The power of conversations
When I was explaining to my friends and family back home about the various courses that I have had this semester, Fundamentals of Design for Social Innovation has always been tough to explain. That probably has more to do with the semantics of the course name rather than its contents. We spoke about various topics from creating our hero’s journey, power and privilege, reflecting on our identities, to thinking about pain points.
One of our deliverables for the course was to choose a topic that interests us and facilitate a conversation around it, for a bunch of strangers. Before I dive any deeper, I need to quickly bring up a brilliant concept that we were introduced to, called World Café. During one of our monthly sessions, five tables were beautifully set up by Marc and Hannah, replete with candies, chart paper, sketch pens and candles. Each table had a host, who was in charge of attending to the conversations that took place at the table. We were given a topic and asked to pick a table to start having our conversations. Once ten minutes were up, everyone but the hosts were asked to move to any other table of our choice. The host, who remained at the table, reported back to us the conversation that had previously taken place, and we resumed the conversation from that point on. This was repeated until we had a chance to experience multiple such conversations.
When my team and I got together for the group assignment, we decided that we wanted to facilitate an inter-faith conversation. We wanted to focus on self-care, community, and spirituality and how our relationship with or without our faiths affected them. When we were discussing different hosting strategies, we all gravitated to the idea of World Café. We all loved the idea of a big group of people having multiple smaller conversations with everyone. But we decided to proceed with a small twist. We decided to have completely new conversations in each group and not let the direction of the previous conversation shape the next.
At the end of our facilitation, when the participants were sharing what they felt, witnessed, and learned from the session, the power of conversations revealed itself. We hosted a three-hour session with a room of some thirty odd adults, who hadn’t reached for or peeked into their phones even once during the whole process. There was absolute disbelief in the crowd that three hours had passed. We heard things like, “The conversations I’ve heard and participated in today give me hope for humans.” “If only we could bottle these three hours worth of conversations and share this feeling with the world.” Hearing such wonderful and heart-touching feedback, I was moved and I had a sudden crystallizing moment.
It clicked!
The whole focus of the course and all the work that was put in from the beginning was to prepare us to facilitate such conversations in our work. Now if someone were to ask me what this course is all about, I have an answer.
This is not a course on the fundamentals of design for social innovation, but a course on the fundamentals FOR a social designer.
