Workshop Rooted Together: Co-Designing Future Legacies from Cultural Memory
Workshop Rooted Together: Co-Designing Future Legacies from Cultural Memory
Rooted Together: Co-Designing Future Legacies from Cultural Memory is an interactive workshop for people navigating life among cultures, identities, and histories. On Designing Our Spaces Day, it invites participants to see themselves not only as inhabitants of communities, but as co-creators of the physical, social, and imaginative spaces they share. Through guided reflection, storytelling, and small-group dialogue, participants will surface values and memories from their own backgrounds, identify resonances and tensions across differences, and translate these insights into future-facing concepts. These may take the form of environments, objects, rituals, stories, music, digital interactions, or other living legacies. The workshop positions design as a participatory practice for transforming cultural difference into connection, belonging, and shared responsibility for what communities carry forward.
About the Host
Uday Dandavate — Co‑Founder of SonicRim and ethnographer of social imagination, design researcher, catalyst of co‑creation, poet, oral history facilitator, and author, currently exploring AI‑generated music as part of his practice. Dr. Peter Kwok Chan — Associate Professor of Visual Communication Design in the Department of Design at The Ohio State University.
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 flourishing.
Dr. Peter Chan’s research focuses on Collaborative Design and Brand Design, exploring methods, techniques, and approaches that design students utilize to delve into, interpret, and apply emotion-driven mindsets to strategic design problems. His teaching methodology integrates Design Thinking and Design Doing within a brand design pyramid framework. Design Thinking employs human-centered perspectives to tackle complex problems through conceptual and iterative processes, contextualized within the study of people, objects, spaces, messages, and services.
Peter and Uday have collaborated for three decades.
