“Human-centered” often faces away from disability, illness, and death, but this too is being human. How might we make welcome what we fear?

Hello, friends. IxDA Pittsburgh is taking a different approach to our events this year. After being distanced for so long, we are inviting you to come together again for more intimate conversations about difficult topics, rather than conventional talks. Our last event attempted to build a bridge between Product Managers and UX teams. This month, we hope you’ll open your hearts to a more personal topic.

Our dear friend and occasional collaborator, Hanna du Plessis of Fit Associates, was diagnosed last year with a life-changing illness: ALS. This is heartbreaking. And like all of life, it is complex in surprising ways. At the same time it brings loss, it has also brought intensity to life and sparked a community of mutual care. We are confronted by life’s invitation to embrace light and shadow, to feel rather than numb, and to stay present in What Is rather than be lost in a story of What Might Be.

The topics of loss, grief, and death might seem dark, but we’re finding that our cultural avoidance of life’s inevitable griefs has closed us off from whole territories of connection and wonder. As designers, this feels like a knock on our door. Something is inviting us out from our comfortable house. Something wants to come in and join us for dinner. Its knocking may make us uncomfortable or even frighten us. AND answering the knock might be an expansive and joyful surprise. “Human-centered,” we say? And we’ve left out this universal part of human experience? What does that mean for our work? What does that mean for who we are as designers, and who we become as we work?

We’ve invited Hanna and her partner at Fit, Marc Rettig, to facilitate a conversation with us about what they are experiencing, what they are learning from it, and how we all might grow from the horrible, humbling, frustrating, inspiring, enlightening, and very human journey they are now on. Please join us.

Register

This event is free to attend, but space is limited, so please register now.

How you can help

Visit okaythen.net to learn more about Hanna’s encounter and the many ways you can help.

Meet our featured guests

Hanna and Marc are pincipals at Fit Associates where they support leaders and groups who work toward equitable, thriving community.

Hanna du Plessis

My fifteen-year career in interior design taught me that what we can imagine can become a tangible reality. But as a society we often lack what’s needed to co-create the thriving world we can dream of.

I grew up in apartheid South Africa with a clear social caste system that still reverberates in inequitable practices that harm everyone. Living there, I came to witness how patterns of oppression perpetuate in our own bodies and in the social fabric, one generation after another.

I left the world of design and strategy to learn about social transformation. I embarked on a different mission: to transform myself and share what I learn with others so that we can get good at the collective work of healing, repairing, and re-weaving.

For the last decade, I have taught in the field of design for social innovation and I have co-hosted spaces of transformation for over twenty-five cohorts. Clients who are tired of the status quo come to me to co-host brave spaces inside their organizations. I support them to see and shift harmful habits, reclaim their capacity to stand in resilient relationships and take effective action to co-create cultures of belonging.

Much of my work has been with change leaders, supporting them to become more skilled at co-creating social change. Other spaces served as a respite for burnt-out change leaders. I’ve also hosted long-term white affinity groups in organizations and communities, in service to the larger efforts to replace white supremacy culture and co-create a just world.

My superpower is making the invisible practical. I help you touch the deep stuff we’d rather avoid, but that yearns to change. I am a glutton for the creative process and have tried my hand as a performer (dancer, improviser, actor), artist (exhibiting some) and writer.

With my background in the arts, design, embodied practices and facilitation, I am uniquely able to help groups who yearn to take their place in creating a wholesome world, to embody and create the change they seek.

Marc Rettig

I help leaders and teams acquire the mindsets and methods necessary for a new relationship with change, shifting from a story of problem-solving to a story of long-term community co-creation. I design and host experiences through which teams become partners with emergence on the long road to a life-sustaining world.

I’m a corporate expat with a gift for seeing social complexity through a poetic lens. I believe people can deepen their work and its impact by reconnecting to a wilder, more soulful experience of participation in the weave of the world’s becoming. And I’m committed to helping leaders and teams learn these practices.

I am inspired by people whose leadership makes an invitation to our highest possibility. Some are poets. Some are academics, or activists, or clowns. They show us how to make long, difficult, even painful creative journeys with joy and love.

Ten years ago I became determined to find a way to make a living through purposeful work. I took the risk of leaving the familiar and lucrative world of corporate strategy and design. It hasn’t been easy, but it has been profound.

Over the last twenty years of my career I have guided teams through experiences that deepen the connection between themselves, the people they affect, and the future they bring into being. I’ve worked with big companies, neighborhoods, nonprofits and NGOs, startups and universities. I’ve seen them caught in old ways of doing things. Their belief that things can’t change keeps their creative force in a box. I’ve learned that the right experience can revive belief in their own possibilities, and they can make a beginning together. Then it’s time for the long work of living into possibility. Together they learn to host their own becoming.

Growing up on the Montana prairie gave me a sense of wide horizons and long cycles of life. Day after day on the tractor at four miles an hour showed me the impact of keeping it up even when progress is hard to see. Often we feel the field too wide and the plow too small. But I’ve learned to trust the long accumulation of days, and showing up again and again together with patient care.

I’ve combined teaching and practice for over thirty years. I’ve taught graduate design and social innovation since the ’90s. And I run a firm that works with everything from Nissan to neighborhoods, suburbs to science labs. This blend of practice and teaching at the edge of our field makes me ready to help leaders and teams connect their deep creativity to the world’s complexity.

Our Venue

Thanks to the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Carol Smith for hosting our event.

We’ll gather in the Robert Mehrabian Collaborative Innovation Center (CIC), room CDLC 1203 (first floor, on Forbes Ave side of building).

4720 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213

The CIC building is on the south side of Forbes at the bridge. There is a lot of street work being done in the area, so please allow extra time if you need to park.