Marc Rettig's career spans nearly 40 years. His work as designer, researcher, and educator has put him on the frontier where design meets social and strategic questions. His firm, Fit Associates, equips people and teams with the fundamentals of social pattern-shifting and collaboration across differences. Marc is a founding faculty member of the MFA in Design for Social Innovation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Practice at the Carnegie Mellon University School of Design.

Thu

23

14:00 - 17:30

Room 5

Workshop

Dialogue Facilitation Hosting conversations that matter

Design and design research efforts are effective to the extent that they impact the organisation. We could say that the work of design is conversational: the quality of the result is dependent on the quality of the conversation we moderate between our organisation and the people for whom we create. Have the same old conversation with customers, have the same old conversation between your team and the rest of your organisation - get the same old results.

Too often, a team's conversational arsenal is limited to enthusiastic vision, heartfelt persuasion, or plain old argument. This workshop is based on the premise that UX and design professionals can increase their effectiveness by expanding their kit of communication tools beyond observation and interviews, beyond meetings and presentations, advocacy, and persuasion. Let's increase our portfolio of tools for fostering good conversation.

Happily, the world is providing us with a rich selection of additional tools. In this workshop, we will experience a few of them, and survey the larger landscape of organisational dialogue.

Activities and topics include:

Collective story harvest
World cafe
The facilitation building block
Situation modelling
The continuum of communication - a design framework for influence and advocacy

You'll come away with a sense of the wide range of methods for conversation design, and a personal experience of some of the methods. Workshop materials include an extended reading list and directory of online resources and facilitation guides.

Fri

24

14:35 - 15:10

Aud I

Talk

Taking "Participatory" Seriously

In the world and work of "social design," participatory methods and strategic approaches have been deepening and maturing. Since all work is social to some degree, our teams and organizations can learn from those approaches. How do we listen to the system that surrounds our work? How can we craft invitations that bring people together as co-creators? What does it look like to involve the people who will "live the change" as full participants in the creative process? Through examples, method snapshots, and long-term cases, this talk offers a glimpse into the methods of participatory emergence.