Dinner with a Side of Design—Culture
It’s Design Week in Vancouver! To kick off the week in proper fashion, we ate, drank, and put our collective thoughts down on the table cloth at Sunday night’s first installment of Dinner with a Side of Design. Our topic was culture, with Monday and Wednesday’s being sustainability and economy respectively.
The stated goal of the exercise was to use design thinking to outline a city of the future that is sustainable for generations to come and a great place to live and do business. We sat at the long table at the Irish Heather and the crowd of 30 or so people was divided in groups of four. Mine was composed of a city councillor, an Indian designer (visiting from Puna, near Goa), a young transplant from Winnipeg and myself. The evening was fun, the dinner was good enough to not be distracting and it was enjoyable to see designers, architects, politicians and other creative types engaged in playful and animated exchanges.
Interestingly, the majority of the ideas that emerged were firmly grounded in reality and could realistically be implemented in 5 years rather than decades from now as none of them seemed outrageous—or particularly innovative for that matter, ours included.
The organizers, Kara Pecknold, researcher at Emily Carr University, and Cory Ripley from the GDC, did a great job of keeping participants engaged and focussed on their tasks and yet the spark wasn’t there creativity-wise.
The process we were asked to follow was well-explained and consisted of individual brainstorming, followed by discussion and the search for consensus amongst group members. As the evening wore on and ran a little late, we synthesized, evaluated our findings and pinned them up on the wall for other groups to mark. Though I opted to not take part in the marking process, I observed and took in the ideas proposed by other groups. Had it not be so late on a school night, I think a conversation with all the participants might have been more fruitful and inspiring than applying stickers on note cards.
But all in all the evening’s format was successful, if only for the unexpected camaraderie that emerged, fueled by a fine meal, a few glasses of wine and a shared desire to innovate.
The moral of the experience for me was this: if this group was any indication, there is somewhat of a consensus on big picture ideas that could lead to a better world, or in this instance, better cities—more designed multi-use spaces; improved education that includes learning by doing; smaller but liveable urban dwellings; a better allocation of space in the streets. . . Where we collectively seem to fail currently, and certainly did last night, is in coming up with simple, concrete embodiments of these macro notions. And that is the eternal challenge in design thinking of any kind: how do you break down the problem in manageable chunks so they can be tackled one by one until the work is done?
Great post Isabelle. Love this blog — good name.
It was fun to watch people that night (i was volunteering) but also so interesting to see a completely different group last night. same kind of thing — some people got really really practical. it’s not often you’re asked to re-imaging the future — hard not to go to what you expect but to engage in a discussion about ideals.
Thanks Lisa, It was great fun and a little startling to see all these people working so well together. Did you get a chance to attend any of the other ones to compare the results and energy?
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