The PlayDate: Learning from parallel wondering

Monday, April 19, 5:00–6:30 pm PDT

If we want design to evolve in conversation with the socio-cultural messiness inherent to the field, we need to carve out spaces where we regularly get curious about our individual practice. This interactive session explores the kids' playdate as an analogous situation for exploring how designers might learn from other designers. The session introduces principles for designing a learning exchange that embraces the values of reciprocity and participatory prototyping. What a parent might call sharing and playing nicely with friends.

Playdate principles create a space for collective experiencing and proposing how the learning encounter serves us as life-long learners. Offering a place to reflect on your individual and collective graduate experience, the playdate invites guests to show up with their expertise, hard-won wisdom, and independent curiosity so we might learn in parallel to each other.

Professor Lisa Grocott is a design researcher curious about the transformative agency of designing for individual and organisational transformation. Currently Director of WonderLab, a PhD learning community, Lisa also leads the Future of Work and Learning in the Emerging Technologies Lab at Monash. Before returning to Australia, Lisa was at Parsons School of Design. Originally from Aotearoa, New Zealand Lisa has Ngāti Kahungunu Maori ancestry on her mother’s side and white settler heritage on her father’s. (Ngāti — nah tee, Kahungunu — Car who knew nu).