blog sliders

So I 'm just back from a yoga class. This usually leaves me a bit spacey. Back bends are mindbending.

Anyway, today was the first day for ages that the three groups presented their Costa Rica projects to each other. I thought that it was the best presentations yet. The housing group produces a really interesting housing system based around materials, the town square group showed a brilliant design, and my lot showed one aspect our 'learning from Matapalo' approach - the community roles system (or Dramatis Personae perhaps) that I've blogged about before. The three projects are so different! One is a system, another is a design and the last an exploration.

In our group debrief afterwards, my lot discussed how much doing our project has changed our thinking. Originally we were tasked with creating a masterplan for the region but our, now exploratory, approach is creating a funny kind of masterplan. We believe very much is not being prescriptive but ended our discussion wondering whether we're not prescriptive enough. Silvio (faculty member) pointed out that you need something, a design, to engage people and get them started on a project. Is he right? Can you do this without disempowering people?

So we're now going to try to think of it as a slider. You've got non-intervention at one end and completed solutions at the other. Depending on where you push the slider, a project will be very different. Creating a system for people to make their own designs probably sits somewhere in the middle, for example. So as we move forward with our exploration of learning from Matapalo, we're going to play with the slider a bit. Some outcomes from our work will be prescriptive designs, some systems and some straightforward learnings. I'll post an examples from my group's work soon so you can decided whether we've been successful at this.

OK back to blissful post-yogic staring at the ceiling.