Celebration is a workshop to learn and reflect on the role of Connector, one of the four roles of the Systemic Design Framework -alongside the system thinker, maker, and storyteller. Connecting people includes building good relationships among relevant stakeholders to amplify the impact of transition actions and interventions. It is an essential skill to ignite systemic change and builds strength among communities and unlocks the collective power of people.

The workshop delves into the concept of celebration. From team events to cultural gatherings, celebrations bring people together around a common purpose and the experience of memorable moments.

In this 1.5-hour workshop, participants collaborate in a team setting, examining essential elements of celebrations and co-design a celebration step by step. The take away of the workshop is a framework and easy-to-apply tools to create celebrations for their teams and communities.

Systems Thinking encourages big picture thinking by mapping and exploring the relationships across different parts of a system and between systems. It supports sensemaking of complex problems and allows identifying the areas within the systems, in which transition actions can be made with minimum effort to achieve maximum impact. Kneading Conversations workshop offers a hands-on way to explore how to map systems and think systemically. In this workshop we system think while knitting bread! We see the kneading activity as a sensual meditation that supports thoughtful creativity to explore the topic. The conversation forms the basis of a system map. Every workshop is unique, and it follows the conversation wherever it leads us. Themes may include culture, education, economy or health… or anything else that we talk about. The workshop ends with baking and easting the bread! We are building a community of systems thinkers, one loaf at a time. Let’s dough this together and toast to positive change!

Crafting Stories with Food is a workshop to explore stories as knowledge and uses food to bring together stories from different lands. In this workshop we craft stories around food, drawing from participants’ lived experience and knowledges.

Participants recreate using colourful paper scraps a meaningful dish. Using the memory of this dish, participants explore experiences, traditions and practices. These becoming building blocks of a storyline that participants build into a new story in their own unique way. Stories are a way to exchange and preserve knowledges of personal context and culture, with the potential to bring about agency for changemaking.

The activities in this workshop intend to support empathy and connections by recognising knowledges in other stories. By taking charge of their own narratives, participants explore ways to express what they are and what they bring to their communities, highlighting the power of their own value systems.

Nature Explores is an interactive session that focuses on the initial Explore phase of the Systemic Design Framework, an approach that support the planning of transition actions in complex systemic challenges. The session was informed by concept of Pluriverse, which honours diversity and interconnectedness among various perspectives, fostering mutual learning through collaboration.

In the session, participants learn and practice collecting information about how people understand their reality through diverse perspectives and experiences. By analysing the gathered knowledge, participants will identify patterns and connections that reveal the underlying dynamics. This skill is crucial for pinpointing key leverage points – those areas within the system where focused efforts can create the most impactful change.

This workshop focuses on the third phase of the Systemic Design Framework: Create. The objectives of the workshop are to practice some key skills used in the Create phase:

• Co-design: through hands-on activities, participants experience effective teamwork and collective decision making.
• Ideas Generation: participants learn to bring together and build on each other’s ideas to foster innovation and how to transform them into tangible prototypes.
• Rapid Prototyping: By crafting a model garden using clay, the workshop practices skills of shaping ideas into materials and exercise reiteration on these tangible ideas to reveal conflict and bring consensus.
• Effective Communication: learn how to convey ideas through your creations.

The ‘Empathy: More Than Human’ workshop aims to introduce participants to the tools and methods used in the ‘Reframe’ phase of the Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework in a playful and relaxed way to maximise learning. The ‘Reframe’ phase builds on research carried out in the preceding ‘Explore’ phase by identifying problems and opportunities to be addressed, defining a focus for the subsequent ‘Create’ and ‘Catalyse’ phases.To introduce methods to create this focus, the workshop asks participants to take the perspective of an animal persona in a fictional scenario to explore and map ‘more than human’ viewpoints. Participants then work with these viewpoints to identify problems and opportunities, and use these as a basis to develop possible ‘How Might We…’ questions to address. The workshop ends with a period for participants to reflect on the process, what they have learnt and how they might use this back in the real, human world.

he workshop focuses on the Designer Maker role from the Systemic Design Framework. It guides participants to experience the design process by actively engaging in the exploration, ideation and creation of fragrances. The session rehearses designer-maker skills while also explores recipe creation and processes for scent-making. The making space, becomes a safe space where imagination roam free among memories trigger by scents and together imagine what the future could smell like based on those scents you love. Then, make and take home the scent of your future! But it’s not just about perfume; it’s about dreaming beyond today and telling your future’s story through scent.