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A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings

The Group Pattern Language Project writes:

We are delighted to announce that, after three and a half years’ work by over two dozen dedicated people (including many readers of this list), the Group Works card deck (subtitle: A Pattern Language for Bringing Life to Meetings and Other Gatherings) is now printed, stocked and ready for orders and shipments! Yay team! The professionally-designed, full-colour, beautifully-illustrated 91-card deck is boxed with an accompanying booklet and five-panel fold-out key card, and sells for $25 (or $20 on orders of 10 or more decks). (weiterlesen …)

by Jascha Rohr & Sonja Hörster

Abstract

The field-process-model is a theoretical framework the Institute for Participatory Design developed to understand generative design processes as dynamic interactions of forces in a field. The development of this model became necessary after we encountered numerous theoretical and practical problems with the application of our former, more systemic oriented, understanding of pattern languages and design processes. The field-process-model explores the idea that a field with its forces (as used in numerous pattern languages) is the spatial description of a process, which in turn is the temporal description of a dynamic field. The model gives us a good understanding of how generativity and emergence unfold and how we as designers can foster these qualities in our design processes. Beneath the question of the emergence of new (design) ideas, the model also helps to investigate qualities such as immergence, crisis or bifurcation and of cultivation for generative processes. With the framework the field-process-model describes, we can develop applicable tools and strategies for actual design. The goal is to design in open and flexible processes that are alive and create results that are alive. (weiterlesen …)

We are facing unprecedented challenges. Crises loom on almost all global issues: the financial system, world climate, poverty, war, HIV, agriculture, to name but a few.

So far in most cases our answer to these challenges has been more of the same: more management and more international conferences. To tackle our problems we still use methodologies and tools derived from industrialization: they are mostly linear and straight forward. They are based on control of procedures. But for today’s complex challenges those ways of thinking and acting have lost their effectiveness. They might even be harmful.

Over the last decades other tools and methodologies have been developed, that acknowledge interconnectedness, complexity and the power of generative processes. These tools are based on trust in the process. We strongly believe that we can only tackle our global challenges if global leaders take up these new methodologies and subscribe to their processes on a large scale. (weiterlesen …)