WHERE DO YOU START?Masters of Design
Guest Lecture & Workshop
Presented to the inaugural UBCO Master of Design cohort, Where Do You Start? challenges familiar accounts of design as a problem-solving practice. Moving through five provocations—being, friction, arrangements, attention, and bearing—the lecture asks what becomes possible when designers stop standing over the world in order to fix it and begin standing with it: attending to the relationships, tensions, and unrealized possibilities already present.
The accompanying workshop invited the cohort to turn these questions toward their emerging collective practice. By mapping what keeps finding them, the frictions they encounter, and the futures they believe are at stake, participants began to establish a shared bearing—not a predetermined destination, but a way of orienting themselves toward what matters. Because design may not begin with knowing what to make. It may begin by learning how to notice, starting close in, and listening to what kind of future is already asking us to participate.