Design for “the designer”

Design for “the designer” — the first designing opportunity!

How do you design for what emerges…and for when things are messy or unexpected?

Design for Designers is “a co-laboratory” process for those of you who are looking for a means to deepen your practice—mind, body, heart & spirit—in service to creating the conditions in yourself for adaptive response-abilities and enduring health in human systems. You may be leaders, managers, consultants, and community activists committed to making a more significant impact in your work.

Our Assumptions:

  • You can design to be a better designer!
  • Resiliency + adaptability are required to design in complexity
  • You want to deepen your practice AND practice your deepening
  • The designer is not separate from the design nor from what is being designed
  • Rapid prototyping is essential –an iterative process
  • Form follows function for flow—there is an alchemy of coherence in every design

The design for designer question becomes: What enables you to be adaptive and creative when YOU are in emergent terrain facilitating a process that you are not certain where you or the group will/needs to go next?

Design for Designers is for when you are standing in that emergent zone, navigating the in-the-moment unknown, as an explorer and an adaptive designer. Designing for transformative shifts engages you in deepening your practice–an alchemy of intention, integration and application of design.

Standing in this zone requires that, as a designer, you know, at any time, why you are choosing a particular resource, approach, or method for what purpose and for what anticipated outcome. Your “knowing” may indeed be an intuitive or “in your gut” knowing but it is gained from experience and intentional learning. This is the fluency required to set conditions for breakthrough thinking and shifts in behaviour. As designers we know that our ability to navigate and negotiate artfully is dependent upon our capability to draw upon multiple perspectives and blend approaches in an integrated fashion. And while there is no one right way, the more “fluent” we are in our design capacity, the more capable we become at aligning the sequential design inquiry.

  • Where does design intention meet emergence?
  • Where is the designer in the design for emergence?
  • When might the designer be the stumbling block in a process?
  • How do we grow the sensing and trust that must be in place to co-design in the moment?
  • Where is your edge in designing beyond knowing?

To deepen our practice is to stretch ourselves in order to stretch the people we work with and their human systems. It involves a deep, structural shift in our premises of thought, feelings, and actions—a shift of consciousness that can dramatically alter our way of being in the world. Our approach to this transformative learning in service to you deepening your practice involves a recursive, developmental learning environment with peers in real time, real work situations.

You might ask yourself:

When I am responsible for creating engagement for change, what do I draw upon to innovate when no one knows the answers — including ‘me’?