Undiscovery
In line with this month’s Autumn Conversations events, we’re sharing stories that reflect the theme of Design & Discovery.
In today’s article Anna Jackson reflects on how craft club and being in decolonising spaces are helping her to develop a more intuitive and relational design practice.
I love the state of being ‘in discovery’ – of not knowing, potential, emergence. I especially love the moments when I’m working with a group and we strike what feels like perfect harmony, humming on the same beautiful frequency.
The flipside is when it feels like someone’s singing off-key and I realise that someone is me, the facilitator, acting as a controller and not a conduit. Sometimes the desire to orchestrate harmony and the fear of discordance can make me cling too tightly to certainty. But resonance can’t occur if there’s too much rigidity or control.
Don’t get me wrong – the thoughtful design, planning and preparation of a collaborative experience is everything. Emma Blomkamp recently described the 5x rule – it takes about 5 times longer to design a participatory workshop than to deliver it. That rings true in my experience, and I’m still a big fan of being prepared. But I’m learning that holding space also means knowing when to let go of the plan – to follow a thread, to hold silence for longer than feels comfortable, to accept some friction instead of smoothing things over.
As a lifelong perfectionist, people-pleaser and overthinker this isn’t easy for me. Two things in my life are helping me to develop a more intuitive and relational practice:
Craft Club.
My grandmother was a champion quilter. Her work was incredibly precise and intricate. I always admired her skill, but never had the patience or enthusiasm for the discipline of perfect, geometric quilting. Last year I attended an improvised quilt workshop at Objectspace and was introduced to the pleasure of making without rules. I found that fabric has its own logic – this scrap can go with that for no reason other than it feels interesting, or pleasing. You can start stitching without a plan and a thread will find its own path. The things I’ve made are usually quite wonky and mostly unfinished. But I’m learning that as a form of discovery, this practice of making has taught me a lot about following intuition and accepting imperfection.
Being in decolonising spaces.
Over the last couple of years I’ve spent more time working in Māori and indigenous spaces, as well as reconnecting with my own whakapapa. I’ve become more conscious that ‘discovery’ is heavily laden with the baggage of colonisation – not just as a word, but in practice. Discovery can be an extractive process of sailing in to gather knowledge, tap the well of lived experience and then either sailing out or taking over.
I work remotely and spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. After a particularly hectic period where I had jumped from project to project, task to task, I spent a couple of days on a noho marae. It made me reflect on the importance of simply sharing space and time, and appreciate the power of wānanga. The experience of taking time to sit, to be still, to listen, to just be present is something that you can’t find in a Miro board. Telling stories, making, playing, dreaming together are all ways of knowing that go much deeper than Double Diamond Discovery.
The double diamond is a useful framework if you heed the philosophy that, ‘all models are wrong, some are useful’. There are other approaches to design, such as Hautū Waka and Te Korekoreka, that make a lot more sense in our context here in Aotearoa. As Rachel Knight shared recently in a post on Māori design frameworks, these approaches model ways of knowing, being and doing that are more relational, that invite more reflection, sensing and awareness and connection to te taiao. (The post has prompted some great discussion and sharing of other indigenous frameworks and resources – it’s worth a read).
At the end of 2023 I finished three years of reo Māori university courses. This year I started all over again at Te Ataarangi, because it turns out the more you know, the more you know there’s more to know. Here’s where it all comes back to design. Sometimes learning is unlearning, and it’s a long path, not a straight one. You can only learn so much in a sprint, and becoming aware of the limits of what you know is as meaningful as any insight.
By practicing different approaches to discovery outside of my work, and by loosening my grip on getting things right, I find myself growing more as a designer and as a person. Like my crafting, it’s a bit messy and doesn’t always end up like I thought it would. And like my journey with te reo and reconnecting with whakapapa it’s not straightforward – but the possibilities seem to spiral out endlessly in all kinds of unexpected directions.
About Anna Jackson
Anna has explored many paths in her career, but these always seem to lead back to media, storytelling and social impact. She combines design and storytelling to help changemakers communicate more effectively.
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