Abstract
The status quo is our default, and often maintain it not because we prefer it, but because we have accepted or assumed that it is the way things must be. Many don’t realize that we have the capacity to imagine and shape alternatives, but this understanding and mindset is core to design work. This workshop explores how collaborative ekphrasis—an inherently multimodal activity in which small groups collectively translate the visual into the verbal—can develop this understanding, or design mindset. This research began in 2023, with a practice session in 2024, a presentation at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Writing Innovation Symposium in January 2025, and an upcoming workshop at the Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference in July 2025. Releasing ekphrasis from its typical confines in art history and poetry and emphasizing its rhetorical function—to engage publics—allows it to ground the co-imagining and co-writing of desired futures. Through ekphrastic co-writing, we can build (life)world(s) and future(s) that allow us all to flourish in the eras to come. Importing community writing and other rhetorical approaches into design, the research informing this workshop fuses participatory design (PD, co-design) and research through design (RtD) methodologies with feminist utopianism “as a practice of democratized futuring, a form of engaged critique and design leading to action.” This workshop is flexible for diverse audiences and ability levels. This workshop will engage in independent and collaborative writing to illuminate the creative process and the implications of design choices. The only requirement is that participants be ready to use Google docs.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Ekphrasis, Verbal, Visual, Multimodal, Multiliteracies, Literacy, Design, Rhetoric, Futures, Utopia
