“We can and should cultivate wonder – a posture of wonder. This is a trained readiness to be astounded.”
– Esther Meek
Hi friends.
In late August this summer, I’ll be facilitating a workshop titled ‘Reimagining Imagination’ at the 2022 Participatory Design Conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. (Learn more and register at pdc2022.org.)
The workshop will cover many of the themes I have written about here before – namely the nature of the crisis we face as a species and the insufficiency of contemporary design practices to address these complex challenges. I will unpack this thesis by speaking to how the epistemological presuppositions of the corporation have perpetuated a bifurcation of human experience where embodied knowing and sensing has been exiled by the disembodied knowing of dataism.
Dataism and quantification are the predominant characteristics of the enterprise conditions within which our modern creative methodologies have been incubated. This enterprise epistemology has quickly atrophied our capacity for abductive reasoning and imagination. I will argue that our inability to solve for the challenges that we face as a society is ultimately rooted in our disembodied state.
I will then propose it is time to reclaim pre-enlightenment practices of non objective imagination and speculation. The practices of encountering, exploring, understanding, and communicating stories of possibility (which I call functional fictions and have written about here.) Functional fictions are narrative containers that posit alternative realities in contrast to the predominant paradigms of our age. They are most often encountered in two innate modalities of human experience that modern creative methodologies and heuristics have long ignored – grief and stillness – two historically innate yet contemporarily rare (or avoided) human experiences that may lead us to a more embodied practice of design.
The workshop will conclude with an archetype study of prophets – those whose representative voices give social expression to marginalized social constituencies. Prophets are well versed in the acts of imagination that propose the alternative realities that exist in functional fictions. It is the prophetic archetype who encounters functional fictions in the grief of their community and the stillness of reflection, embracing imagination as a legitimate way of knowing.
Through personal reflection and group based dialogue, workshop participants will have the opportunity to make connections between embodied knowing, grief and stillness as opportunities to connect to self and others, the power of story, and what this may mean for a practice of participatory design.
In addition to a lecture, workshop participants will have an opportunity to learn a ‘grief practice’ through an intentional listening exercise. Additionally, I will introduce the concept of productive inefficiency and what it means to be ‘time anemic’ in modern life, along with a group practice in embodied stillness. These exercises will provide workshop participants with new paradigms for participatory design, along with ideas for exploratory methodologies that can use in their work.
It’s going to be super nerdy, super human, and super fun. Not your typical design conference breakout. I hope you’ll join me.
More soon,
-Joel
The reason that I love great architecture is not in it's functional utility but it's ability to inspire wonder. Walking into a space that immediately fills you with delight is why I became an architect. I look for that opportunity on every project, despite it's aspirations dictated by the client.
Joel, this is rad. I wish I could join you!