Dreamcatcher Facilitating
Sonali Ojha
Sonali, from Dreamcatchers Foundation, joined the Design Rounds as someone working in the shadows of traditional design. Not trained as a designer, she had come to see the potential of design in her social and educational work with vulnerable and under-represented youth in India. Sonali’s non-Western, new-to-design practitioner perspective introduced startlingly different ways of conceptualising how one might design for transformation. From the outset, Sonali made explicit that this kind of practice is grounded in designing for emotional needs, specifically emotional safety. If agency and empowerment are central to the goal of emancipatory transformation, then for Sonali, the only way to get to that is to design for hope. In this way, Sonali’s lived experience echoed the education mantra to first ‘start where people are at’. Other case studies have acknowledged the messiness of teaching and learning. Sonali’s facilitation-led practice is not just comfortable with messy contradictions, but also with tears, trauma and long silences.
The transformation session Sonali deftly hosted in the Design Rounds can- not be reduced to an academic framework or easily digestible steps. Analogous to a yoga class, the session unfolded as a sequence flowing from one activity into the other. The overarching felt experience of the slow-paced encounter was that this was more ritualistic. The contemplative atmosphere felt opposite to the high-energy, structured design sprint. The session began with Sonali privileging belonging as the essential move for making participants feel included and safe. Each individual was invited to place a rock on a blanket in the middle of the table to make tangible: I am here, I am present, my voice counts. The moves that followed ensured participants’ whole selves showed up. One activity had participants taking minutes to closely examine the lines and structure of their hands. After reflecting on what the hands had held, healed, made, created, nurtured, carried, written and cherished, participants shared a sentence that began with the prompt: ‘these hands have…’. For homeless youth in Mumbai, that might be children sharing ‘these hands have fed my little brother’, ‘these hands have stolen food to survive’. In Melbourne, what people shared was oftentimes more prosaic and yet inevitably intimate. A similar move, later in the session, had participants attune to how their feet touched the ground. With eyes closed, people stood on tiptoes before settling their heels on the floor in search of the point of connection that confirmed the earth was there for us. The embodied act grounded participants in the present and acknowledged a connection to what has come before.
Beyond the bodywork, a guided visualisation had participants bring to mind a well-placed structure strong enough to withstand the wind and rain, attractive enough to draw in people passing by and welcoming enough to be a place where people want to spend time. The structure was to represent a way of revealing how a participant might wish to leave their mark in the world. This meditation purposely primed participants for the making phase. We created the kind of structure we wanted to build with inexpensive stones. When it came to sharing the bridges, sanctuaries and shelters, the reflective prompt was not to describe the structure but to share what we discovered about ourselves through making.
Towards the end, Sonali invited participants to walk as slow as they could. In paying close attention to all that had to come together to simply take a step, participants were invited to notice the effort required to build momentum. The walking feet needed to lift away from the supportive earth if we hoped to travel somewhere new. This performative metaphor gifted learners an experiential understanding of the challenges of transformative work. In observing their bodies, participants were introduced to a physiological, emotional, and cognitive respect for the energy, muscles, faith, bones and intention that need to align for an individual to take a step forward. To mobilise these reflections into action, the last task had participants bring paper cut-outs of their footprints to the stones placed at the beginning of the session. The final prompt was to contemplate the path one wished to make alone and to make together.
Antithetical to modernist productive principles of resolution, solutions and answers, this inclusion-driven practice was committed to holding space for shame, fear, sorrow and pain. From the first call for belonging to the last invocation to set an intention, this close attention to the affect of place, time and emotions shaped the session. These new ways of ‘being with’ transcend Western notions of co-creating at the same table. Just as the moves to make change consciously created a shared, if not collaborative, space for honouring that whole-hearted work is challenging for a reason.