Every end of year we retreat and reflect on what we learned over the year’s events and who we are becoming in DwD community and practice. Fifteen people attended to co-create the vision for 2012 priorities, sessions, and direction. An Appreciative Inquiry guided the exploration and reflection, leading to harvests for each phase, as illustrated:
Discovery
Discovery explores the best in our experience, sharing and learning from our past and bringing forward the positive values to be honored in the inquiry. Paired shares led to whole-group expressions of valued experiences and impressions from Design with Dialogue in the 2011 season.
Visual reflection of DwD 2012 by Patricia Kambitsch.
Dream
Dream envisions what might be, and generates a multiplicity of possibilities for the group to reflect and decide. Individuals generated their ideas, shared in triads to review and add more, and posted and clustered in a harvest sheet. We organized and labeled clusters in a following session, resulting in a document shared with participants. The original harvest appeared as follows (not the full image):
Design and Destiny
In concluding the review and vision, people expressed their own hopes and encouragement for the 2012 season. People added their personal commitments to their proposals, which all ensures a rich, diverse, and heartfelt community in 2012.
- Have continuity between sessions, with blogging and conversational support.
- Have workshops to explore the nature of inquiring systems (of which AI, DwD are representative)
- Evaluate the impact of learning from dialogue. Observe and evaluate the forms and outcomes of design. Relate the learning and observations to academic impact.
- Inquiry into experiential modeling and experiential learning. What contributes to enhanced perception in dialogue?
- “Listening sessions” How to best share what we are learning in listening?
- Continue with “sessions on what’s going on right now.” Capturing relevance as its emerging.
- Holding new types of experiential dialogue sessions (e.g., Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects)
- Continue to connect with conferences and academic groups
- Consider interim DwDs that provide continuity – Hold special interest groups for hot topics
- Develop the practice and “rituals” of dialogue:
Save 30 min at Pre or Post for continuing topics
Provide coaching / video in basic facilitation and process skills
Start Web conferences or online sessions
Designing a Future for our Future: Personal Foresight
Get ready for The Multiplicity.
This workshop engaged participants to co-create multiple personal futures in large and small group collaboration. This social design experiment in personal foresight generated the creation of possible personal scenarios for the challenging next-future term possibilities. We started by creating a personal profile for the Low Tech Social Network. Communities listed on the profiles were shared in the closing circle to co-create a living network among the participants.
An amazing array of participants were involved, suggesting that DwD is reaching beyond its business + creatives + designerly roots. More and more people from dedicated social change communities are engaged and returning. While businesses can benefit from and afford these creative group processes, social change agents need to learn from each other. A community across communities is forming.
The event was framed by the question of considering the multiple futures we have choice to create. When we think of the future, we tend to push a vague collection of dreams, possibilities and wishes out to a speculative point in the years following the nearest term. We can guess about the world in two years, we can plan for 5 years, but 10 and 20 years challenge personal vision. Our concept was to confront the future opportunities for humanity, by learning to position our own inherent multiplicities as creative narratives to counter a technologically-determined future, whether a career ideal or the “singularity.”
The venue supported the creation of a circle and pairs for the exercises:
The workshop was convened by Peter Jones and Patricia Kambitsch (visual reflection) at The Design Exchange Feb 24th in the DX boardroom as part of the Toronto Design Week Design Offsite Festival.