Principle #1: co-create
What it is
Co-creation is a design principle that we apply, in service to multiple characteristics of justice and solidarity. Co-creation is an artistic practice where the experience of democracy — shared power — is lived (in both body & mind), multi-sensory, joyful, & meant to unlock creativity.
This principle is important to Street Works because we believe...
Just systems practice democracy — among other things. But we don't all truly understand what shared power is or means. To deeply understand something, it is more important to do than to say. Deep knowledge comes from experience, soul change, and body work. Co-creation helps us experience democracy joyfully, and on a deeper, more authentic level than logic or words can on their own. It also fosters relationships and a sense of belonging.
GoalS
To prioritize co-creation, Street Works aims to:
Collaborate in distributed leadership. Leadership is permeable, and votes guide decisions. Members both shape the systems they participate in.
Design for mutual aid, where giving and receiving both matter. This is inherent in everything, but most structured in the time bank, where time credits are a shared tool for tracking participation and helping support circulate across the network. Members receive more than they give, or vice versa, for long periods without judgment. —> What is mutual aid? —> What if someone wants to give and not necessarily receive in the time bank? Or vice versa?
Design for interdependence by balancing autonomy, reliability, and accountability. Participation is always voluntary, and everyone has the right to opt out at any time. But systems must also support trust, follow-through, and shared responsibility so that people can meaningfully rely on one another over time.
Create or present art in which passersby can collaborate in real time, with each other and/or with the artist. This is essential to Street Works festivals.
Design experiences to turn abstractified ideas, like democracy, into ones we can feel, touch, smell, see, move with, and/or taste. This is essential to festivals.
Explore collective ownership. For community wealth building, some assets should be owned to protect justice. Examples include coops, land trusts, and more.
WhY
1. Co-creation is embodied democratic practice, not just participation
We're all familiar with looking at a painting on the wall, watching and/or listening to a musician, dancer, or actor on stage, or passively absorbing art and culture. Many of us have also seen arts that are more interactive. Maybe you can touch the object or climb on it. Maybe it responds to you.
Co-creation represents a third, often overlooked art form in which the participant isn't just interacting with an object, song, or performance; they're changing it. While the artist might be critical to design, they are not the sole author of the final work.
We love taking in artwork made by others, but established presenters of the cultural asset ecosystem — like museums and galleries — are dangerous arbiters of cultural value. With their colonial histories, museums have reinforced racist worldviews, dehumanized other cultures, and contributed to wealth gaps. Still, 60% of arts funding went to 2% of large museums in 2017. And their cultural power is rarely democratic, or just. Instead, curation is usually in the hands of a small group of people who are deciding too much about what and whose ideas are worth preserving, amplifying, and paying for.
2. Shared power must be learned through experience, not only by reading or LISTENING
Co-creative arts aren't a magic cure, but they are one way to learn and demonstrate what shared power feels like, in a world in which it is very common for our beliefs, experience, and words to be disembodied: we say it, but we don’t “get it”; we know, but we don't “live” it; we understand it but we don't “feel it.”
Artists are excellent at building practices of embodiment that help us feel ideas or knowledge at that deeper level. For those of us jaded by democracy, they can also help turn democracy into a joyful act: we witness our actions contributing to a collective thing that has its own beauty. It's creative, fulfilling and fun. It might be a little hard, but not so hard to be out of reach. And that object is precious.
We can build our sense of power in small, joyful acts that get bigger and more complicated. With reinforcement, it's a hop, skip, and a jump to seeing civic action as an art form.
3. Co-creation expands what counts as meaningful participation
In most systems, participation is often limited to predefined roles (observer, consumer, voter, attendee). Co-creation expands this by allowing participants to shape outcomes directly. This shift matters because it builds the muscle of shared responsibility: people are not only responding to systems—they are partially producing them.
4. Interdependence is the condition that makes co-creation sustainable
Co-creation only works if relationships can hold both freedom and accountability at the same time. People must be able to:
choose participation freely
change or exit without coercion
be reliable when they take on shared commitments
be part of systems that respond when patterns of non-follow-through affect others
Without freedom, co-creation becomes coercive. Without accountability, it becomes fragile and extractive. Interdependence is the design condition that holds both together so trust can actually form over time.
5. Co-creation is also a pathway into mutual aid and collective systems design
In Street Works contexts, including the Time Bank, co-creation extends beyond art into infrastructure. It becomes a way of practicing how resources, care, and responsibility circulate across a community. This is where participation becomes systemic: people are not only engaging in shared experiences, but also learning how shared systems of exchange, support, and coordination actually function in practice.
