The Lifeworld Academy helps you to develop practices for working with human meaning, values, emotions and experiences in the lifeworlds of real people:
- You will learn to empathise with and understand the lifeworld of the people that you’re designing for,
- You will learn to conceptually analyse fields of meanings and values as the basis for reframing the original issue or problem,
- You will learn to use everything learnt from this analysis in the design of new products, services or systems.
Note the choice of words: it’s not ‘we teach’, but ‘you learn’. There is very little theory involved. Learning to interpret and conceptualise your observations is more important than applying existing theories. Our aim is to challenge you to learn from specific assignments and situations. We’re not against ‘teaching’, but we know from experience that learning requires personal involvement and a sense of purpose as much as the teaching of new knowledge or skills. When you cultivate and nurture your curiosity about people that are not like you, that live lives different from yours, you will learn things that no theory can capture, that no one can teach you through explanations.
“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” (WB Yeats)
Learn from experience: from practice to concepts
We’re less interested in ‘applying’ ‘theory’ than we are in reflecting on lifeworld challenges in order to gain a conceptual understanding of intricate relationships between ideas, values and emotions that can fuel meaningful approaches to design and innovation. More often than not, existing theories and strict methods get in the way of curiosity and original thinking. Instead of a knowledge-oriented approach like ‘explain, understand, apply, evaluate’, we actively stimulate learning from experience: ‘engage, empathise, reflect, intervene’ in a continuous cycle. Learning to think for yourself in a structured way, based on concrete lifeworld observations and experiences, creates a rich understanding that is emotional or even spiritual just as much as it is cognitive or rational.
Thinking about feeling, thinking about thinking
This approach is aimed at the integration of conceptual thinking with intuitive and emotional insight and involvement. The focus is on learning to empathise and to reflect on the concrete situations and practices of people (however messy and confusing they may be with all kinds of complex relations between values, emotions and rational ideas) and to use what you’ve learnt to reframe problems and imagine new solutions.
You will develop your thinking: about values, about meaning, about emotions, and ultimately about thinking itself. You will become a more conscious thinker, aware of your own values, biases and mental habits, and more skilled in integrating rational reasoning with intuitive and emotional subjectivity. You will develop your creativity in line with all this. Think of it as the evolution of your own existing practices and the creation and cultivation of new ones.
Hands-on learning
We offer different modules that are aimed at learning to think about people, situations and systems. They are meant to familiarise you with a professional and innovation-oriented approach to human meaning and values. All modules are very much ‘hands-on’: they are invitations to engage with people and with situations in order to understand, reflect, analyse, and (re)design. They are also a preparation for working on your own project(s) in your own context, during which you will be coaching by a team of peers and professional design coaches.
Although the Nuniversity has its homebase in Harderwijk, we can also come to you, online or in real life, or look for places to get together that have a strong connection the lifeworlds of the people that you want to design for.
All together now!
Please don’t come alone. Experience has taught us that learning is much more effective when it is embedded in an organisation in the form of a team of people who learn together and who will be able to experiment together when the time comes to prototype, intervene, or transform.
Making portraits
Our modules each have a specific focus: on a person, on a situation, etc. They are all about things you ‘do’ and will learn from (that is a promise). They will teach you to observe, empathise, interpret, and imagine—these are all things that you need to do and experience in order to truly master them. They require a personal journey of discovery. Understanding what empathy is, is no match for actually experiencing it.
They all involve the creation of a ‘portrait’ as the end result: an evocative representation of what you’ve discovered and learnt. Making a portrait challenges you to communicate your findings to other people like team members, your target group, or other professionals in your organisation in a meaningful way. Make hem understand it, but make them feel it as well.
LW01: The mirror
Make a portrait of yourself that emphasises your personal values and how you (try to) work with them on a daily basis. What are your talents, hopes and fears? What do you expect to get from life and what do you have to offer? Formulate your life motto and explain it.
LW02: Feeling Alive
Make a portrait of someone who is demographically very different from yourself. What is their life about? What inspires them? What do they worry about? What are their ambitions? What do they expect from the world and what do they think they can give to the world?
LW03: Hello, lifeworld!
Make a portrait of someone’s lifeworld. What does a typical day in their life look like? Are there situations that inspire them and give them energy? Are there situations that suck energy, that make them feel frustrated? What values are actually expressed in that lifeworld and what (potential) conflicts exist between these values?
LW04: The social space
Make a portrait of someone’s outside world: different aspects of places and how they affect people. Investigate social relationships, but also physical spaces and the way they relate to each other. The emphasis is on what makes social or physical ‘spaces’ actual ‘places’: how do they affect people’s emotions or thoughts, and which values do they express, facilitate, or frustrate.
LW05: The hidden rules?
Welcome to professional lifeworlds! Make a portrait of the hidden rules and habits of an organisation and how they relate to values and emotions of professionals. Organisations have formal processes and procedures, but also stories and myths. Are they representative of what actually goes on and drives the actions of departments and people? What are the hidden rules and habits that drive the reality of what happens on daily basis? How do the values of an organisation align with daily practices and with the values of professionals?
LW06: Deep experience
Make a portrait of a specific kind of human experience (fear, joy, insecurity, hope, trust, etc.). Analyse the experience in different ways (from your own experience to scientific research). What is the essence of that experience? How does it come about? What emotions play a role? How does it relate to other experiences?
LW07: Rethink and reframe
Make a portrait of new way of looking at a problem or an issue, based on insights about deeper meaning and experiences. How can different kinds of experiences and values be combined into new ways of dealing with them or facilitating them in new ways?
LW08: Warm Systems
Make a speculative portrait of a system within a new framing. Be specific about the values, meanings and experiences that the system is trying to address, and how it could possibly do that. How can you possibly prototype this system in order to find out if it is worth to actually develop or scale up? Can you set up a ‘lab’ where you can experiment in real life?
Coaching
Once you’ve determined what issues or challenges you would like to work on, we will create a coaching team together with you. That team will include professional design coaches, but also other participants that are dealing with similar challenges. Don’t be surprised if other participants invite you to their coaching teams. As experienced teachers will tell you: ‘there is no better way to learn something than to be asked to teach it’. We will actively support participants to stay connected with each other through a network of alumni.
More information?
The Lifeworld Academy is not (yet) formally connected to an existing institution. We work closely together with different existing bachelors and masters degrees, and offer customised training programmes for professionals.
We are looking forward to making you learn!
Kees Dorst, Dick Rijken and Rodger Watson.
For more information, email or call Dick: dick@37c.nl, +31 652 451995