾶξις, translit. praxis) is the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, or realized. "Praxis" may also refer to the act of engaging, applying, exercising, realizing, or practicing ideas. This has been a recurrent topic in the field of philosophy, discussed in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Paulo Freire, Ludwig von Mises, and many others."
"If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Wicked problems are systemic, which means they almost inevitably break pre-existing boundaries of university departments, roles, governance structures, embedded processes and standards, businesses, projects, governments, industries, and any other stakeholder grouping or classification system we're accustomed to using. It may not be ethical, or even possible, to make a profit on a venture which deals with a wicked problem. Indeed, the requirement to profit from research, frequently at the expense of other values (such as people and planet) has arguably contributed to rather than helped resolve many of the complex issues we're presently facing.
This means that collaboration is critical, and it's not enough to collaborate across academic disciplines or across government departments. It is also necessary to collaborate in implementation, across organisations, through different structures, in different countries, across every different type of form or structure we can imagine, and others we haven't yet thought of. We need to capture a huge array of human perspectives, and build up our dynamic, continuously evolving picture of the "elephant", which none of us can see alone, and which changes from one moment to the next.
We need a way to capture and share our information, across multiple sources. We need to make the most of our complex, intelligent, human sense-making capacities, without running up against the limitations built into our bodies, such as our desire to belong to a tribe, our imperfect memories, and our tendency to bias in our perceptions and our recollections. We need to realise that we have these limitations, and get creative about how to step outside their constraints when this is necessary to solution. We must use the tools we have created to work in concert with us, to do well the things we cannot do well ourselves, but without relying on them to perform the complex functions we must ourselves perform. The tools are not just technological, but social, creative, interpersonal and intrapersonal. Stories and questions and playful experimentation are tools too.
To deal with wicked problems, research needs to make it from the lab into industry, local community action, decision making, legislation ... into praxis.
We have to be able to embrace and value failures for what they are -- information we desperately need as inputs to future work.
In so many ways, Praxorium itself is a living experiment. We don't know how to do the kinds of work and sense-making we need to do. We will learn as we go.