Making Non-Sense: A game of designed ambiguity for unshaping our collective identity

Mario Márquez Lartigue

Within any group, we are not isolated thinkers or collaborators, we are entangled beings shaped by a collective identity field, made from inherited roles, invisible agreements and systems of power. Truth, identity, and narrative are routinely misshaped as tools of manipulation and control. This game is not about using design to dominate. Instead, it performs as a minor gesture (Manning, 2016) that helps us to become ready for a new and unknown collective identity. A necessary disturbance in service of a more metabolically just, plural, and interdependent becoming

Making Non-Sense explores the practice of unshaping the collective identity field, not as a distortion, but as an invitation to co-design ambiguity and practice collective identity decomposition. Rather than defaulting to the coherence, legibility and linearity provided by modern identities, we invite you to pause, play, and make space for contradiction and complexity. The aim is not to fix or solve, but to soften the ground where something new might take root. Making Non-Sense is an experiential playground, a game, where unshaping is carefully tended. 

The gameplay is a remix of frameworks including, but not limited to: compost pedagogies (Leong, 2023), dialogic inquiry (Bohm, 1996), critical systems heuristics (Ulrich, 2000), embodied cognition (Macrine & Fugate, 2022), hospicing of modernity (Machado de Oliveira, 2021), and tending the prelude to change (Bateson, 2022).

Participants form a collective intelligence that moves through four phases:

1. Sensing the field
2. Composting the self
3. Tending the broken “we” 
4. Welcoming the unknown

The game mechanics are a remix of embodied prompts, reflective dialogue, rhythmic expression, and emergent improvisation. We are looking to: derail the solution-optimisation-machine, widen definitions, acknowledge otherness and practice designed ambiguity.

The objective of the game is not set for individual mastery or performance. It is about nurturing a shared field of transcontextual emergent learning. What we develop is not expertise, but co-sensing, embodied experimentation, and reflexive disorientation. It’s for designers, educators, researchers, disruptors or everyone who is ready to stretch beyond their own identity.

Come with your contradictions, your existential fatigue and your design dogmas. Leave with a handful of ambiguity, a whisper of the unknown, and maybe, just maybe, a more attuned relationship with complexity.

KEYWORDS: Relational emergence, designed ambiguity, field theory, embodied systems practice, change-readiness

RSD TOPIC(S): Learning & Education, Methods & Methodology, Society & Culture