Communicating the new: what moves us to go beyond what we know
Posted by Ricardo Dutra Goncalves on December 15, 2014Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron once said that “embarking on our life’s journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands”. She highlights that with wholehearted practice comes inspiration, but soon or later we also encounter fear. That journey seems to me one of exploring reality and like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what is out there without yet knowing if we are prepared for it. At Parsons, my “design journey” has been so far one of that kind. Without having the graphic & visuals background, I still decided to join the master program. In this post, I wish to explore what moves us to “go beyond” what we know and attempt to speculate some of what we might end up finding. In this writing, I will use my personal experience of discovering design, as the “boat” that helps us navigate some key concepts.
Long before realizing that we are immersed in a “visual world”, I was trying my best at “communicating the new” in a very challenging job in India. My role was to build a community of impact-minded individuals in India’s biggest economic center, Mumbai. We re-launched a co-working space and hosted around 50 entrepreneurs working for “social good”. We had many “shaking” concepts to deal with: the fact, for example, that we were the first space of a kind in a 1 billion nation was certainly mind-blowing for me. What were the implications of that? What movement were we a part of? It felt like that kind of work was necessary and also emergent. We were pioneers but we could barely name it. How to name people that are working to make a difference in the world? What if, for doing that, they switch models as chameleons change colors: at times acting as businesses, other times as non-profits or government programs? I was always blown away by the creativity of those individuals, who would measure no effort to take meaningful projects ahead. That experience helped me realize the need for developing new languages, when we are prompted with “experiences of the new”. That was also the birthplace of my insight that whatever my next professional step would be, it needed to involve participating in multi-disciplinary teams and environments where solutions for complex problems are explored and brought to light. The calling here was to upgrade my skills and I had the intuition that design would be a good bet. Without a design background and as an explorer, I have moved to the US not yet knowing what was waiting for me.
To reflect on what moves us to “go beyond” what we know, we can consider some basic elements. Starting by a calling, which seems to be the least it takes for us to “embark” on this journey. I am a believer that at certain points, we are called to do certain things in our life because 1. It feels right and 2. It feels necessary. In that process, there is also an element of awareness, which allows us to tune into our intuition and connect with our calling. At that moment, we feel something is emerging but we are not yet quite sure of what it is. The journey really begins when we rely on courage to move forward and on our language to start communicating what it could possibly be. This is a process of continuous expansion. For instance, I decided to join the master program at Parsons because of a calling that was born out of the insight of my fieldwork experience in India but at Parsons itself, this experience is continuously expanding into new meanings. In “journeys of going beyond”, the only certain thing is that there is absolutely no guarantee of what will come out of this process. But here, a new element can be introduced: the concept of “dignity”, which is a grounding sense of self-respect and the clarity that we deserve the place we occupy in the world. And if we deserve it, we may just use it.
Inspirations
Erwin, Kim. Communicating THE NEW. Wiley, 2014.
Scharmer, Otto. Leading From The Emerging Future. MIT, 2013.
Chodron, Pema. When Things Fall Apart. Shambala Classics, 1997.