Practicing Relationality - Caitlin Walker [MASTERCLASS]

This masterclass is part of our Symbiotic Hospitality program

“Nothing pre-exists the relations that constitute it.”
— Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse (2018)

This two-day masterclass articulates why Clean Language is highly relevant for participatory design methods and for practices in which working with others is central. Participatory design starts from the understanding that relationality is not a tool but the medium through which design takes place. Designers, facilitators, and process guides operate within living systems in which language, power relations, experience, and context continuously influence one another. Under such conditions, awareness of one’s own position, assumptions, and biases becomes a core professional competence.

The Clean Language practice of Caitlin Walker offers a precise and applicable way of engaging with this complexity. By systematically suspending interpretation, judgment, and projection, attention shifts from directing content toward attuning to relationships. The facilitator hosts the conditions for inquiry, while participants bring their experience into a temporarily shared space. Meaning emerges from lived experience and remains provisional, situated, and responsive to context.

Within participatory design, this opens a distinct field of practice. Clean Language shows how quickly and effectively interactions change when they remain free from imposed interpretations and claims of expertise. Conversations take on a distinct quality, one in which participants are present as holders of experiential knowledge rather than as representatives of predefined user groups. The interaction itself becomes design material that shapes the process.

During the masterclass, Clean Language is approached as a micro-practice of symbiotic hospitality. Systemic modelling deepens this work by exploring metaphors spatially and physically, making relationships, tensions, and potentials perceptible and discussable. Experience shows that systems, whether bodily, social, or organisational, find their own forms of recovery, alignment, and balance more readily under these conditions.

The masterclass combines theoretical framing, demonstrations, guided exercises, and reflection. It offers participants a rigorous, ethical, and relational repertoire of practices for participatory design and shared processes.

Practical

Duration: 2 days

Date & time: March 22–23, 10:00–17:00

Group size: max. 15 participants

Fee: €1500* (including meals and materials)

For whom

Professional designers, artists, facilitators, researchers, and students working with participation, collective processes, organisational culture, or spatial and social questions.

What to expect

• Insight into Clean Language as a practice for commoning
• Experience with systemic modelling and metaphor-based work
• Refinement of listening and questioning skills
• Applicable methods for shared practice and collective learning processes