From the Blog Draft Archives, 2012. I’m leaving this one as is with a short reflection from today at the end.
The 2012 Draft:
I am designing and facilitating a lot of face to face gatherings lately. People ask me “how do you do this work?” and I realized that I was acting as an unconscious practitioner some of the time. So it was worth stepping back and asking myself the question, “what is my design approach for facilitated events?” With a little reflection, I realize I DO have an approach. Here is a quick description. I hope in the comments you might share your approaches!
- Purpose, Purpose Purpose
- Outcomes
- Process options
- Pacing, consistency and variety
- Harvest
Or, as John Smith calls it “memory practices.”
The 2022 addition. Those five things are pretty mundane. It is the stories we tell about them that holds the key. So the thing that remains most salient for me from the draft today is the idea of “memory practices.”
What is this? A quick search found something from Geoffrey Bowker’s book Memory Practices in the Sciences. “How the way we hold knowledge about the past—in books, in file folders, in databases—affects the kind of stories we tell about the past.” As I’ve been reviewing old blog drafts and creating new ones, the way I’m telling stories is changing. My memory practices are changing. I find that fascinating!