George Fedha, Laurence Habib, Dewi Hartkamp, Flavio Mesquita da Silva, Fred Steier, Abbie VanMeter, and Sergej van Middendorp
In this workshop/playshop, we facilitate the co-creation and co-emergence of a collaborative support network using The World Café (Steier et al., 2015) as a design pattern, and we aim to provide a reflexive and joint experience of collaborative support networking as a systemic design practice where participants connect deeply on the undercurrents of human needs, values, motivations and drives while co-creating collaborative support that ranges as widely as possible to address the question: How do we design for collaborative support that affords the co-creation of regenerative, sustainable and just futures in the face of a polycrisis?
We rely on techniques grounded in the metaphor of jazz improvisation in order to bring together and collectively expand the inherent serendipitous nature and multifariousness of the experience of the participants. In hearing the variation of perspectives, stories and cases, we go beyond mere curiosity and attempt to facilitate the emergence of a joint understanding of the concepts of polycrisis, regenerativity, sustainability, environmental-, ecological, social and climate justice.
Taking as a starting point that empathy and compassion are an essential element in processes of co-creativity, we hope to achieve a high degree of fluidity in the conversation, independently of how many voices the conversation includes, and a high degree of constructive plurality, where differences in opinion are invigorating and lead to new combinations. We also use the focus on plurality to support singularities (thereby echoing Benjamin (2015), who suggested that “[t]he plural event is that which allows for singularities” (p. 3).
KEYWORDS: collaborative support networks, polycrisis, systems design, world café, dialogue
RSD: Cases & Practice, Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology