Constellations Practice Work

Let’s get started! To prepare for our first session on Oct. 1, we are asking you to:

1. Review the Design Justice Principles
2. Review the Constellation Culture note
3. Go analog 
4. Practice reciprocity 

Taken together, these preparations should take up to 3 hours, and can be folded in to your day-to-day work. 

1. Review the Design Justice Principles

Please re-read the Design Justice Principles. If you have not already, consider becoming a signatory.

2. Review the Constellation Culture note

Please review the note about the culture we are trying to create within the Constellation. 

3. Go analog

We are asking everyone to start carrying a pocket notebook, if you do not already. This could be as simple as a few sheets of printer paper, cut, folded, and stapled to a small size. The exact size does not matter — what’s important is that it’s small enough for you to carry with you most places you go. Ideally, it literally fits in your pocket. 

The notebook will be a place to:

• Do prep work related to the Constellation practices
• Jot down notes about anything (Constellation or otherwise) without opening your phone
• Make sketches
• Get into a habit of putting pen to paper
  

4. Practice reciprocity 

[A] transition from exploitation to reciprocity, from the individual good to the common good has been seen as a parallel to the transition that colonizing human societies must undergo, from hoarding to circulation, from independent to interdependent, from wounding to healing, if we are to thrive in the future.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

The first practice will be reciprocity. Some of you will notice echoes of the prep work you did for Creative Practice in a Time of Upheaval.

Design work cannot happen in the absence of relationships. There is often a complex web of relations underlying any design undertaking. Consider, for example, an architect designing a building. They are in relationship with:

• A client, who commissions and signs off on the work
• A neighborhood advisory council, possibly
• The neighborhood the building will be situated in
• Local government
• Engineers
• The ecosystem of that building site
• Future residents of the building
• The workers that will construct and maintain the building
• The places in the world where the construction materials were mined, harvested, or manufactured
• The workers and ecosystems in the construction material supply chain
• The teachers and mentors who contributed to their education
• The junior architects who might be supporting them
• Their partner, who might make dinner on deadline nights
• …and so many more

In our current paradigm, many or most of these relationships are transactional and have asymmetrical power dynamics. Many are invisible. What might change if we acknowledged the utter breadth of these relationships and oriented ourselves towards reciprocity?

Instructions

1. Read this excerpt from The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://wghn.com/2026/08/21/book-excerpt-the-serviceberry-by-robin-wall-kimmerer/
2. Map the relationships that support your design practice. You may do this in any format: mentally, as a list on paper, or as a mind map — whatever helps you visualize the expansiveness of your relational web.
3. Are there relationships that feel transactional or extractive in your favor? Is there anywhere where gratitude, gifting, and reciprocity might move your work further into alignment with design justice? Remember that reciprocity is not about “bilateral exchange,” but rather about “keeping the gift in motion.”
4. Spend the rest of your prep time practicing reciprocity and making notes about what you notice. How does an intentional reciprocity practice impact your design work?

If this is already part of your practice, hooray! And, challenge yourself to go even deeper with it.

The Design Process: Regrounding & Interrogating

Preparation for Session 2 will involve regrounding in the design process, and interrogating how we use it.

Design practice has coalesced around a set of steps, to be followed in sequential order, moving from problem to solution. The “design process,” as it has come to be known, has been adopted outside of conventional design contexts. “Design thinking” is about applying the design process and design methods to all kinds of problems.

While the steps themselves often have different names, they generally follow this flow:

1. Definition: What is the problem we are trying to address?
2. Discovery: What do we know about the problem? What is the context in which it’s happening? What has been tried before?
3. Ideation: What new ideas might we try to tackle this problem? Are there existing ideas we can adapt?
4. Prototyping: Creating small versions of the most promising ideas to test them
5. Implementing: Building out the full version of the strongest idea
6. Evaluation: Is the solution working?
7. Iteration: What can we improve?

This process has been applied from everything to social movement campaigns to surveillance technology.

Design Justice has offered up a critical lens with which to look more closely at the power dynamics at work in design processes. We ask:

• Who is initiating this work?
• Who is at the table throughout this process?
• Who has real decision making power?
• Who might be harmed by this work?
• Who benefits the most from this work?
• Are these power dynamics transparent?
• Is the design process itself transparent?
• How does this work take other-than-human beings (earth, water, air, plants, animals) into consideration?
• What values underlie this work?

This month, we will observe ourselves using — or not using — a design process in our work/organizing. 

1. Map out your design process

What does your design process look like? Make a diagram or write it out. If it is identical to the one mapped out above, that works!

If you do not usually use design processes in your work: 

• Why is that? Have you not been introduced to it before? Have you abandoned it? 
• Create a process to try to follow over the next few weeks. Make a diagram or write it out.
  
  

2. Start noticing how you interact with your design process

Select a project or initiative you’re currently working on that either uses the design process explicitly, or is about solving a particular problem. 

1. Where are you at in the process?
2. What challenges, frustrations, or concerns have been coming up?
3. Have you been following a design process closely? If not, why? Has it been inadequate, inapplicable, or tedious?
4. Answer these questions:
   • Who is initiating this work?
   • Who is at the table throughout this process?
   • Who has real decision making power?
   • Who might be harmed by this work?
   • Who benefits the most from this work?
   • Are these power dynamics transparent?
   • Is the design process itself transparent?
   • What values underlie this work?
5. If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the process, including the conditions and culture within which you’re working, what changes would you make?

As thoughts come up over the coming weeks, make note of these somewhere (maybe your pocket notebook!). You are also welcome to respond visually, with diagrams or drawings.

Bring your notes to the next session.

Channeling Desire

How, as designers, are we engaged with desire? Are we participating in the manufacturing of desire through consumerist fantasy or dopamine delivery? Are we listening for what the people and planet are actually longing for? What does it look like to attune our practice to elemental desires — like belonging, safety, and joy — while recognizing that much of our work is about addressing the barriers to fulfilling those desires?

1. Read Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde
   
2. What are you most longing for? Pay attention to your desires throughout your days. What are your elemental desires — the longings lying at the root of your fleeting wants?
   
3. Tune into what you are designing. What are the elemental desires of the community you’re making this for? How might you attune your project to those deeper longings? How might a closer relationship to the erotic provide some guidance?

Bring your responses and notes to our final session.