Nov 30 — Participatory event: With(in)

This is the summary for week 14 “Participatory Event” of Seminar 3 Advanced Interaction & Service Design Concepts / Design Theory & Practice. The aim of this course is to engage in critical discourses in design and explore and reflect on the implications of designing in the world, the agency of designed artifacts, and their effects not only in human systems but also in environmental ones.

As the culmination of the course, students hosted a participatory event where they designed and facilitated a series of activities to showcase concepts, methodologies, and approaches discussed in this class throughout the semester.

The students titled the event: With(in), Introspection and Collective Reflection. They invited participants to engage in a set of activities, conversations and games that reflect on the nature of design process that is based on inquiry, introspection and sharing. During the event we had three activities: Benefits & Burdens, Simplicity & Complexity, and Beyond the Clock.

Benefits & Burdens

First year PhD students in Transition Design from the School of Design at CMU facilitate ‘Benefits & Burdens’ a game to deepening into conversations about who may have a stake directly and indirectly, visibly and invisibly in what we design across time and space

Designed objects and services impact people, places, ecology, and the web of relations between them in nearly countless ways. This participatory card-based game introduces players to an extended experience in “stakeholder mapping”. The game encourages players to think more broadly and in longer than usual time scales about who will reap the benefits and who will carry the burdens of design.

Simplicity & Complexity

Participants converse about what it means to deal and make around ‘Complexity and Simplicity’ an activity designed by second year MDes students from the School of Design at CMU

The spectrum of simple to complex interventions in the world is vast, yet as designers, we must learn to leverage both complexity and simplicity with equal passion. To explore this idea our exercise asks two participants groups of participants to solve for the same problem, one in an overly complex way and one in an overly simplified way with the groups coming together at the end to reflect and share their experience.

Beyond the Clock

Second year MDes students from the School of Design at CMU facilitating ‘Beyond the Clock’, an activity to explore and think about sensory experiences of time

What is time beyond the clock? How do we experience time? This event will use pre-collected data to give participants the opportunity to explore, analyze, and design for subjective experiences of time.

You can see the landing page of the event here: With(in), Introspection and Collective Reflection