DesignShift: From Glorifying Simplicity to Holding Complexity
If we want to move from designing things to designing change, rather than simplifying the complex, we must find ways to hold and be with the complexity that exists around us and inside of us.
Rather than rushing to fix, solve, or clean up, we must embrace contradictions and tensions as essential parts of the design process.
DesignShift: From Glorifying Simplicity to Holding Complexity.
One of my favorite tools for holding complexity is called Vent Diagrams. A “vent diagram” is a diagram of the overlap of two statements that appear to be true and appear to be contradictory. The goal is to purposefully not label the overlapping middle
Making vent diagrams as a practice helps us recognize and reckon with contradictions and keep imagining and acting from the intersections and overlaps. Venting is an emotional release, an outlet for our anger, frustration, despair -- and as a vent enables stale, suffocating air to flow out, it allows new fresh air to cycle in and through.
We’re trying to make “vents” in both senses of the word: tiny windows for building unity and power, emotional releases of stale binary thinking in order to open up a trickle of fresh ideas and air.
@Vent_Diagrams: contradicting truths towards collective liberation, is assembled by artist Rachel Schragis & teacher E.m. Eisen-Markowitz, two queer white jews on turtle island