LCD Weekly Issue - 024 - Life-Centered Design and Facilitation
🏔️ Words from the mountains
Last Wednesday, we had our second LCD Talk. My friend Daniel Wirtz and I talked about Facilitation. Daniel is a co-founder of the Facilitator School, and to me, he is one of the leading professionals in Facilitation. I have facilitated workshops, classes, and co-design sessions for the last 15 years. I discovered that facilitating Life-Centered Design workshops or sessions sometimes worked differently from what I was used to, so I wanted to chat with Daniel about this.
Here are the three main insights from our conversation.
Daniel's definition of Facilitation is: "To make it easier for a group to meet their goals and needs" With easier, he talks about creating a safe space where each individual in the group can contribute to the goals. A facilitator's task is understanding the group's needs and help them reach their goals.
Where you facilitate matters.
Participants will have a different mindset if you facilitate in a classroom where everyone is seated in a fixed position compared to when the group is standing outside, connecting with nature, able to mingle, and chatting.
What you facilitate matters.
I was used to facilitating design thinking processes for a single target/ user group, and they were pretty straightforward. You had to find ONE design challenge and then create a solution. But when you suddenly identify the challenges of the end-user and impacted nature & invisible communities, you can close the so-called Double Diamond. You end up with multiple challenges. How do you deal with that as a facilitator?
How you facilitate matters.
As a facilitator, you can shape the participants' experience of the design process. When you time-box the process very tightly, people can feel pressured. Agile is great, but sometimes it is better to facilitate at a slower pace. Facilitating holistic approaches such as Life-Centered Design requires a slower process because it is less goal-driven and more purpose- and value-based.
For more tips and tricks on facilitation, download the LCD Talk with Daniel here.
🐅 LCD in the Wild - Moth Rights
Catherine Bianca, our team member, shared with us this fantastic project:
"The More Than Human Life (MOTH) Project is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing rights and well-being for humans, non-humans, and the web of life that sustains us all."
"MOTH is a long-term effort to document, discuss, disseminate, and advance ideas, strategies, partnerships, and practices that offer creative and rigorous answers to these pressing questions and others. It is centrally concerned with providing an experimental platform for ideas and partnerships in this area that have transformative potential but currently lack the resources, mainstream acceptance, visibility, or opportunity to realize it in practice.
We deploy a mycelial mode of thinking: we connect different parts of the more-than-human rights field, bolstering individual actors' work while cohering a larger community of practice and knowledge – much like mycelial networks are often the foundational builders of rich and complex ecosystems."
Go ahead and check out this amazing project and its beautiful website!
🪄 Inspiration- War on Weeds (Essay)
Laura J. Martin is the author of this intriguing essay and the book Wild by Design—The Rise of Ecological Restoration.
"My father saw two things in lawns: grass and not grass. Botanists have labeled this "plant blindness"; as fewer people farm or learn botany in school, fewer people can identify plants or even notice them."
"With biocides, we have fundamentally reshaped life on Earth."
This article reminds me of two things: this meme
The Pollinators for doing a great job at re-pollinating the planet!
🔥 Hot in the School - LCD Guide to Slow Down
Do you need a relaxing and quick read for the holidays? Our Life-Centered Design Guide to Slowing Down is ready for you! You could apply one or more exercises during your break or when you return to work!
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Until next Monday!
Have a great week!
👋 Jeroen
