Waterlution is planning the Canadian Water Innovation Lab 2010 for October 18-24. They are seeking both participants age 18-35 and facilitators of all ages.
The event is billed as “a once-in-a-lifetime learning event that will turn…into concrete actions to protect our most precious natural resource: water.
Here is the presentation from our session on April 7, 2010:
Thanks to the 15 people who joined us for a special Design with Dialogue session with Dennis Schleicher, who joined us via Skype videoconference and guided a bodystorming master class. Attending were 5 graduate students from OCAD’s MDes Strategic Foresight and Innovation, 5 from Toronto’s CFC Media Lab program, and 5 Toronto designers. Dennis’ presentation is attached following : Bodystorming
And the following videos show the group’s presentations of one of the bodystorming scenarios given to the group:
A Future Voting Scenario – Team 2
Another Future Voting Scenario – Team 3
Bodystorming at Design with Dialogue from Peter Jones on Vimeo.
Design with Dialogue invites OCAD and design community participants to a special session welcoming Dennis Schleicher, Director of User Experience for Sears, to Toronto Tuesday March 23 from 7-9:00 p.m. This interim (DwI) event was just made possible by Dennis’ willingness to participate with us again in Toronto, and on this occasion to engage graduate students from the OCAD MDes Strategic Foresight and Innovation program. To register please use EventBrite and add your name.
Dennis’ workshop provides an introduction and practice of Bodystorming as a method for engaging people in simulating experiences and processes by designing them through joint acting and improv of envisioned situations. Dennis writes about three types of Bodystorming on his noteworthy blog site Tibetan Tailor. Maybe you can guess which one we will do, and come prepared to play.
Dennis Schleicher is Director, User Experience Architecture at Sears Holdings in Chicago where he builds the teams that build the online brands for Sears Holdings Corporation, mainly Sears.com and Kmart.com. He has worked with American Public University Systems, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, United States Air Force, Microsoft, Comcast, Dominos, White Castle, Bosch, and Numara.
Dennis uses his background in business and industrial anthropology to design interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives. He is actively involved with the Information Architecture Institute, the ASIST Special Interest Group of Information Architecture, Overlap, and the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
My view of life has altered dramatically after an attempt to break the rules and sneak up to stardom. I suppose stardom is my word choice because I wanted to get back at someone, some people, some idea of doubt. Not that I doubted myself, no, doubt was all around me and that’s what made me mad. I couldn’t understand why people didn’t believe.
My emotions manifested themselves in the Bloorcourt neighbourhood, one that I had never stepped into prior to my classroom investigation. Ever heard of a think tank? At Ontario College of Art & Design there are design classrooms for it, and the teacher decides what tank you get to think in. In this case, our tank was business improvement and neighbourhood identity. Lets just sum up the story to when I got a key in my hand to an empty storefront that no one believed was possible to acquire. It was the one moment where I felt so powerful, that nothing could stop me from making a dynasty of my own after graduation. And it all ended just about the next day, where I found myself alone, confused and in need of help, in a 1400 square foot space at 957 Bloor in May 2008.
The story of community arts for me is a story of people believing in something that they have never seen, heard or trusted before. It’s like actually shifting some particles in people’s brain that gravitates to the leader, like hard-core respect. I mean, where do I begin? Have I even begun yet? I don’t even know what beginning is anymore. I thought it was when I got the key, but every time someone walked through that door and asked me what the space was about, it felt like the beginning. Like everyone had their eye on this empty space, expecting it to become something that they so deeply wanted…a gallery, a rental space, a mixed-use space, a community hub, a place where students could work with the community, a playground…and I was in charge to make wishes come true. The hundreds of people I met through this “social network” that I had built, to me, felt like art in my mind, so I tried my best to communicate it by having people physically connect.
The possibilities kept growing and my time and energy were dropping. It was a period where I felt like I was responsible for everyone else’s needs and none of my own. I didn’t know who I was trying to be and what direction I was headed. As if all the work I had done was a lie, having talked my way through the process. The adventure came to a point where I felt like I had gone too far with my emotions and stood naked on a stage. It’s when all the loving people I had come in contact with felt so connected to my courageous attempt to re-configure the model of a space, that their needs mattered to me more than me. I completely lost sense of my own identity through the gathering of minds and hearts of others, trying to figure out their collective identity, which was really the space’s identity.
Was it selfish of me or selfless? I say I tried my best, but did I? Did I really manifest all that I worked for to its full potential? Or was it all a waste of time and energy? To tell you the truth, I don’t even know. Sure, I got a Globe&Mail article out of it, got invited to speak at an Innovation Café, worked my way up to the BIA and attempted to make a site called MEconomist, but I wonder to myself if my lifestyle change was worth it. Until tonight, almost a year later from when I gave the key away after the renewed months of paying reduced rent from various resources, I haven’t come to a solid conclusion on how I feel about putting my all before four walls and a community of people who wanted to help and support me. I felt like the star of a pilot show, not knowing if I’d make it through to the next episode.
However, I have come to a conclusion on community building and neighbourhood development: No one wants to take responsibility and everyone wants structure. We want new leaders and new structures, so we’re drawn to people who break the rules and shift particles in our hearts and minds. And to end it off, that is the art part of it, not the longing for change.
March Design with Dialogue explores the purposes and styles of conversation in organized planning and design situations. Ryan Coleman presents concepts from the Focused Conversation method, a process formulated and taught by Institute of Cultural Affairs. We explore a group conversation using the method, and explore the extension of FC with visual reflection, in large and breakout groups. Peter Jones presents Conversational Performance of Design, from the recent Interactions article. Complementing Ryan’s exploration of FC, Jones presents an opportunity to model the meaning and intent of conversation as expressed and received. The session closes with reflection (visual and verbal) on the purposes and practices of conversation as intentional communication.
Toke Moller of the The Art of Hosting community recently posted a link to the Art of Hosting in chaordic design process. A picture of the process, nearly identical to the Kaos Pilot project model, is found on the Chaordic site and linked here. 
A full description of the process is provided on Chaordic.org:
The chaordic design process has six dimensions, beginning with purpose and ending with practice. Each of the six dimensions can be thought of as a lens through which participants examine the circumstances giving rise to the need for a new organization or to reconceive an existing one.
Developing a self-organizing, self-governing organization worthy of the trust of all participants usually requires intensive effort. To maximize their chances of success, most groups have taken a year or more on the process. During that time, a representative group of individuals (sometimes called a drafting team) from all parts of the engaged organization or community meet regularly and work through the chaordic design process.
The steps involved in conceiving and creating a more chaordic organization are:
Develop a Statement of Purpose
The first step is to define, with absolute clarity and deep conviction, the purpose of the community. An effective statement of purpose will be a clear, commonly understood statement of that which identifies and binds the community together as worthy of pursuit. When properly done, it can usually be expressed in a single sentence. Participants will say about the purpose, “If we could achieve that, my life would have meaning.”
Tomorrow night DwD participants will join the ChangeCamp folks at the Toronto Reference Library for the second ChangeCamp event.
The session, expecting a couple hundred people, focuses on the collaborative design of a set of tools and processes that can be used by all citizens to engage their peers in the run-up to Toronto’s Municipal Election this fall. In their words:
In a fun-but-focused 3 hours, registered attendees will contribute to the creation of a toolkit for a self-organizing, people-driven, nonpartisan movement for positive change in Toronto and beyond.
We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.
To prepare, we will read Peter Block’s Workbook on Civic Engagement (pdf).
See you there!
Imagining the Future of Leadership