Behind the scenes at the Dott thinktank and masterclass

After a week of storms and horizontal rain, the sun broke through on the morning of our think tank on ‘emerging design practice’ as a welcome respite.

We started to get excited some time before everyone arrived, as the expertly designed delegate packs created by Two came, hot off the press, by courier, in the rain. There was already a palpable sense of anticipation and expectation at the Dott Office.

Our premise for the event was simple; create an event that we would like to attend. Or if Heineken did a design conference...

Technically this involved:
- An inspiring setting on the cliffs of Mawgan Porth, showcasing the best of Cornwall’s sustainable hospitality at the Bedruthan Steps Hotel
- A passionate interdisciplinary group of people with both deep expertise and broad knowledge and expansive interests
- Time for ideas to percolate over two days
- Long lunches and late starts interspersed with intense periods of activity, thought and provocations.
- Personalised design of the ‘touch points’
- An overarching ethos namely ‘going old school’
- An unlimited audience, digitally
- A format that enabled ideas to emerge (see below)

We deliberately created an event that was in itself emergent, based on the idea of open space technology a format, which put simply, is based on the concept that the really important conversations at conferences tend to happen in the coffee breaks and over lunch. This combined with the principle of butterflies or bumblebees, where ‘the law of two feet’ ensures that people move from place to place of interest. This left everything to chance, circumstance and participation.

So we accepted in our format that ideas ‘emerge’ dynamically during conferences based on conversations, rather than captured in pre-prepared powerpoints. This builds on the idea of the charrett. Thought to originate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century. "In the 16th, 17th, and 18th century when travel took long periods, a Charette referred to long carriage rides in which politicians and policy makers would be sequestered together in order to collaborate in solving a set problem over the duration of their journey." And what a journey! Andy Polaine probably travelled the furthest, from Germany, by train.

So we set about to create an unconference such as those created by Wenovski’s design thinkers for day one, where everyone is a speaker and there is no audience.

We asked Lauren Tan, PhD researcher from Dott07 and currently working with University College Falmouth on Dott Cornwall, to scribe the event.

The question we asked was ‘what is emerging design practice’ or ‘what is design in our times’. In many ways we were looking for the key questions rather than solutions. And in many ways this is what emerged.