DesignShift Practice Session: Shifting Beyond
In May 2026, we hosted a DesignShifts event exploring what it means to shift within and beyond the current system.
This session was prepared in collaboration with sahibzada mayed; a decolonial designer and researcher working at the edges of cultural and systemic transformation.
About the gathering
The current system is breaking, and a new one is not yet born. In that uncomfortable in-between space, we met to explore what it means to navigate current realities while shifting towards a different future.
During a 1.5 hour practice session we meet each other and the world in this messy middle through reflection, co-creation, and a shared presence. The session is fluid but some of the things we’d love to do together is:
Reflected on the current system and realities we face and feel
Imagined a better future that is just, caring, and liberated
Co-created the shifts needed to move within and beyond the current system
The registation was guided by questions. What feelings are alive in you right now? If your design practice was a plant, what would it be? What tensions are you holding? What future are you dreaming of? The answers became the material we worked with together.
Session reflection and observations
These were the contradictions people carried in.
Survival vs. meaningful work. Needing money to exist, while the work that feels true or regenerative doesn't pay, or conflicts with the very economic logic we're trying to dismantle.
Inner capacity vs. outer demand. Exhausted, overstretched, grieving, neurodivergent. And yet pulled to do more, faster, at scale.
The system I'm in vs. the future I want to create. Using proprietary tech, designing for consumerism, being part of capitalism while critiquing it. The awareness of contradiction is sharp and largely unresolved.
Breadth of vision vs. depth of follow-through. Many ideas, not enough energy, focus, support, or time to go further than the surface.
Knowing vs. doing. Information is abundant. The picture of what's broken is clear. And yet the gap between understanding the world and being able to change it can feel vast, even paralyzing.
"The overwhelm is real. The feeling of being powerless. Sometimes it makes me want to try harder to shape change where I can, other times I want to dig a hole and hide from it all."
— Session participant
What struck me across all of these: nobody framed their tension as purely personal. Even the most intimate entries located themselves within structural conditions. The personal and the political arrived together, inseparably.
I dream of a future that is…
As part of the pre-registration, we gathered every submission into a collective dream, which you can view here. Holding everyone’s visions together in one place was something.
But the activity also surfaced a real tension around dreaming itself. One participant noted that the leap from current conditions to a better future felt too vast, and that before we can dream forward, we need space to grieve what’s already lost or breaking. That observation is something I carry forward in my work. So much futures work skips over grief entirely. Grief should be named and practiced in its own right. Grief helps us become unfrozen.
“Community helps us feel like we are enough.”
Session Participant
A final note: community, connection, care
Something surfaced in this session that I've been thinking about for a while.
We are all carrying enormous feelings and enormous visions, often simultaneously. The weight of that is real. And increasingly, I wonder what it would look like to carry it together, not as a mailing list or a channel we slowly stop checking, but as something more alive. A space where DesignShifters share ownership, hold space for each other, and show up across the full range of what this work asks of us.
Not critical mass. Critical connection.
I don't have the shape of it yet. But I'd love to think about it with you. What are you craving? What could it look like? Reply or send us an email, and let's find out.
