I attended a fascinating new event called 'Design 21c World Cafe Sessions' yesterday.
The event was an invitation only event held by an exciting company called Design 21st Century', who are based in St Stephens Green, in Dublin.
I had met Deirdre, the lady from the 21st century at an event called 'Convergence' at Cultivate organization in Temple Bar in April.
The event followed on from the concept of 'World Cafes' whereby the invited people would
sit around a table, and contribute their thoughts and ideas on a certain theme for example water or waste in Dublin and how these issues could be used and solved in a practical manner at a local level.
The event allowed a facilitator at each table as the 'host' to control the topic and write down the general thoughts in a structured manner and speak in a small presentation at the end of the allocated time period. Each invited person sitting at the table were of various backgrounds with different ideas to bring a fresh skill to the proceedings.
This allowed great perspective and hindsight to ideas suggested.
The World Cafe sessions are part of a bigger project called the ' Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn'. The project is supported by the Creative Dublin Alliance - a network of diverse urban leaders that is working to bring unified, creative, strategies to better the Region. The Creative Dublin Alliance is lead by Dublin City Council's City Manager and the Dublin Regional authorities.
Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn is a learning project that intends to engage individuals in a design process that generates collaboration, invents solutions and builds entrepreneurship by giving individuals the opportunity to interact with Dublin city as a living laboratory.
In the Autumn, ten participants will join Design Twentyfirst Century for three months to collaborate on a project for the city.I hope to apply for the project myself also.
The first question in developing the learning pilot was 'What is the project?' A group of masters marketing students from the UCD Smurfit school of Business helped compiled the findings to a massive survey of how to help improve Dublin City amongst the general Dublin public.
The UCD marketing team had conversations with over 1000 people. The intention of collecting wishes was to help to inform the project that the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn team will collaborate on in the autumn.
After the UCD team had read all the wishes collected it became evident that there were reoccurring themes that people wished about - water, waste and community.
To understand the potential of these themes, they decided to hold three World Cafe sessions.
The World Cafe sessions are not research vehicles. They are conversational events for passionate people to discuss the identified themes. They will also help us understand the potential of turning one of these themes into the project that the ten individuals will develop in the fall as part of Designing Dublin.
For example, the project could be on litter and the team of ten could work on developing a project that changes our attitude and behaviour towards litter.
More examples of what the Design 21st Century team are interested in can be seen with these links;
1. http://www.storyofstuff.com/
2. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0605/1224248092959.html
3. http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
4. http://www.mcdonough.com/writings_c2c_case_studies.htm
5. http://www.zeri.org/.
For interested people who would like to find out more about Design 21st century or apply for their project by tomorrow deadline, please log onto design21stc.com.
Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn has two additional stages:
Phase 2 - Inviting people to apply for the Designing Dublin: Learning to Learn pilot and selecting ten people. (June - July 2009)
Phase 3 - Testing the pilot - conceptualization and implementation. (September - November 2009)
I invite you to view our newly launched website, to submit your wish for Dublin or to read more about Designing Dublin - www.design21c.com
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