Design With Dialogue

Photo of a man with grey hair and a beard
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 10:00pm to Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 2:00am

Strategic Learning: Personal innovation in a fluid environment

How might we enhance our experience of learning to accord with personal or professional strategy?

Can we strategically direct our learning individually and together to adapt and lead through a changing world?

June's DwD is hosted by Donald Officer, delving into a shared inquiry and practices toward discovery our personal lifetime learning potentials. Strategic learning can be viewed as choosing what you and I specifically need to know and practice to make our way and reach our goals, in a time where learning itself is changing on the run.

More than ever learning processes are breaking boundaries and are trending toward chaos. We have MOOCs, online degree mills and tuition debt slavery in pursuit of formal education. Training, facilitating, coaching abound. Rock star professors and researchers tour morning television sets with do-it-yourself prescriptions for personality makeovers

Disturbing? Yes, yet at the same time this becomes background noise. Each of us has the opportunity to remake ourselves in a serious powerful way while connecting with others to make massive significant change. To do this we have to realize something so obvious it’s as invisible as the air we breathe.

More power to all of us. However, we only leverage it by becoming aware of it.

This Wednesday we’ll have the chance to grow that awareness while having fun together as we explore ways to take charge of need to know.

Powerful ideas we’ll tease out in small group exercises and open session:

  • Recrafting personal mission statements to build transformative learning

  • Learning for them versus learning for you – no, it isn’t self indulgent

  • Ways we learn that schools won’t acknowledge and what to do about it.

  • Just in time, just in case and just because we feel like it

  • Necessity not curriculum is the mother of invention

  • Learning to think strategically (and save yourself from the planners)

  • Powerful media (new and old) tools we all can access

  • How to curate your own learning space

Donald R. Officer has been a writer, planner, communicator, management consultant and educator for over three decades. Persistently seeking better ways to approach the fuvaluesture and how to live there, he has become a strong advocate for a major rethinking about our ideas on innovation. Don’s recent career as life coach has launched a serious innovative rethinking of his own life and the meaning of learning and professional practice, insights which he shares with DwD in this session.

Don has written articles for newspapers, journals and magazines and edited policy papers, newsletters and on-line forums. He continues to review books and write articles on many social change topics, especially strategic thinking,for magazines and his blog, The Intention Coach.  Meanwhile he continues to toil away writing longer works on psychology and education. These are destined for wider publication

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University 100 McCaul St. Lambert Lounge, Room 187
Website: 
http://designwithdialogue.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=a4347f867a9326ed7362dd510&id=3c6b71e05f&e=f8367a57a8

Design With Dialogue: Innovative Learning in Canadian Higher Education

Design with Dialogue logo with speech box
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - 10:00pm to Thursday, April 9, 2015 - 1:00am

Join OCAD U Strategic Foresight & Innovation students for a roundtable & ideation to explore new ways of learning in the future world of Canadian higher education. 

April's DwD is convened by a graduate student-led panel from the MDes Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) program to engage in inquiry and a generative dialogue responding to the question:

What new ways of learning, particularly in higher education, will Canadians need to thrive in an evolving society and labour market?

The roundtable and dialogue contributes to Imagining Canada's Future, the strategic development of next-generation social science for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) with the Canadian Association for Graduate Studies (CAGS). Our question is one of their key Future Challenge Areas.
 
OCAD U faculty and students, as well as members of DwD community are encouraged to attend and participate in the dialogue. A limited number of seats will be available, please RSVP to reserve your spot. Food and refreshments will be provided.

Parts of the event will be captured through images and video. By registering to attend this event you are consenting to the use of the media for productions related to the event. Please contact the organizers if this is a concern.

Hosted by the SFI Dialogue Team

Inessa Chapira
Christina Doyle
Maggie Greyson
Conor Holler
Goran Matic
Corey Norman
Adrienne Pacini
Sheldon Pereira
Patrick Robinson
Peter Scott
Jacqueline To
Ryan Voison
George Wang
and faculty advisors Peter Jones and Greg van Alstyne

 

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University, 100 McCaul St., Lambert Lounge, Room 187
Website: 
http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/innovative-learning-in-canadian-higher-education-tickets-16358705328

Design With Dialogue

Black and white logo with caption box
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:00pm to Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 2:00am

 

Involving the Whole Person Within Community Dialogue

How might action methods and dramatic expression be applied to help groups build relationships, gain understanding and develop trust?

One of the more pressing demands of civic engagement and community building is to provide ways for members to personally relate and commit to deeper conversations. Where this is possible, we can move beyond engagement and toward building systemic insights that can support behavior change, community-driven innovative and development.

This DwD workshop offers a way to learn and discover for yourself:

  • How group drama approaches can build community trust and release communication barriers.
  • Experience the co-creation of narratives that help gain understanding of different perspectives and social landscapes.
  • Experience making meaning using a simple, yet powerful, Action Sociometry process
  • How to express ideas and explore themes of interest using dramatic methods
  • Gain a brief overview of how ADCID works with these types of approaches within larger, complex, multi-disciplinary project configurations.

Through years of practice in international development and collaborating with local community-based organizations, Stephen Sillett of ADCID has been working with these aims in mind. Through long-term projects, Stephen has helped shift the relationships and dynamics that local community-based organisations have with the marginalised communities they serve, in Africa and Canada.

Stephen will present a taster of group exploration with a focus on Action Sociometry methods and dramatic approaches where individuals and groups engage in non-verbal reflective inquiry. For this session participants will explore a field of strategic action that they can connect to personally.

For more information – the innovative use of mood drawings to unpack body images(PDF)

A video of drama activity being worked on by members of the Zisize Drama Group around the theme of Love and Protection, This shows some deep, silent, engagement by the local team around an emotional image.

About the Host

Stephen Sillett is co-executive director of Aiding Dramatic Change in Development(ADCID), and helps the organization research, facilitate and direct dialogue, drama and art processes for healing and community development. Through ADCID projects and in partnership with other social actors, he is exploring approaches that engage community members in conversations, consciously orientated to maturing visions of the future. Research interests include the facilitation of non-verbal and spatial meaning-making practices within group workshop and the creation of interactive performance. He directs InFusion Labs where theatre artists, therapists, scientists and social practitioners explore spatial approaches to exploration and discovery.

Venue & Address: 
OCAD Univesity 100 McCaul St.
Website: 
http://
Cost: 
Free

Design With Dialogue

Black and white logo with a speech box
Wednesday, October 8, 2014 - 10:00pm to Thursday, October 9, 2014 - 1:00am

 

The issues facing working parents are most often posed at either the individual level (“How can I achieve better work-life balance?”) or at the level of society at large (“Should Canada have a national child-care strategy?). On Wednesday October 8, Jane Thompson will lead a Design With Dialogue session centred on the question “How can community-level change help working families?”. Can local initiatives like babysitting co-ops, community kitchens and pedestrian school-buses transform the lives of working parents?  Jane would like your help considering this question.

 

Jane will introduce the session with an overview of the issues facing working moms and dads, and how reframing our understanding, at both the individual and the family level, can help us navigate our way to greater resilience and sanity.

 

While these family issues are played out against the backdrop of broad social policies (including paid parental leave, child-care subsidies, and full-day kindergarten), this session will focus on how we can address the challenges of working families at a community level. Please join this lively workshop conversation.

 

THE HOST

Jane Thompson is the author of Resilient Woman: Weaving Together Work, Family, and Self. She writes and speaks on the challenges and opportunities faced by working families.  A working mother herself, Jane has a PhD in women’s history, as well as a business degree, and a certification as a life coach. As part of her broad commitment to helping people live their best lives, she also works as the executive director of a national scholarship program, granting $1.4 million in undergraduate funding each year.

DESIGN WITH DIALOGUE

Design with Dialogue (DwD) is an open community of practice learning together to lead organizational & community change through participatory design, strategic dialogue and emerging facilitation methods.

We gather monthly to convene workshops as a practice in social design to engage the organizations, projects, and civic communities to which we're committed.

Join us from 6-9pm on the second Wednesday of every month at OCAD's Lambert Lounge.

DwD is coordinated by:

Peter Jones
OCADU professor and Principal at Redesign

Greg Judelman
Chief Design Officer at The Moment

Kaitlin Almack
Process Facilitator at ICA Associates

Christopher Lee
Principal at Potluck Projects

Venue & Address: 
OCAD University Lambert Lounge, Room 187 100 McCaul Street M5T 1W1    
Website: 
http://www.eventbrite.ca/e/we-know-it-takes-a-village-but-how-does-that-work-dwd-08102014-tickets-13435829929
Cost: 
Free

Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for Students

Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for Students
Thursday, October 17, 2013 - 10:30pm

Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for Students

How can we create a campus that not only supports mental wellness, but a campus that also allows for students, faculty and staff to thrive? We want students to direct our work in making positive changes on campus. And we want those changes to work for students.

The OCAD U Mental Health Steering Committee invites all OCAD U Students to join us for refreshments and an in-depth conversation about Mental Health on campus at our Open Dialogue where students can safely express their vision and ideas for a healthy and vibrant campus.

The vision of OCAD U’s Mental Health Steering Committee is to inspire and nurture healthy and imaginative learners, educators and cultured citizens of the world. We are composed of students, faculty and staff of OCAD University.

This event will be facilitated by spoken word/dub poet, writer, artist, activist and OCAD University creative writing professor Lillian Allen. There will be food, good people and good vibes. Join us for the conversation!

 

www.ocadu.ca/students/health-wellness/mentalhealthinitiative.htm

 

 

Free

Venue & Address: 
Auditorium 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario

Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for the OCAD U Community

 Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for the OCAD U Community
Friday, November 8, 2013 - 5:00pm

Mental Wellness Open Dialogue for the OCAD U Community

How can we create a campus that not only supports mental wellness, but a campus that also allows for students, faculty and staff to thrive? We want students to direct our work in making positive changes on campus. And we want those changes to work for students.

The OCAD U Mental Health Steering Committee invites all OCAD U students, faculty and staff to join us for refreshments and an in-depth conversation about Mental Health on campus at our second Open Dialogue where everyone can safely express their vision and ideas for a healthy and vibrant campus.

The vision of OCAD U’s Mental Health Steering Committee is to inspire and nurture healthy and imaginative learners, educators and cultured citizens of the world. We are composed of students, faculty and staff of OCAD University.

This event will be facilitated by spoken word/dub poet, writer, artist, activist and OCAD University creative writing professor Lillian Allen. There will be food, good people and good vibes. Join us for the conversation!

 

www.ocadu.ca/students/health-wellness/mentalhealthinitiative.htm

 

 

Free

Venue & Address: 
Room 187 100 McCaul St. Toronto, Ontario