Sensing The Present

As designers, innovators, and change-makers, making sense of the "now" capacitates us to act, change, and orient the near future. But we only see what we are able to perceive. We hear what we are ready to listen to. We think about what we are able to process.

For the past year members of the Design & Critical Thinking community have gathered regularly to make sense of our “present”. We have deployed our curiosity, questioned our individual and collective experiences and enriched our understanding and potential for action.

Sensing the Present is an act of genuine curiosity. We let go of our preconceptions of the world to be able to reassess our understanding of reality from diverse points of view. It is both the recognition of our own unique experience(interpreted on our own, individual terms), and the ability to blend it into the collective understanding in a meaningful way. It forces us to remain humble towards what we know, critical towards what we learn, and challenge the“now” to rethink together how“tomorrow” could be. It is a critical practice, for individuals and groups, in today’s more than ever complex and uncertain world.

As we reach our first-anniversary mark, it is time to celebrate the year past and look at the year to come! 

We invite you, members, friends, followers, and any of you who are interested in what we do, to celebrate with us in a unique 7 hour “mini-festival” (covering many time zones), during which we will reflect on what we learned, play with some of the tools we used to make sense collectively, and open the stage for personal stories and informal discussions.

🍻Join our Slack to engage with the community → join.designcriticalthinking.com

ℹ️ Event website → sensingthepresent.designcriticalthinking.com

🎉04:00 PM CEST –  Opening (30min introduction)
For the past year, the community gathered together on regular occasions to make sense and collectively enrich our individual understanding of our present. What did we learn? How did we do that? Why all of this?

🧠04:30 PM CEST – Navigating complexity like explorers (60min discovery)
Become a 'curious explorer' and navigate complexity through a set of challenging metaphors. Presented by Kevin. This session runs in parallel to the "collective drawing" session.

🤿04:30 PM CEST – Collaborative Drawing (60min deep dive)
Making sense of the complex and generating the time & space to enable opportunities are exercises tightly linked to innovation and design. The collaborative drawing session creates a space of enabling constraints through conditional design. In other words, it’s a playground with limited rules, a medium for thinking and creativity.

🍻 ---15min break---

👂5:45 PM CEST – Personal Story (15min listening)
Members will be able to share a personal story, a story of failure to reflect on.

🗺06:00 PM CEST – Panel discussion (45min exploration)
Open panel discussion with community members and/or participants. Theme to be defined.

🍻 ---15min break---

🧠07:00 PM CEST – Sense-Framing & Systems Thinking (60min discovery)
Senseframing is a practical method to run decisions impacting systems. The goal is to cultivate Systems Thinking, so it becomes accessible to strategists, product managers, and designers. Together, we’ll run work on reframing a problem concerning the growth of a system. The initial frame (our starting point) will be: creativity is not a skill.

 
This session runs in parallel to the "collective writing" session.

🤿07:00 PM CEST – Collaborative Writing (60min deep dive)
The collaborative writing session is a variation of the collaborative drawing. It enables through a different set of means and rules to collectively explore themes and topics.

🍻 ---30min break---

👂08:30 PM CEST – Personal Story (15min listening)
Members will be able to share a personal story, a story of failure to reflect on.

🗺08:45 PM CEST – Panel discussion (45min exploration)
Open panel discussion with community members and/or participants. Theme to be defined.

🤔09:30 PM CEST – Collective sensemaking outcomes (30min reflection)
Participants and members helped sense the present together during our two collective sessions. What did we learn during today’s festival? What are the insights for the year to come? Daiana & Krasi will present your collective learning.

👋10:00 PM CEST – Closure, open discussion | end of the event at 11 PM
Ready for the year to come, one step after another! 

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Design & Critical Thinking (D&CT) aims to build shared understanding, collective knowledge & sensemaking at the intersection of design, innovation, change, ethics, critical thinking, etc. through a community of professionals from different backgrounds and horizons.
designcriticalthinking.com