The Anti-Brief Workshops (Part 1 of 3)

This 4-hour workshop is part of the Anti-Brief series. It will be held on the 22nd of September, 12:00-18:00 GMT.

Design and the economy are intimately related. In this workshop we will be looking at strategies for reconfiguring this relationship in service of life. If you struggle to give answers to the following questions but find them interesting then please join us and we will explore them together:

• What would give you a stronger sense of purpose in your work?
• Are the issues and dissonance that you experience in your work and the global polycrisis connected?
• If economics was reframed as the practice of planetary stewardship, would it attract different people to work on it?
• Could the economy be redesigned?
• What would an economy that was in service of life look like?
• Can you imagine forming designer / non-designer partnerships to reconfigure how we understand and do our work?
• As an individual do you have the agency to change economic systems?
• Can you imagine a future where profit and growth were no longer considered so important? How would this change the work that you would be doing?

Together we will build the confidence to talk about the economy and how it intersects with common societal challenges. You will also learn how to identify areas in your own work where you can reframe problems into constructive anti-design briefs.

What are the Anti-Brief Workshops?

If the brief sets us up for the work we will do, the anti-brief questions our motivations, what we will do, how we will do it and with who. In a world where we are dehumanising, suffocating and poisoning ourselves to death, what kind of brief is appropriate? If the brief is anything less than fundamentally redesigning our economic systems, is it just a waste of time? How would your work change under a different worldview? Perhaps you are a professional designer or perhaps you are someone working in the field of finance, business or systems change. What is it that you need to unlearn and learn? We don’t think any single profession has the answer or can do the learning alone. Instead we need to work(shop) together. This is why we are organising the Anti-Brief Workshops.

There are 3 linked workshops in the series:

1. Re-Designing the Economy: Why do we need to and why will it involve every profession?
2. Conversational Dimensions: How can we expand and deepen multi-dimensional thinking?
3. Designing Dialogues: How can we shift from communication design to conversation design?

You can join any of the workshops as a standalone session, but ideally we recommend participating in all three as each compliments and builds on elements of the others.