Designing with the darkness, not against it

... and engaging with 'negative' feelings more creatively

Last week we ran our August coaching workshop where we explored this question: What if we could use our anxiety, rather than running away from it?

It was a really satisfying experiment which has reinforced our enthusiasm on a couple of fronts.

First, we’ve been questioning the idea that designers are meant in some way to leave their own feelings out in order to ‘focus on’ the users. Human-centered design and design ‘best practice’ teaches that our feelings are capricious, biased, and not to be trusted. We wanted to explore what happens if we lower that particular boundary so that we’re not the rational experts fixing things for others, but human collaborators sharing a challenge. That’s the spirit in which we ran the first workshop, sharing our own fears and experiences as well as inviting participants to do so. We’re going to do more of this, as we think it creates a much richer sense of community.

Second, we want to keep going with this idea of taking supposedly ‘negative emotions’ and see if we can build them into design rather than trying to eliminate them. The intention of reducing them may be good, but we think it leads to a fantasy of a world without friction - that’s both unsustainable and actually quite dystopian.

So we’re running with a theme like Designing with Despair in September.

There are fifteen tickets available, five at $40, five at $20, and five at $5. You can pay whichever you would like, although we suggest leaving the $5 option for students and those not currently earning an income.

If you wish to join us, you can reserve your place below.