What is Align and Design?
The age of industry has given way to the age of information, yet we seem none the wiser for the evolution. In a few centuries we have moved from the complex, but personal, connectivity of nature to a digital era that somehow simultaneously both shrinks and expands our sense of place in the world without creating a reciprocal sense of awe and humility. We are still the little fisherman in Hokusai's Great Wave print but Mount Fuji has been replaced by the invisible machinations of technology and code. If that precarious and threatening wave is what is existentially at stake, self-evident within the present pressing exigencies of the times, it is easy to feel overwhelmed in the face of the gravity of this moment. Within the frame and domain of Health, whether it be our individual, societal, or ecological well-being, how can we act, in the midst of all this information, such that we may join the collective participants and purveyors of wise-change going forth? Our answer to this clarion call of the age, in part, is Align and Design; a Health-centered design and implementation approach, grounded in both pattern and principles of connection.
Align and Design is a Pattern Language approach to Health Design, Leadership, and Implementation and Integration. Align and Design is an interactive group discourse, discussion, and dialogue whereby we seek to mutually explore and create a shared Pattern-Language and an applied Design-Thinking process. In this way, we can seek to understand and apply primary patterns and first-principles of engagement in the development of our systems of care, connection, as well as a means towards physiological and ecological wellbeing at scale.
Align and Design Methodology
-
A Complexity-based learning (CBL) that utilizes an emergent set of applied systemic metaphors, grounded in a holist epistemology.
-
Applied and embodied interactive and improvised inquiry such that we can wayfind a course together in the context of the Living world that holds us in the Times we are in.
-
Etymological consideration and reflection, giving our words their broader historical due.
-
Pattern language development – A creation of a coherent set of interacting and informing patterns that let us speak to the ineffable, unspeakable qualities of that which is alive, vital, and whole.
-
Exploring “The art of and science of manipulating defensible metaphors." (Gordon Pask).
-
A (Zen-inspired) Koan approach, where paradoxical and wicked questions, statements, and stories are held so as to bring about a “Great Doubt” and a tension thereof– or the Art of holding unanswerable questions as the genesis of our actions, and thus understanding.
-
(Batesonian) "Metalouges: “… a conversation about some problematic subject. This conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss the problem but the structure of the conversation as a whole is also relevant to the same subject” (Gregory Bateson)
-
Co-creative performative responsiveness that draws on an improvised birthing of aesthetic, non-literary modes of expression within the living moment.
