i facilitated a discussion for the dilemmas & debates group at itp. this is what i invited them with:
i began by asking each participant to write down answers to two questions:
- what they envision their title(s) to be in the future, post-itp.
- a moment in their work in the future with the title where they could go back home and say that it was a good day (for example: winning an award, standing in-front of a whiteboard scratching their head, et-cetera).
then, through probes, we collectively understood larger themes behind the kind of work that people want to do here at itp.
we organically arrived at the point i initially wanted to make:
- there are only a few finite buckets that all of us are chasing. our goals may seem wildly different at first, but they boil down to a few if we ask why.
- while people disagreed with me in ryan’s discussion group about finite & infinite games, it was evident through the map that many of us were, in-fact, attempting to pursue more ‘infinite’ pursuits (in the context of finite & infinite games). i knew this early on, but was unable to make people see it. hence, this discussion.
alua’s concrete-moment-in-the-future was the closest to mine. she said:
title: designer; moment: struggling really hard to solve a problem, and then eventually doing so.
i had larger themes to bring about, but it was hard to do so in 75-minutes. there were people afraid of their moment-from-the-future being too small (like jaye), people with abstract beliefs that i am sure could be broken down into smaller ones (like william with his idea of doing art because it allowed ‘freedom to be a human-being’), and collectively-missed exploration (like why antonia wants to make something ‘big’, or why emilia wants to ‘further’ her art).
i am certain that we would have arrived at ‘love’ as an anchor, if we had enough time.