A public engagement event and collection of conversational cards reflecting diverse perspectives on precarity.
Project Description
The project offers prompts, provocations and engagements that seek to explore values, challenge perceptions and cultivate new understandings of precarity. The cards cover an array of topics, from motherhood to loneliness to whether billionaires should exist. The extensive research is organised into three themes: Define, Cause and Experience — defining the term, investigating the cause and reflecting on the experience of precarity. This collection is designed to facilitate dialogue and create awareness around how precarity affects our everyday lives, start a conversation about the topic of precarity and explore your own views and experiences. The project is the culmination of a collaborative research practice by the 2024–2025 MA Design for Change cohort.
Creating multiple doorways in...Portals to Precarity.
Project Rationale
How can we engage with a topic from multiple angles? How do we acknowledge and celebrate diverse perspectives and experiences in a way that allows for deeper understanding and empathy to emerge? How do we design communication in a way that invites reflection and questioning rather than “telling” people or “imposing” one view or one way of seeing the world. How do we care for people in the research process, given that the topic is a sensitive one for many? How do we make something thought-provoking and at the same time gentle?
Engaging with interconnected issues of precarity facilitates a deeper and more reflective understanding of how precarity affects and is embedded in our everyday lives.
Next Steps
Distilling the key elements of the process/ engagement model in a way that can be shared and replicated, sharing tacit knowledge of what was learnt along the way.The project has the potential to grow to incorporate more perspectives on precarity outside of the core MA cohort. Designing additional and future engagements to collect more responses, statements, questions and the creation of more postcards, resulting in an expanded deck.
This process could be adapted to any topic where multiple people can bring their chosen themes under one heading. This pack allows the cards to be designed in endless ways, ensuring interest and different styles. E.g. “Sustainability – Let’s talk about it.” / “Gender – Let’s talk about it.” etc.
