Strategic Exploration: Breaking Symmetries
The importance of striking the iron while it’s hot.
Part 3 of this series. Check out part 2 for some extra context.
Building Meaning as an activity for Strategic Exploration becomes a pivotal stirrer to expand any learning space, especially when you engage in a collaborative fashion. Learners may have different paces, given their prior knowledge, skills, and motivations/objectives. Unlike taking a course together where we are all learning the same thing, Collaborative Learning is a way of testing knowledge among each other to strengthen our own course. I believe that, in many ways, this is what my Strategic Exploration comes to rely on, given the ongoing conversation with
.On the basis of Collaborative Learning, I am able to continue to build meaning in a more empowering way. I will highlight two main ideas that make learning meaningful:
- Serving as a prerequisite for Creation
- Acquiring depth and variety to strengthen my role as a Strategic Designer
As of now, I cannot yet step fully into the activity of creation because I need to declutter the space for it to emerge. Creation can happen spontaneously but not prematurely. A certain germination phase needs to occur through learning and exposure to creative triggers (e.g., others’ creative work, a certain mood, environment, a walk, etc.).
For this exploration, I will focus on building meaning for Strategic Design and how my role is impacted.
In Strategic Design, Building Meaning is a work of alignment of multiple instances — theoretical and practical — to solve certain challenges and derive new frameworks that can enable new actions and possibilities. It follows a long thread of developments, exchanges, and reframings before it reaches a stable state that can be shared with others outside the process.
Collaborative Learning is nurturing that ability present in design thinking to converge and diverge and creates the fluidity of experience necessary for navigating complex problems.
The by-product of Collaborative Learning in Strategic Design is to enrich context and meaning in a very active manner. Why does it have to be like this? Well, learning and sharing knowledge is a very complex feat that, if it’s not done properly and timely, can create more problems than it can solve.
Oliver’s description of Conceptual Heterogeneity is a very useful way of demonstrating how contexts are enriched but also separated:
“What’s Conceptual Heterogeneity? It refers to different people using the same word to express different conceptual meanings. It leads to Knowledge Fragmentation inside one discipline. Also, it raises the cost of cross-boundary collaborative projects.”
The costs of Knowledge Fragmentation seem to get higher and higher with time since no matter how powerful and comprehensive a particular study/theory within that discipline is, it cannot synthesize the entire complexity of that field. There are bound to be contradictions, counterarguments, and practical limitations.
So how does everything I’ve written so far tie into my role as a Strategic Designer?
The ongoing trends now advocate for more Transdisciplinarity as a way to bring experts together and share their Conceptual Heterogeneity in a given context in a way that is meaningful to the whole. The challenge is to build frameworks that are flexible yet robust enough to hold a heterogeneous dialogue without losing the relevant meaning and the quality of certain knowledge along the way.
While I rely on an extensive number of frameworks to meet different types of needs and clients with expert knowledge, even if I gain access to their knowledge, I might not be able to distill its value. My task is to create the means for Collaborative Learning to happen and keep the momentum through the right questions and stories so we build meaning together in a way that we can all understand and use. More or less
One last point on a previous highlight Oliver made that I want to build on is the diagram of Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity with the addition of my insight on Collaborative Learning. As of now, the subjective and intersubjective parts are not in a state of balance, nor should they be until more exploration is “done.”
There’s a certain balance that needs to be achieved for knowledge to crystallize and allow for meaning to settle. But I believe that symmetries are not a good representation of the design as a transformative force.
suggested a while ago that creative thinking requires breaking symmetries to discover new things.Staying active on the journey to explore and learn, unlearn or relearn is to find balance in movement!
