Card Sessions: Understanding Method Cards
Card Decks are frames.
Understanding Cards are to When and Where, what
Method Cards are to Why and How.
Card: Understanding
What if understanding is our ability
to hold space for the possibility of
knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds,
directs and discloses its relevance to
unexplored aspects of things known?
However, Understanding Cards can be used as method cards.
Understanding Cards used as method cards are a tool and approach to inspire thinks, things, insights and gatherings, inviting participants to weave questions with cards, forming new understanding.
Each of the two hundred cards outlines part of one pattern, (with an underlying, large finite set pattern, pattern language) and provides a text, catalyzing a conversation, a structured conversation, weaving tacit and explicit, capturing individual and small group genius intelligence and insight.
It’s not a “how to” guide — it’s a gameful environment co-design, social cognition and networked agency tool meant to explore cards in light of questions and help you emerge, unfold and evolve your own paths.
Gamefulness
Using heuristics to evaluate
the mindful, gameful and flow
cultivating purposefulness of
play and social social media.
Use the deck to weave cards, conversations and questions with shared understanding, cultivating new perspectives, forming a different understanding of yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Created, field-tested and prototyped through years of digital conversation and online community interaction, CSMM Method Cards are intended as inspiration, instigation, immersion and social, societal innovation.
Card sessions are designed to cultivate knowledge, knowledge applied to spiraling, evolving lines of inquiry, scaffolding possibility spaces, providing space for a requisite variety of paths, between today and preferable outcomes.
Understanding
What if understanding is our ability to hold space for the possibility of
knowledge, as it emerges, unfolds, directs and discloses its relevance to
unexplored aspects of things known?
Yes, We Can, and Do, Design Our Understanding: The Roles of Ascribed Coherence and Ascribed Realism in Our Sense-Making
— Michael Lissack
In a previous set of articles, I suggest that the road to better understanding might be approached from the perspective of designerly-thinking. More than sixteen commentators submitted reactions to these pieces. Here, I review my basic claims, respond to the commentators, and state clearly what I mean by “ascribed realism.” I expand on my contrast between representations and compressions. I assert that understanding is a product of choices that are forced upon us as we seek to overcome the mismatch between the relentlessly rich, interwoven complexity of the world and our minds’ limited ability to cope with it all. When we recognize that we can actively choose rather than merely accept what appears to be a pre-given conclusion, we open the door to agency. And agency, in turn, opens our understanding to self-reflexivity and responsibility.
