The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. The Essential Guide to Doing Transition. | Page 39

Every movement, every coming together of people to bring about positive change, needs its flags, its icons. Transition is no exception. When you are doing Transition in your community, always invite in creativity, design and the arts. One manifestation of Transition’s ‘let it go where it wants to go’ spirit is in the huge diversity of logos groups create

for themselves.

One of the greatest icons of the Transition movement is the Brixton Pound £10 note. The one featuring David Bowie. Notice how you had already heard of it and, most likely, could already visualise it. In the event that you didn't, here it is, among its fellow notes.

It's bright, it's simple, it's colourful. I have taken it to many places. What has often amazed me is how its reputation has gone ahead of it so that, on at least 4 occasions, just my holding it up during a talk has generated a round of applause. When I went to Paris recently and visited a project run by Le Pre Saint Gervais en Transition, we were visited by the local Mayor Gérard Cosme.

Did he want to have his photo taken with the group of people there? With me? Not really.

The key thing he wanted was a photo of himself with the Brixton Pound £10 note, "the one with David Bowie on" (see photo below).

It starts conversations. It embodies the sense that a Transition future could be more fun

than the alternative futures currently on offer.

It embodies possibility. It is delightful.

Why would anyone want to settle for the dull money currently on offer, when we could have bright funky money with David Bowie on?

No, seriously... why would you?

And if you won't settle for that, why settle for anything else? It opens the possibility of actually refusing to accept the planet-trashing, attention span wrecking, community atomising, wealth-concentrating nonsense that makes up so much of what we accept in modern society.

Every revolution needs its banners: the role

of creativity in Transition

39

An extract from a blog post by Rob Hopkins