December 8, 2020 — Plurality in Practice
Today’s class was the product of a semester-long planning process. Four teams collaborated to produce a Zoom showcase that highlighted the lessons learned and material covered throughout the semester.
A facilitator group acted as virtual MCs, assisting with promotion, documentation, and running the show via Zoom for the activities designed by the other three groups.
To wake up participants around the globe, the facilitation team started with a fun chaterfall activity asking the questions, “Where are you zooming from today and how do you embody plurality in your own identity?” Wide-ranging answers from 10 countries revealed a diversity of ways to engage with plurality.
And before going any further, the facilitator team paused to outline a set of community agreements.
For those unfamiliar with the course, Dan and Marysol next offered an introduction to some of the topics covered this semester:
- Politics, Ethics and the Pluriverse
- Research x Design
- Sustainability?
- Meta-futures and Futures of Design
(And if you’d like to get a deeper sense of the topics in the course, take a look back through the Seminar III Publication posts.)
With those foundations in place, the stage was set for our first activity.
Dear Maggie Mo
Inspired by Pentagram’s Dear New York… project, team Maggie Mo directed their nostalgia towards Margaret Morrison Hall, and aimed to capture the feelings of the CMU community during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the Zoom, members of the CMU community contributed notes via Miro to answer three prompts :
- Dear Maggie Mo, the last time I saw you in March I…
- Dear Maggie Mo, I miss…
- Dear Maggie Mo, post-COVID I hope…
Reactions to the first prompt ranged from those who thought they were saying a temporary “be back soon” to those expressing a longer-term acceptance, more like “saying goodbye to my second mother.”
After analyzing the responses to what was missed most, the team found that the notes could be divided between relationships and attributes of the building itself. While some missed the “late night walks with studiomates”, others found Maggie herself to be a “reminder that I am part of something bigger than myself.” Another missed her “certain smell”, which was received with both confusion and agreement.
As for our hopes, they ranged from uncertain to reminiscent, and also hopeful. While some expressed how they had “los[t] hope” of a post-COVID future, the team leaned into futures thinking and embraced the practice of foresight to inform the live activity for workshop participants.
They asked participants, “How might Maggie Mo evolve to fit the need of 2030 in a preferable future?” and divided the responses into four categories:
- Physical Spaces
- Work/collaboration
- Community
- Curriculum/education
While participants began placing their notes, the Maggie Mo team was able to watch the responses come together in Miro. After 8 minutes of flurrying cursors and notes, everyone came back together for discussion.
In the physical spaces group, imagined improvements ranged from adding “lots of plants” and “good ventilation” to a fundamental rethinking of how Maggie Mo might “adjust for different bodies,” including those with long-term COVID disability.
One member of the work/collaboration group lamented how Zoom meetings have promoted a check-in/check-out, task-focused approach to collaboration, contrary to the way of “truly meeting people” that was fostered in studio. In another group similar themes coalesced, as they always seem to, around the kitchen, where the casual interactions eliminated by Zoom once found each other.
As discussion of the curriculum/education teams opened up, there was hope for a more diverse student body, creating meaningful connections, and more inter-disciplinary learning. There was also a call for partnerships with non-profits and other CMU schools.
Although the community quadrant ended up without teams assigned, participants expressed hope for more in-person meetings, drop-in online chats, and international collaborations.
The Maggie Mo team closed with a thought from Devon Powers, (a voice you may recall from the Metafutures session) “Futurism may not provide a flawless roadmap of the future, but it sharpens focus on likely outcomes, forces us to think ahead, and demands that we plan for multiple possibilities.”
If Maggie Mo could see the outpouring of affection and hope brought forth by this activity, I think she would appreciate the community’s ability to resiliently plan for the multiple possibilities ahead.
What Is(n’t) Design?
This team took a creative approach to sharing a set of pre-produced podcasts in a live experience. As if in a museum gallery, each Zoom breakout room contained a looped podcast, allowing participants a chance to wander in and out, exploring the content at their leisure. On offer were a series of podcasts exploring what design meant to non-designers, and even non-humans.
- Conversations with my Grandmom
- Simple to Use and Looked Good
- “Design” to a Psychologist
- Look at that tail wag!
- Sirious Talk
Listeners were invited to share their reflections to questions in a Miro board.
Design Lotería
The final activity was a design-seminar-themed adaptation of the classic Mexican game called lotería. By replacing the traditional colorful images with design concepts from the semester, the team created a fun way for our guests to engage with many new concepts.
Although the live experience couldn’t be captured for my Zoom-recording recap, you can recreate it with this Miro board. And yes, we really do use Miro for everything!
Group Reflection
To close the session, the facilitation team invited Marysol & Dan to lead some group reflection. Especially given the breakout-room by breakout-room isolation of certain insights, the time was meant to allow those smaller conversations to be shared more widely.
The first bubble to break the surface was a speculative notion of what it might be like for humans to establish community agreements with our devices, as one student noticed her classmate attempting to do while conversing with Siri in one of the What Is(n’t) Design podcasts.
Another of the podcasts, “Conversations with Grandmom,” was praised for sharing authentic perspective with an openness and practicality not always found in the design world today. As Marysol pointed out, “Design is all around us all the time.” Listening to conversations with grandmoms can be just as critical to the design discourse as distilling knowledge of design theory in the traditional academic ways.
“Imagine a co-design workshop facilitation with dogs” read one chat message. And I can’t think of a much more emblematic way to embrace bringing the missing “capital D” Design to mankind’s best friend, as discussed in reflection to the “Look at that tail wag!” podcast.
“What would it mean to embody plurality,” Dan asked of the way entities like universities, design schools, or even the notion of Design, can embody plurality in contrast to the pressure on “corralling things together and saying this is a unit”.
One student wondered whether embracing different identities than “Designer” might allow for plurality and “abolish[ing] disciplines” that have historically shoehorned design practitioners into better-recognized roles.
As an example of that approach in action, Dan recalled a university that brought unlikely teaching to the design school by merging the teaching of medical science with design. The way these disciplines “collide” revealed some less-obvious similarities — they’re both about people and their lives, and perhaps about intervening or providing care. Could this “embed more plurality from the start?” Dan asked.
Reflecting on the Maggie Mo project, one member of the group shared how the exercise’s longer temporal scale allowed for plurality by stretching the time horizon over which members of the CMU community could participate and share their reflections when ready. Much like understanding crip time, exploring the reasoning behind rigid academic time schedules or arbitrary deadlines was an opportunity to explore how plurality can be subsumed in others’ needs to keep the proverbial trains running on time.
An attendee noted how cybernetics emerged as a field that dissolved boundaries in its early temporal stages, but as Dan pointed out, that dissolution of boundaries faded as the practice became absorbed and renamed into fields like HCI and other more relevant job titles as previously discussed.
To close the session, Dan and Marysol invited participants to imagine ways in which they currently do and might in the future embody plurality in their design work. For one student, that was about creating “compelling alternatives” rather than being “absorbed into mainstream structures.” Perhaps that means embracing multiple deliverables/outputs to project work, and pushing back against the notion of a single solution. As Dan pointed out, “that’s not really how it works in natural systems.” Rather than aiming for “solutions”, perhaps we ought to focus on more pluralistic approaches that “work with the situation or complexity”.
For another, embracing computational design seemed a promising approach to promote plurality. For one guest, a recent CMU MDes graduate, the lotería solidified f plurality as meaning “decentral, squishy boundaries, [and] being situated in my place.” She also noted the importance of “unlearning” the many narrow assumptions and stories our thinking is often unconsciously built upon.
In a compelling closing call for plurality, one student shared their concerns about fellow designers trodding the safe paths that may not embrace plurality or “fuck authority”. Instead, they encouraged “work[ing] with other people to abolish boundaries” and trying to do something different, even if it risks a more challenging career path or feeling like an outsider. But hopefully, this semester and course offered a chance to work with others and build more pluralistic outcomes.
Thank You!
Marysol, Dan, everyone in the course, and anyone who’s engaged with this publication — thank you.
Although I wasn’t able to be “in the room” either physically OR digitally for this grand experiment of remote design education, I know I’m taking away a perspective that is more open to uncertainty, complexity, and “squishiness” that will benefit my design practice. I learned and unlearned so much through the rich discussions and lessons in this course.
I hope that the posts in this publication have served as helpful recaps to make the class material accessible for reference and reflection.
It’s been a pleasure to assist with this course, and here’s to a 2021 filled with the many fruits of plurality, research, sustainability(?), and meta-futures!
