- Hard Steps. We help designers identify what keeps people from living by a value in one context vs another. We call those things—what gets in the way of living by values—the "hard steps" of a value.
- Design Imagination. In Stephany's case—she already has a good instinct for the theatrical aspects of event design, and has little to learn from us there. But we can help her develop her imagination in new directions:
- Imagining Relationship Structures—buddy systems, mentorship structures, etc in her rituals and org processes.
- Imagining Legitimation Processes: How do people decide what to share about the deceased? How should guests be chosen for a dinner?
- Conversations with Experts. Towards the end of our program, Stephany will document her most promising ideas. By then, she'll have collected values from the populations she cares about, and turned them into new ideas about death rituals and dinners. She'll have prototyped some of those ideas, and will be able to argue for them—explaining why her structures support those values better than alternatives.
Consider Stephany's value of guests at an event feeling held, supported in a thoughtful structure, knowing they have a role. What are the hard steps of this? What must a party guest be able to do, to relax into a plan in this way?
They may need to be able to asses the hosts' plan roughly, without knowing the details. They made need to recognize that the host has taken their personality and situation into account, in giving them a role.
In our plan for Stephany, we'll teach her to find the hard steps of the values she designs for, to avoid unintentional values-misalignment.
By helping Stephany explore the hard steps of her value and extend her design imagination, she'll come to a broader view of what rituals, organizational practices, and dinners might support the values she found.
At this point, she has something worth sharing and spreading!
So we'll arrange conversations with relevant experts. Some private conversations, and maybe some podcasts. She'll meet other social designers who've dealt with death, grieving, and end-of-life care, and experts in stranger-to-stranger connection like leaders in authentic relating and Strangers for Tea.
We expect these people will find Stephany's designs exciting, and these meetings will help her inventions to spread.
We'll organize practice sessions for her (1-3 hours per week), so she can get good at the interview process with other students, teachers, and friends. Then, for her death ritual work, we'll support her as she interviews people who've experienced loss, about the meanings they found in it, and about what community responses could have helped.