Design for Relating – Letting Go, Drifting, Making Shifts
A co-creative experiment in exploring personal dimensions of change.
Creative reflection, self-awareness and embodied activities are applied to guide participants on a journey where the ability and willingness of individuals to let-go, shift perspectives and adopt new roles and practices is central.
Transformation toward eco-social sustainability involves a personal dimension of change. It calls for turning inwards and paying attention to the fundamental, innermost questions: Who am I (as part of a larger whole and eco-system)? What is my work? (as a human being on this planet)? Such personal, internal journeys of change often require external stimuli to help us become aware of what might have been invisible, stuck and hidden. These experiences might help foster our understanding of our interconnectedness: how we relate to the world, to other human and non-human creatures, and to ourselves.
In this session, we will approach such personal dimensions of change by guiding participants on a journey of shedding their skin through creative reflection and self-awareness practices, as well as generative embodiment activities. We will explore our inner worlds and the fundamental questions of our entangled existence through a co-creative exercise in opening a space for non-doing, pause, and letting-go. We will pay attention to the qualities of our relating, focus on how our perspectives shift, and experiment with radical openness: receiving and trusting the emerging elements that unfold beyond our control. By creating connections between non-doing and doing as an inspiration for future shifts, these exercises may enhance our sensitivity to how ‘change’ might feel like here and now.
The event is organised in collaboration with the CreaTures project.
Kirsi Hakio
Kirsi is a design researcher and doctoral candidate at Aalto University, Department of Design. Her research interests and practices focus on awareness-based systems change as well as methods and techniques for facilitating both individual and collective transformation journeys. In particular, the relationship between internal and external change is a continuous source of wonder and inspiration for her. In her work she is constantly looking for ways to explore and make visible how in the transformation processes our inner world is related to the formation and co-creation of externally observable events, social structures and outcomes.
Tuuli Mattelmäki
Tuuli Mattelmäki is an expert in co-design and service design. She acts as associate professor, tenured, at Aalto University and as the Head of the Department of Design and leads the EU-funded CreaTures project. The starting point for her research has been in empathic and explorative approaches in human-centered design. She is interested in public sector and service design related questions, and more recently in creative practices and transformational futures.