Are you prepared for the “NOW”?

Obsession about the future has in the past kept us from getting the most out of the present. The pandemic has opened a small window of opportunity for us to expand our consciousness and learn to engage meaningfully with the “Now”.

How might we use “Now” as the center from which to expand our sense of connection to the universe with curiosity, compassion and creativity?

These and more questions will be addressed at the Pune Design Festival (PDF). The event will provoke conversations about the paradigm shifts taking place around us. The event will take place online between February 21st and 28th.

I have been offered the honor of opening the conference with a dialogue with Lauralee Alben, the Founder and CEO of the Sea Change Design Institute. The institute addresses challenges from human rights to ocean conservation to disruptive technologies.

Since the launch of my book of poems about life imagination and design in June 2020, Lauralee and I have been engaged in a conversation about a “revolution of consciousness” taking place in all of our minds. The topic of our dialogue at the Pune Design Festival will be, “Now or Never: Designing our emerging future”. The following description of the session was co-created by Lauralee and I:

“These are extraordinary times defined as much by cataclysmic crises as by compassionate actions. We are in the crucible of a transitional era. As a new worldview births, extinction provides a counterpoint to evolution. The design challenges summoning us require simultaneous shifts spanning the personal to the planetary. It’s now or never for us to ”hear the footsteps of our emerging future.”*

How can we use design to engage in the profound nature of paradigm-shifting and the pragmatic work of problem-solving? There are endless opportunities to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic inequity, social injustices, and the climate crisis. Just as imperative is reconciling the disconnection, isolation, and wounding within the human heart. It’s time to co-create new ways of living, doing, and being. Realize the limitless possibilities! Healing poetry. Regenerative products. Restorative processes.

Our inspiration awaits us in the Now. Immersed in this sacred still point, we come back into relationship with all life and our collective imagination gives form to what must manifest to bring us into oneness, interdependence, and consciousness. Our souls give design wings to soar, amplifying the butterfly effect of each blessed one of us. From within the nexus of self, crisis, and life, “design serves as both vessel and revelation.”**

The conference program is being planned. We encourage you to join this provocative dialogue, so we do not let the opportunity slip away under our feet.”

. *excerpt from NOW by Uday Dandavate

**excerpt from Design Consciousness by Lauralee Alben”

Lauralee Alben

As Founder and CEO of the Sea Change Design Institute, Lauralee Alben advocates for co-designing positive, profound, and regenerative transformations. Sea Change Design has been used to inspire ocean conservation, protect human rights, build innovative organizational cultures, humanize technology, and brand initiatives for clients including the Environmental Defense Fund, Apple, Procter & Gamble, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. In 2020, Lauralee was inducted as an AIGA Fellow by the American Institute for Graphic Arts. She’s also a recipient of the Design Management Institute’s prestigious Muriel Cooper Prize and a member of the I.D. Forty, named “one of the most influential people in design.” Lauralee also serves as a wisdom-keeper, healer, and poet.

Uday Dandavate

A design activist, poet, and ethnographer of social imagination, Uday Dandavate is also CEO of SonicRim, a San Francisco based design research company specializing in co-creation. He has traveled extensively around the world, studying and connecting with all kinds of people and cultures, and watching and participating as they change over time. In his professional capacity, as well as through blogging, teaching, speaking, and facilitating, Uday provokes fresh perspectives that help to humanize technologies and democratize design. Uday recently published an evocative collection of poems, ”a window for a home without walls.”