Meta-making: Crafting the conversation of values and design

Ingrid Erickson, Lisa Nathan, Nassim Jafarinaimi, Cory Knobel, and Matthew Ratto designed a workshop for the 2012 iConference in Toronto in February 2011, in order to understand synergy and integration. The team oriented the day to prompt reflection and conversation by way of active engagement. In the first exercise, workshop participants were invited to bring an enchanted object to the workshop, like a toy car, a phone, or any item to which they strongly ascribed some sort of value. To set the tone for the activity, they elected to share one of their own enchanted artifacts with the group. In random groups of five and six, seated around a hotel ballroom, attendees got to know one another by sharing stories of their chosen artifacts. The same working groups to imagine how their chosen artifacts might be associated with values other than those with which they had been originally connected. The products crafted by the participants exemplified a broad understanding of the relationship between values and design.