Workshop: Your first day of work 2025
“It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.”
- Augusto Boal
This workshop was created and facilitated in partnership with Service Designer & Ethnographic Researcher Hilary Dixon. Created and facilitated in collaboration with our actor/writer Lillian Noonan.
After leading a short warm-up of Forum Theatre exercises, participants were presented with scenes that explored UX work dilemmas, situated in future technologies. They were able to interrupt and interact with these scenes, change the scenes, take stances within the scenes and discuss with their fellow UX professionals.
Workshop description:
Conversations about tech ethics are fascinating — but can leave us wondering how to actually put them into practice. What can individual designers do if they're asked to implement features that take advantage of users? How will each of us actually act on our beliefs to make a better world?
Welcome to your first day of work in 2025. (Congratulations on the promotion, by the way.) How will you respond to today's problems?
Inspired by Forum Theater techniques developed by director Augusto Boal in the 1960s, Dixon and Euclide will lead workshop participants through near-future scenarios where you decide the outcome. Think of it as a dystopian Black Mirror episode where you can change the ending. Workshop participants will leave with a deeper understanding of the unique risks and challenges presented by mixed reality, machine learning, IoT, and wearable technologies.
Emerging technologies have the potential to have a dramatic impact on our lives, both positive and negative. Instead of passive despair, this workshop is designed to give participants a pragmatic toolkit for building the future they want to see.
Practical, playful, and provocative, we will come together as a professional community to take on the most urgent questions facing our profession today: not what can we make, but what should we make — and how?