Description

Talking Circles offer an opportunity to meet other delegates with similar interests and concerns. Delegates self-select into groups based on broad thematic areas and then engage in extended discussion about the issues and concerns they feel are of utmost importance to that segment of the Research Network. Participation is open, encouraged, and supported.

How Do They Work?

The Talking Circles are grouped around each of the conference themes so discussions can focus on the specific areas of interest represented by each theme. 

How to Begin:

Allow members of the group to briefly introduce themselves. 

The facilitator should encourage open dialogue and ensure a collegial and respectful conversation. 

Starting Questions to Assist Discussion

Talking Circle: Who are we?

What is the territory, or scope, or landscape of this thematic area?

What are the burning issues, the key questions for this theme?

What are the forces or drivers that will affect us as professionals, thinkers, citizens, and aware and concerned people whose focus is this particular theme?

What are the future directions (in research, in theory-building, in practice) for this thematic area?

2024 Special Focus - Cultures of Transformative Design

Participating in the construction of society through transformative design requires patient and constant reflection, study and adaptability for survival. Contemporary society builds and destroys at the same speed, excessively manipulated by particularized interests, seriously polarized and riven with desires and projects so contradictory that they engulf the essential social nature of the human being.

In order to aspire to recover a more naturalized environment, our area of responsibility, design studies, invites us—indeed, sometimes it forces us—to think and rethink transformational solutions that also coexist with systems proven harmful to personal and global survival.

With full awareness of the power of design, its powerful emotional effect and its capacity for positive transformation, we propose a courageous discourse of transformation. Firmly grounded in humility, can we can nevertheless set our set ourselves the task of creating realistic, social, ecological and sustainable proposals, viable in the moment in which we are bound to live yet, above all, humanizing.

It is proposed to analyze current design cultures that set out to transform the world. It is boring, even demoralizing, to listen to speeches and transformative proposals incapable of positive practical implementation in a society formed of people with differential capacities to enact change. Constructive criticism is necessary, certainly painful, and this can lay the foundations for a sustainable, socially inclusive and normalized future.

Transformative design may not be perfect. Its focal interests and programs may not be homogeneous. Their agendas may be minimal, recycled or reused. Often, they fall outside the standardization parameters to which we have become accustomed. Nevertheless, they raise possibilities that we might not contemplate in more formal environments. As such, they may break with certain conventional design schemes, and prompt necessary change to our way of being in the world—our ways of creating, producing, acquiring and consuming. In these circumstances, design becomes a strategic tool and engine of social change.