Written by Daiana Zavate, on Owtcome's blog.
Creativity is not a scripted act. It often urges you to let go of trying too hard, especially when seeking to place constraints on how creative outputs unfold. That is the beauty of it. Whether it’s creating a new product, a tool, or a community, there is always a degree of unpredictability to how they will manifest. But that makes room for “happy accidents” or “odd outcomes,” as we call them. Our latest episode dives into the worldview of a designer. Kevin Richard shares an insightful perspective on the role of tools and the dynamics of communities.
In my conversation with Kevin, he touched upon two key pointers on how to design something meaningful:
A perfect tool
Tool creation can take a great deal of time and effort. It’s not always rewarding, and, frankly, it’s a never-ending process. Part of tool creation is deciding when the tool is good enough to perform in a real context. It’s extremely difficult to create a one-size-fits-all design tool.
There’s a fine balance between the tool and the people using the tool – facilitators and participants. It is really hard to say how the tool helps, but you could imagine that it supports achieving certain results. In my experience, the tool doesn’t have to be perfect anyway. If it’s perfect, it’s perfectly fine-tuned for a specific context, and you know it’s highly unlikely to work for many other people or in many other contexts.
Open spaces
Kevin describes the Design and Critical Thinking as an open space for genuine exchange:
The mission of the community is to create knowledge and understanding at the intersection of various disciplines and practices and for that purpose I do feel like it’s important to create those bridges and to create these ways to gather people around some common understanding.
A community is not just a structure held in place by rules, clear vision, and purpose. It’s a space of experiencing a sense of belonging without feeling pressured to behave in a stiff manner or fear of being judged for your ideas. Often, common sense is enough as a foundation.
I hope it creates a good and soft addiction to the idea that you don’t know what will happen and that you might leave the session with more thoughts and more ideas than what you had in mind when you arrived.
How we develop the community further relies on exactly that opportunity found in a happy accident. [...] Read more on Owtcome's blog 👇
Daiana Zavate
Listen to the ODD Owtcomes Podcast episode
Thanks for reading and thanks to Krasi & Daiana for their amazing work at Owtcome 🙏
Kevin
Oh, and a fun bonus 🙃👇
