Workshops
Design for Living Complexities: Exploring the Intersection of Design and Critical Thinking
Workshop Presentation Peter Taylor, Bobby Ricketts
This workshop, which draws on a graduate course titled Design for Living Complexities, leads participants through activities to appreciate the perspectives below, apply them to possible revisions in their own teaching, and share them with others. We take design to mean intentionality in construction, which involves a range of materials, a sequence of steps, and principles that inform the choice of materials and the steps. Design also always involves putting people, as well as materials, into place. This happens by working with the known properties of people, as well as the known properties of material, and trying out new arrangements to work around their constraints. Critical thinking, as we define it, involves understanding ideas and practices better when we examine them in relationship to alternatives. Design cannot proceed without the idea that there are alternatives to the current way of doing things, even if one has not yet found those alternatives, or have not yet found the best ones, or have not yet been able to put them into practice. In short, critical thinking is in design from the start. For example, one critical thinking theme is to ask, instead of dividing real-world complexities into many local situations, how can we examine “intersecting processes” that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time?
Narrative Dioramas: Capturing New Knowledge Generated through Storymaking within Co-design Activities
Workshop Presentation Kelly Anderson
This session emphasizes three main generative methods within co-design activities: probes, prototypes, and toolkits. These methods focus on providing guidance for participants to interpret, make, and reflect upon a lived experience within the workshop. These generative methods help make things that are normally unobservable available as resources for design decisions and rationale. While methods such as interviews and observations give designers access to the explicit and observable, generative methods afford access to the tacit and implicit aspects of users’ lives. Generative making methods produce insights in many variations, sometimes taking the shape of performance, forms, and future imaginaries. This research is currently investigating how these variations emerge, and are shared through stories within workshops, as well as how best to analyse this story data within spaces of emergence. One motivation for trying to capture and analyse these stories as they emerge is twofold: 1) to help minimise the time and energy spent on data analysis far after the workshop occurs, and 2) to provide a platform for the participants to take a more active role in the analysis. Co-design methods have been while established, while a mode of analysis for generated data has not. This research seeks to develop a mode to attune to, and analyse, emergent data surfaced through stories.
