Talk or Panel Designing Social Imagination: New Tools for Healing and Renewal
Talk or Panel Designing Social Imagination: New Tools for Healing and Renewal
Design can play a vital role in responding to a world transformed by the pandemic and the rapid rise of AI. In this lecture, I share how pausing a decades‑long design research practice opened a path toward new tools: poetry, oral history, community dialogue, and music. Drawing on my poem Pandemic—with the lines “suffer together, endure together, and we will rise together,” which later inspired a healing song in Hawai‘i—I explore how creative practices can help us process grief, reconnect, and reimagine our futures. Through glimpses of poetry, edited videos from my oral history project The Legacy of India’s Imagination, community dialogues on “Being Human in the post‑COVID, post‑AI future,” and music that supports meditation and reflection, I propose an expanded frontier for design: the design of social imagination. The lecture echoes themes from my forthcoming book, The Cracks in Asphalt: Openings for Hope and Renewal.
About the Host
Uday Dandavate, Co-Founder, SonicRim
Uday Dandavate is a San Francisco–based author, poet, design thinker, and ethnographer whose work explores participatory design and the study of social imagination. He leads SonicRim, partnering with leading‑edge technology companies to drive innovation through co‑creation with communities. He also facilitates the oral history project The Legacy of India’s Imagination, documenting voices across India’s cultural and democratic landscape. His forthcoming book, Cracks in the Asphalt, explores how design, democracy, and social imagination can open new possibilities for human connection.
