Care as a Practice

For those who use a designing-with mindset, the toolbox is virtually unlimited. New methods, tools, and techniques are being invented or reinvented on a daily basis. The participatory prototyping cycle of making, telling, and enacting is a way to organize and activate the dozens of old and new tools for bringing people into the design development process. [1]

In theory this year, I have been learning about co-design and collaborative practices as this has helped me find the path of how I was to approach my studio design. It became the only path that made sense because the design could not continue to grow without the involvement of the ‘designers’ who wrote the love letters. Therefore as a part of my studio work, designing of the workshops needed to continue as this was the instrument that invited people to ‘participate’ in learning and practicing care. The actual thing being designed is the ‘design process’, where the process invites participants to the experience of ‘doing’ these activities to help them discover more about themselves.

Late in semester 1, the project started to shift to building and developing online workshops as the nature of the pandemic had interrupted experiments of designing for ‘face-to-face' interactions. Therefore, with the movement to maintain the format of creating more virtual workshops, I needed to clarify the purpose and the materials that make up these workshops. My journey of learning about collaborative practices had led me to ensure that the format can use co-design principles and mindsets, to value and involve the participation of the group. The love letters were about them and therefore, this project is about them. The design needed to include the users so that it does not lose sight of the problem it is trying to solve. Here are the following points that I have finalised that are needed to make a care workshop:

Telling, Making, Retelling

The aim of each workshop needs to involve the process of telling, making and re-telling as part of the sense-making experience that creates a ‘caring’ space. Through the engagement of these methods, participants are able to find new ways of learning how to reframe problems.

Telling
Referring to the acts of ‘say’, being able to tell your story, tell the reasons why a love or breakup letter was written — telling is a construction of an expression, of an opinion, a viewpoint or a story. It encompasses not only ‘acts of behaviour of a person on [their] own, but  actions of communication of a person toward another.’[2]

Making
Making requires a deconstructive process as reflective methods are introduced, inviting users to engage in ‘making activities’ as they interact with make tools to help unpack new layers and discoveries in their stories. This invites participants to engage in a ‘language of designing’[3] where ‘drawing and talking become parallels of designing.'[4] Here, the user who becomes the designer of their own story deconstructs their experience to make sense of the problem and its connection to the self, to others, the environment and to their practice.

Retelling
To retell is to reconstruct, a reflexive approach to ‘being able to look analytically at problems in their context and especially connections between them.’[5] A story is being retold not because ‘you like retelling it so much, but because there is ultimately a valid reason for a new interpretation.’[6]

Materials: People, activities and tools
This workshop can’t run without the participants. The activities will be created along with the reflective methods of ‘telling, making and retelling’, while tools will be present at each workshop to help assist people to find new forms of communication.

Technical: Video conferencing apps, collaborative whiteboards
Lastly, the workshop needs two platforms: a video app to allow you to interface with participants (apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype) will do; and an online collaborative whiteboard — where all of the live workshop activities can happen visually. Programs like Miro and FigmaJam are great options for visual collaboration online. 

Limitations
The process of co-designing takes time and while this can be a limitation to the project during the develop and deliver phases, the aim is to ensure I can capture a lot of the data through the screen and audio recordings, in order not to assume nor lose sight of what happened in the workshops. Having this data will be valuable to revisit the conversations and can be used as an instrument to make sense of what needs to be designed.

Say, Make, Do 

“Designers and design researchers are exploring the creation of tools that non–designers can use to channel their own creativity. In co-design, designers use the ideas generated by others as sources of inspiration and innovation.” [7]

While the say, make, do techniques will be employed through the reflection activities of the workshop, to assist with the ‘making’, I have decided to include generative tools into these workshops because of how much they support participants when accessing memories,  making connections and interpretations. My intentions for workshop 2 is to create tools that are built on the conversations and love letters derived from workshop 1. Below are the tools made for workshop 2 as I tried to combine elements of emotional and cognitive tools to help with eliciting memories and making connections between ideas and materials.

Agenda

The purpose of this workshop was to see what new would emerge as the participants map out their relationship experience, journeying through disorientation to reorientation.

Aim 
The aim of this workshop was to test the new tools created, seeing the interaction between the materials of what was used, how the participants communicated in their break out rooms and helped each other through the task, and if the task was able to bring a transformational experience as the group embarks on a path to discover latent knowledge. 

Participants
In workshop 2, this was the first time I was able to include more people that were not specifically in a design profession. The group now included architecture students, a business student who had a passion for music, and a copywriter — all the participants here in group 1 worked for the same organisation. In group 2, all participants were design students. The reason for being able to include other people who had a different background beyond design was the realisation that most design teams consist of different people who are not just ‘designers’. Nowadays, teams are diverse and consist of a variety of roles that all contribute to impacting and creating cultures at work. 

Materials 

• Bring back the love letters, for new participants, they were asked to write them before the workshop 
• A pre-structured timeline
• Generative Tools

Activity
Participants are asked to revisit their love letters with their partners and review what has changed since the last time they wrote them. They are to work out if they still stand by their letter and reveal what has continued to make them feel that way. Using their discussions, participants are asked to map out their conversations on the timeline of disorientation and reorientation, picking a point of where they may be sitting on this map.

Findings

In the findings, we find the emotions are the underpinning of each person’s journey map. They create the experience at each point and help understand the complex challenges and opportunities. They also play a key part in helping us understand and navigate through uncertainty and provide us with a compass to understand our relationships in these situations.


Quotes from the participants

“Understanding my values mean everything to me. Being able to name them and see them in the space has already helped me learn so much more about myself ” 

“When I wrote my letter, I didn’t know what to write. So instead, I worked with being stuck and then it all started to come out.” 

“The path to reorientation is never linear. I look at it as a maze, a process that is like trial and error. We sometimes make our own obstacles and we have to get through them”

“There’s resentment.” A sense of bitterness due to the work and time being undervalued by staff. 

“The creative path is like the Uno multicoloured card. Each colour represents a different journey that is like a trial and error process. Sometimes, ideas work and they have a path of their own. Sometimes they don't work and you have to continuously pick the right colour to find that path. That experience in itself can be disorientating. But seeing in a map like this, let’s you see what journeys you have to go through. It’s something that you can reflect on and come back. We’re all capable of getting there, sometimes we might just not know that path.” 

Key Notes

A note on some of the things to consider and carry over to the design process:

Tools
The tools were definitely used and were a great way that didn’t leave the participants hanging in the dark, thinking about what to put onto the page. The feedback given from this session was that the materials themselves were able to trigger new memories and ideas to bring in new materials that can be added to the tools board.

Collaborative Timeline
An observation I found while rewatching the recordings of Workshop 2 was how having an activity that required participants to map on a shared timeline, helped those who were feeling lost as they were able to observe what the others were doing.  Once they had an idea of the task, they were able to proceed contributing to mapping out their story. The other benefit of having everyone contribute to this activity was based on the feedback of the conversation, how they were able to see that each and every person had their own up and down experience in their relationship with practice. This idea of not feeling that they were alone in the journey, was a key driver of the conversation as the participants were learning how to find ways to support each other.

However, the downfalls of using a shared timeline may get too messy for larger groups. This can be easily solved by making duplicate timelines for each participant, or for each group.

Facilitation
Facilitating Workshop 2 required a higher level of participation from the facilitator itself. This meant taking the group through the instructions into detail, splitting groups up into breakout rooms and bringing them back for a debrief, encouraging participants to think outside of the box and ensuring that those who would need extra guidance, were attended to.

Changing it up
For this workshop in particular, I was able to utilise breakout rooms and had pre-planned partners to see the dynamic of each pairing. This actually worked brilliantly as I had a number of participants who were new and quite shy, pairing them up with someone who was able to bring the best out of them, or who had similar qualities or who got along, this had helped reduce the awkwardness that can be usually felt in a workshop space like this. The participation was much higher which made me think how this was sort of an icebreaker in itself as they started to feel more comfortable taking part in conversations.