I will start by saying the bubble week in Texel was a lot of fun, surprisingly. To be honest, I was not really looking forward to spending a week biking in the rain and surviving on Dutch food. But I did it and loved it!
Now onto what I learnt in Texel. First thing that comes to mind: coordination is everything when working in such large groups. I found that all three groups (STS, tourist and inhabitant) had great ideas but they were just not aligned. I enjoyed my time as one of the tuners. It was a great experience relaying an idea from my group to the others and vice versa and observe how the pathways would change. The iterations were frustrating but informative and satisfying at the same time.
Secondly, my interview with the artist Maria Roelofsen. Maria is a Texel based artist that collects plastic and wood waste that washes up on the beaches of Texel along with her “fans” and turns it into artistic models. We were interviewing her to understand the constraints that the people of Texel faced regarding managing their waste. She told us one major constraint was space. Households just did not enough space for three different waste bins for segregation. I then asked her if Texelaars would accept a financial reward in lieu of greater segregation of waste. Maria answered in the negative, she told us that Texelaars must be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated. Her answer surprised me because such incentive based mechanism were great successes. Like I said in one of our group meetings, to me, at the end of the day, value for money always beats sustainability. People are not going to choose sustainable options unless it is subsidised. It was therefore, surprising to hear Maria say that this would not work on Texel :/.
Thirdly, It is not easy to transform a scientific analysis into a relatable story. It was difficult for many of us to comprehend why we were working on a dreaming up a future for Texel rather than convert all the data and theory concepts that we had collected into a scientifically accurate report. I for sure did not read all those articles to dream of floating buildings in 2065! But then, it started making sense to me. We were there to inspire not really to make a report. I understood we had to create sort of a bed-time story to plant ideas and images in our audience’s minds. A story that had crisis and suffering but also hope and innovation. I realise now hoe much work goes into creating stories.
In a nutshell, I am glad that I made the trip to Texel. It was a pretty charming place that I wish I could have seen more of. On the plus side, I met a lot of interesting people and learnt so much.