Futuring design: futures workshops
ONGOING
What are different ways that workshops can inspire participants to speculate and future? How can these workshops activate community values, explore climate-justice, and disrupt habitualized thinking by centering futures built of joy? I have developed three participatory speculative workshops that do just this.
More details below:
faraoyść: building alternative worlds through joy
Workshop Length: 2 hours
Faraoyść (fah-row-she-tchi) - a neologism that describes the feeling of realizing that something oppressive might be coming to an end, which provides a glimpse into a liberated, joyful future. Participants recalled their individual pasts and translated them into co-designed futures that centered collective joy.
Our series of interactive exercises lead to a facilitated conversation that fostered a knowledge-sharing space. This method drew on our research into the geopolitics of language and culture, and their roles in futuring, and builds on the work of emergent strategy, adrienne maree brown, Audre Lorde, and Elise Boulding.
The workshop was presented at the 2020 UNESCO Futures Literacy Summit in partnership with Parsons School of Design.
climate-just futures with groundwater arts
Workshop Length: 3 hours
This workshop asked theatre makers from frontline communities in Washington, DC and New Orleans, LA to develop strategies for a post-climate crisis world.
We developed a set of parameters for participants that were rooted in climate justice principles, and then challenged participants to imagine new ways of making theatre. This workshop was in partnership with Groundwater Arts and No Dream Deferred NOLA, and presented by theatreWashington in DC.
the unconference
Workshop Length: 3.5 hours / 2 sessions
Conferences and symposia are intended to be exciting spaces of knowledge-sharing and relationship-building across a field. Yet, in practice, these are rife with gatekeeping, hierarchy-jockeying, superficiality, and soul numbing boredom. What if instead, we reimagined a space of knowledge sharing that dismantles power dynamics and the norms of this forum?
In this two-part workshop, we investigated the power dynamics inherent in knowledge-sharing spaces and imagined how we might disrupt these. We designed new spaces and performed the characters who inhabit this speculative world, as we enact an un-conference.
The workshop was part of the Performance Education Studio Event at Parsons School of Design