Music Thinking breakout at Design Thinking Conference

Design Thinking Conference 2018 in Amsterdam

We did a music thinking workshop breakout on Friday 12th October at this year’s Design Thinking Conference in Amsterdam.

Like last year, the conference had the subtitle ‘through different eyes‘ and the focus on empathy. Instead of definitions, tools and showcases, the conference focused on inspirations to question oneself, debates getting further, perspectives outside the comfort zones, all in togetherness and positivism, and with a bit of lightness.

For more info about the conference see the facebook page.

“Having empathy is not enough we have to remix all of our findings, inspirations and insights to move on.”
Christof Zürn

From Empathy to Remix

Because Empathy is one of the six cues of music thinking we extended the theme to “through different ears” because music thinking starts with listening. We started our one-hour session with a very short explanation of the Music Thinking Framework and the new Music Thinking Approach to Service Design overview.  We divided the hour into the four sections Listen, Tune, Play and Perform of the framework. Empathy is the cue to change. It starts with listening.

We did three listening exercises: We started with Wide Listening, the awareness of sounds surrounding us (a link with John Cage and Pauline Oliveros). Then we did Close Listening, the exploration of a very near object (this is inspired by Terry Riley). The first two exercises were very short and after the exercises, the participants had to write down what they heard and what they thought. For the third exercise, we used the Jam Cards in Serendipity Lab mode, the participants used their smartphone to play the spotify codes that are on every card.

After the Listen phase, everybody stepped into the Tune phase and was looking for patterns, insights and surprises. Before the Play phase, we did the team grouping in duo, trio, quartet and quintet. The groups prepared each other for the 1-minute performances. 

Last years workshop

If you are interested in the last year’s workshop you can read more about it on the CREATIVE COMPANION blog and also hear a recording of the performance of the workshop group of John Cages 4’33’.

More info about the Design Thinking Conference