‘WHAT IF’: Designing for known ‘people’ in unknown ‘scenarios’

Workshop

With constantly evolving skill sets, competencies, changing contexts, and new kinds of knowledge and wisdom required, along the lines of this year’s UXINDIA conference theme, we would explore how to hone the capabilities of the future and not just those of the past while understanding users better?
This will be done through the usage of gamified interactions (for example: character cards, situation cards, crisis cards, factor cards etc.) that the participants would undergo. The participants would watch films, unpack the known fictional characters in these popular films, understand their mindsets, behaviours, habits etc. and eventually will situate these characters in diverse kinds of future scenarios and imagine/speculate how might the known characters behave in the range of the unknown future contexts and why? The idea is to explore different ways to understand and empathise with the users for and with whom, one does research in any process of design.
The workshop is designed to help anyone who wants to engage in complexity, narratives, systems, design, business, problem solving in a people-centred and futures-oriented way. It is meant for anyone who is interested in learning and ideating about how to design for and with people, understand mindset and behaviour, have hands-on experience on mapping systems and unpacking people and doing problem solving with an empathetic humanistic and systemic worldview. There is no prior knowledge required for attending this workshop and hence it is meant for anyone who is interested.
‘WHAT IF’- is a part of the larger work on Future Literacy, Fluency, Competency and Consciousness that Sudebi and Probal have been working on for the last few years at their transdisciplinary Design-led systems innovation Collective, D.epicentre, in a diverse range of contexts. This year they have worked on the same in the contexts of creative economy in South-East Asia at Meeting Point: Revealing Contexts, for the AIGA SHIFT-ED conference with Design Educators, for the International Teaching Artists Collective as one of the five global Innovators, for Complexity Weekend and also for Virtual Design Education Forum. In this highly engaging, reflective, provocative, facilitated, immersive and dialogic set of workshops, using novel and unique approaches, tools, frameworks and methodologies designed at D.epicentre, Sudebi and Probal would open up possibilities for people to reflect on their own experiences, identify where the gaps are and share perspectives around futures.