This week’s class was focused around how to better introduced ourselves and our work, mostly from the perspective of a professional setting (ie. Job interview), especially considering this is Confluence Job Fair week.
We were joined by TARA CAMPBELL (in person) and ARIANA LUTTERMAN (virtually) from Superorganism and graduates from the Master of Design in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University, who facilitated a workshop on “Designing your introduction”.
They helped us go through different processes, stages and angles on how to approach the task of introducing ourselves, starting from the verbal, to then going deeper into how to choose grammar and syntax, as well as style, to portray or highlight different aspects of our work, processes and contexts.
With the aid of a series of cards that they designed, they helped us think about how it would be like to introduce ourselves by adopting angles such as: Storytelling, Values and Principles, Collective identities, Metaphors, Future-making, Invitation and others. This process made us all reflect, not only on the type of work and activities we carry out on our practices (and/or that we would like to pursue in the future), but also upon how our introductions can be objects of design themselves. The implications of this could range from having an amplifying effect, as in the case of the Introduction as an Interventions, or the case of using it to open an invitation for collaboration beyond the context (time and place) of the introduction situation.
Students were engaged in very fruitful discussions and raised very important questions that were artfully addressed by Ariana and Tara sharing with us their insights from their specific experiences. The workshop helped us all reflect upon how we may better introduce ourselves in the present, but also remind us that this is something that we will be revising often throughout our careers. The tool they offered us helps address this issue and enable more creative and critical thinking on how to design our very own introductions for them to be aligned with different contexts, goals and audiences.
Here are some photos that tell the story of what happened:
We are very grateful to have had the chance to host Tara and Ariana and we encourage you to look more deeply into their very interesting work and collaborations.
To connect with them:
TARA CAMPBELL: tara@superorg.ca
@tara_campbell
ARIANA LUTTERMAN: ariana@superorg.ca
@atmlutter