Àrokò Monthly Roundtable #04

Each month, we gather members of the Àrokò Cooperative for an unfiltered roundtable, giving you a temperature check of our take on design as it moves through art, music, politics, technology, and everyday rituals of taste. We ask sharper questions about what’s being made, who it’s for, and what it’s really doing in the world.

“Who writes the score is also a question about power and legibility.”

Inspired by Are.na’s eighth-volume call, themed “Score,” members of the Àrokò cooperative gathered to ask what it might mean to keep score outside competitive systems. A score, after all, is not only a tally of wins. It is also a set of instructions, a pattern of marks that accumulate over time, and a way of tracking what resists counting, such as care, memory, or responsibility. During a monthly roundtable, seven members followed four questions: what comes to mind when we hear the word score; who writes it; what objects a community uses to keep it; and what a liberatory scoring system might look like.

The images that fed the conversation live on our Are.na board; browse it alongside the read.

On hearing the word “score”

SHAKEIL
Two things come to mind. There’s scoring in the competitive sense: six one, Man City versus Man United. And there’s score as a guide for a performance, whether that’s sheet music or a riddim from Jamaican music culture that you replicate over the top of. Then there’s our current cultural obsession with numbers: Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores, critical consensus. I think about that especially in fandom, in music and video games, tracking concurrent player counts, people inventing metrics to quantify and validate their own likes and dislikes.

ZARIAH
When I think of score, I think of trauma immediately. In a deeper sense, I attach score to a biased version of performance. It was always based on one person’s, or a few people’s, perspective of how you performed. The score you were given came from their view, not from how you thought you did, and from what they deemed good enough, which you couldn’t control or change. Growing up, even when my efforts reached that level, the score would simply be adjusted again.

AISHATU
When I hear the word, I think about my heritage. I was born and raised in Cologne, but I’m of Hausa and Fulani heritage from Northern Nigeria, so I think about marks on the skin. I think about scarification patterns that signal family, lineage, community affiliation, even spiritual protection. They are a permanent record written into the body, a score that announces who we are before we speak. It inscribes belonging.

KELLYN
Like Jeremy dropped in the chat, my first thought was clay. Scoring is what you do when you join two pieces of clay together. After that I went to points and numbers. But it also made me think about repetition. I kept asking what makes a score different from a sheet of music, and I think it’s the duration, the repetition.

MICHAEL
A lot of this would have come to mind for me too, but to get into something slightly different: I was reminded, maybe showing my age, of The Fugees’ album The Score, a wonderful piece of music. Then I started thinking about the phrase “to know the score.“ When someone tells me I know the score, it very rarely refers to a piece of music or a sports game. It refers to a shared understanding, an if-you-know-you-know quality, the àrokò quality we keep circling. Coming back to Black music, to jazz, the music is improvisational but still built around a shared understanding: the changes of Porgy and Bess, whatever it is. Knowing the score is as much about understanding the role you play in a larger system as it is about any particular instruction.

Who writes the score?

SHAKEIL
When I think about who writes the score, the scorekeeper feels almost omnipotent. Think about sport again: there isn’t really a scorekeeper. There’s only one way to score a goal, it goes in the net, and that’s how it is. It’s a shared understanding, an agreed method, in every discipline. So who sits behind the design of the systems we adhere to? On my football tip again, think about VAR, Video Assistant Referee, and how it changes the way the score is kept. Or the AFCON final, where a result was established with a set winner, and then months later the score was adjusted by this omnipotent other force in charge of recording it.

MICHAEL
There’s an immediate overlap with traditional European orchestral music, where there’s not just the conductor keeping time and leading the performance, but the writer of the piece, who might not be the conductor at all. You start to develop these layers of scorekeeping and adherence to the score. And again the contrast with jazz, where the score, in both senses, is spontaneously developed out of that shared understanding.

JEREMY
Let me connect a few thoughts and see if they stick. One thing I keep telling my creative friends is that you’ll always be mad if you’re trying to play someone else’s game. The only way to win is to make your own rules. To the point about who keeps the score, it’s always a person, or a people, who create a shared understanding. My second thought is score versus scar. Looking at the etymology, there’s an overlap between score, as in to measure or to cut, and scar. With scarification you create scars to identify which community, which family, which tribe you belong to. With pottery you score a surface to create the texture so the clay can better adhere to itself. Both of those are really about joining and uniting.

KELLYN
In my notes I immediately wrote “winners.“ Who writes the scores? The winner. It came from that quote, history is written by the victors. Picking up what Shakeil said about the systems that create the rules, and what Jeremy said about making your own rules, it’s whoever gets deemed excellent or great at the thing. They get to say “we’ll remember it this way,“ and that becomes the score. The movie Stick It comes to mind. The whole point of it is gymnastics and how scoring can be outdated, how the people who determine the score are no longer the right ones, how the markers keep moving so we have to establish new names and new point systems, instead of imagining a new way of existing in the game and tracking what excellence actually looks like.

AISHATU
Drawing from everything so far, my understanding is that who writes the score is really a question about power and legibility. When I think of colonial systems, they established a rigid way of recording reality: statistics, borders, and categories. Many design systems continue that legacy, deciding what is visible, what is countable, what needs to be optimized. As someone working in the ethics space, when I look at scoring systems I think of algorithms and datasets presented as neutral when they are deeply situated, reflecting specific worldviews, often Western and often extractive. At the same time, African and Afro-diasporic communities have always written counter-scores, counter-narratives, and not always in written form. We have old traditions that encode knowledge so that those who are meant to understand it will. That is what interests me: who writes the score is also about who gets to be legible.

MICHAEL
The twentieth-century fallacy of the neutrality of the image has been replaced by the twenty-first-century fallacy of the neutrality of data. In the same way images were presented as accurate, neutral captures of reality, data is now presented that way. That is so fundamental to the colonial ordering and mindset. Think about how much the camera was used in twentieth-century colonialism to capture, record, categorize, and valorize all the various parts of the world these people seized.

JEREMY
Kellyn, when you brought up written language and what symbols a community uses to keep score, I thought about the early tradition of written music, which was work done by monks. It was how monasteries were funded. They would transcribe music to standardize and share it, but in a commercial sense. And toward the next question, I keep thinking about the phrase “the body keeps the score,“ which I’ve heard as a reference to trauma. Building on what Aishatu said, what if there’s a tradition in which the body is the tool trusted to hold the score, where oral traditions entrust the body to be the scorekeeper itself? I trained as a classical musician and I play jazz, so I see two sides of this. There’s a way of learning music where someone wrote something down and you sit and read it, and there’s a way where you play with other people. Those are two very different ways to keep the score, and people have done both for a long time.

MICHAEL
Talking about jazz and the body keeping the score, I’m reminded of people drumming on the lunch table. If the body keeps the score, that’s exactly what we’re doing on the lunch table. There are beautiful videos of Brazilians and other Afro-diasporic people drumming with anything at hand, their hands, their bodies, or a matchbox. That is the body keeping the score. We talk about embedded knowledge and embodied knowledge, and that’s it.

The objects that keep score

SHAKEIL
To segue toward objects, I found this a really interesting question: what symbols and objects does a community use to keep the score? What came to mind most immediately was trophies and prizes, the existence of that as a representation that you won or achieved, whether it’s an AFCON trophy or a Nobel Peace Prize, all the way down to participation trophies. On the same note, I keep thinking about the museum collection as a trophy in itself. It’s a score that shows the colonial tally: this is what we were able to extract, this is how we choose to represent these people, and we do it in our context.

KELLYN
That was huge. I’d written “trophies“ and “borrowed objects,“ because when I think about symbols a community uses to keep score, I move away from sports and music and toward the transactional. Transactional relationships, where I’ve given you this and now you’re keeping a tally of what’s borrowed or owed. On that imperialist and capitalist level, the score was once kept by dividing up an entire continent. The score was kept in the act of saying, I have collected all of these things. So stolen objects become objects that keep the score, and that ties into the historical question of who gets to say who owns these things. I also think a lack of objects keeps score. Places that have lost things, places that have been extracted from, the score is held there too, marked by the people doing the extracting.

MICHAEL
Piggybacking on Kellyn, if you think of the score as an extractive process, then places that lack keep the score too, as a negative, as a void. Museums have come up a few times, and the ontological inverse of a museum is the library, where things are kept in order to be shared rather than hoarded. In the library I’m reminded of something you don’t really see now that everything is digital: the marks inside the back of a book listing everyone who had taken it out. By borrowing something, by participating in the sharing of that object, you joined and added your mark, your score, to a tiny, ephemeral community that existed for as long as the book was in circulation. I don’t know where that goes, but there’s something to it.

ZARIAH
There is a hundred percent something to that, and it connects to what Kellyn said. A lot of my notes were about liberatory scoring systems. I do believe we’re seeing a shift, less transactional and more communal, and also a recognition that these systems, this shared, ancestral, communal foundation, have always existed. For a long time we centered Europe and the West, specifically the United States, as the center of the world, because the people in power decided that only their perspective counted, and they were the ones doing the scoring. With the crumbling and dismantling of that center, I think we’re watching organizations and people revert to what has always felt foundational, reciprocal and regenerative. We’re going back to what has always worked: not one person’s effort alone, but collective effort. It plays on each person’s strengths and fills the gaps in their weaknesses. I see it with us, with Àrokò, in how we’re developing our own scoring system.

It’s beautiful that we base it on that Yoruba word, àrokò, on encoded messages. We already share an understanding of how we show up, so we don’t always have to state it explicitly, and that creates a nurturing space that honors everyone’s different skills. It becomes regenerative, built on true collective ownership. Michael said in a previous meeting, what’s mine is mine. I’m willing to put in the work because I have true ownership over what I put into this cooperative, rather than pouring all my work into the people above me who set the score while I barely get anything back.

AISHATU
It’s important that you reminded us what the name of our cooperative means. Àrokò is a Yoruba communication system in which objects are used to send messages. That matters here, because it lets us see a symbol not as an object we simply use, but as something that creates a relational system of meaning-making. Just as àrokò is a form of encoded communication, it’s part of a relational system that holds history, context, and shared understanding.

Toward a liberatory score

What would it mean to design a score that measures care, solidarity, or collective flourishing?

SHAKEIL
We’ve touched on a few examples already. The library checkout card is a fantastic one, scoring as record-keeping in its purest form. That ties into what Zariah said about how we keep score internally. It really is a record first. We track who’s working on what and how many hours, so we can use that record to make decisions. The record isn’t the end in itself; it informs collective decision-making. The last example I’ll bring up: borders are a really pertinent symbol of scorekeeping, so a liberatory version, if we want to go there, would be open borders.

MICHAEL
I want to chime in in defense of competition, and in defense of there being a clearly defined winner in a game. With apologies to Eduardo Galeano, who I’ve been reading a lot of, I want to talk about football, the game you play with your feet, eleven players to a team. One of the things that endears not just me but eight billion people to the game is that, unmessed-with, it has the potential to be a scoring system that accounts for the things we look for. Leave aside the bureaucracy and the business of how it’s sold and marketed. It’s eleven people on a team, which is not an insignificant number, more than we have on our team right now. The games are ninety minutes, split into two halves of forty-five, stopping and starting, with no changing the play in the middle of it. It just runs until it’s done. There’s a referee in the middle keeping the time, holding in their head how long the game has actually been played so that enough time is played.

What’s particularly glorious about football, compared to almost any other game in contemporary society, is that because of those rules, those systems everyone across the world has agreed to, except for these stubborn Americans, the bond between those players can transcend circumstances you’d otherwise think impossible. And it can be done with simply that belief and that shared understanding. We look for that in all kinds of things, and it’s why football stays so globally resonant: it offers the tiniest sliver of a glimpse of it. It’s the same thing that happens in jazz, the beauty of a quartet, a combo, a trio who just transcend themselves. So what does a liberatory scoring system look like? It looks like anything that enables that transcendence, often in spite of all the surrounding circumstance. And now I’ll shut up.

AISHATU
When I think about a liberatory scoring system, I think it should question the impulse to measure, track, compare and evaluate individuals, and focus instead on sustaining relationships. Rather than asking how we can score better, maybe the question is what we refuse to score. It might refuse the quantification that causes harm. It might center opacity, where not everything needs to be known or tracked. It might prioritize continuity over performance, and value presence, care and responsibility without turning them into metrics. It’s that resistance to the colonial metrics that are present everywhere. Not everything that matters needs to be recorded in written form. I think often about the oral storytelling methods that exist across many African and diasporic communities, which I find equally valuable.

JEREMY
I don’t really have an answer to this one. I’m sitting with the question of what we gain by quantifying and what we lose. I think about this with operations. Numbers predate the colonial systems we’re talking about. Western Europe didn’t invent numbers, and didn’t even do them well. When I think about Àrokò and my own work, I never want anyone to feel like we’re under a fine microscope, like everyone has to give an immediate account of what they’re doing or how they’re spending their time.

MICHAEL
On that microscope image, I think it identifies exactly what we’re trying to break. You keep granular track not so that we’re the ones put under the slide, but so that we have visibility of ourselves. There are plenty of places we’ve all worked professionally where we gave even more detail about our workdays, but it wasn’t in service of our being informed or made more knowledgeable by that data. It was in service of extracting value for somebody else. What we do here is about providing visibility to all of us, instead.

JEREMY
When I say this isn’t only my work, I’m not sitting here asking whether I’m doing it right or wrong. It’s more about asking the question, and asking whether there aren’t other ways to reflect our value back to us. I hear you, Michael, and that’s where my heart is too, to reflect back what we’re doing and how we’re spending our time. But it’s also the question of whether there are other ways for that to be reflected.

MAHIE
I was thinking about how, in movement and wellness, there’s this call to your body, checking in with how you’re feeling and what your body is telling you. So much of the time, the metrics and the everyday ways of grading ask only what the fact is, and we’re told to ignore our intuition, or how we’re showing up in community. I want to give more value to responding to one another that way. I think about transformative justice, which is all about honoring impact and calling in the conversations that ask what was harmed, what your intention was, and what long-term, sustainable work we’re going to do to rectify it. Those are the things coming up for me.

JEREMY
I love that àrokò conversation. Who we are and what we stand for as an idea is part of this.

MICHAEL
The idea that this is what àrokò means, I’m not sure I ever had it in a nutshell like that. As if I needed more justification to get out of my own head, the fact that that is what our name means.