Conceptualizing and Designing with Liberating Voices Patterns

This workshop will introduce you to a method for engaging community partners (academics, activists, local people) in discussion, to help identify ways of working together to solve a community challenge, develop concepts, and work together on a shared project.

The workshop will be convened by Doug Schuler from the MAZI project advisory board, and is based on his 2008 book, Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/liberating-voices). The book contains 136 “patterns” which were written by 75 people from around the world. Each pattern presents a conceptual seed that can be used a multitude of different ways by different people in different contexts for different reasons. Patterns can provide new ways of perceiving challenges and opportunities.

The goal is to work together in groups to help develop concepts / projects / campaigns etc. for moving forward. Ideally several members of an existing, planned, or imagined project would work on the same group but it’s perfectly OK for people who are not working together on a project to participate in the workshop.

The patterns are available at http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv. There are short versions of the patterns on physical cards, which is what we use in the workshop — one example is shown below. There are also complete sets of the cards available in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese and other translations are in work. Card sets are available from the author or online. They are licensed for free use.

Email to book your place (20 places maximum) – mark.gaved@open.ac.uk

Workshop Plan
30 minutes — Introduction to the theory and practice of patterns and pattern languages
60 minutes — Work in groups designing something using the patterns
30 minutes — Debrief results and ideas for future work