Workshop: Narrative Kitchen
Narrative Kitchen
What could inter-cultural meaning making look like for design and research practitioners? In this immersive and dialogic workshop, the facilitators, co-founders of D.epicentre, Sudebi Thakurata and Probal Banerjee, will bring in aspects of their work on international cultural relations, futures and foresight, design-led innovation and transformative leadership and creative and fair collaborations to provoke the participants. Tools, processes and frameworks from many of their relevant ongoing initiatives (Fair Collaborations Toolkit for EUNIC, Response_Able Futures, Narrative Kitchen, Dignity Compass, Intercultural Collaborations by Design, SEAD cultural leadership programme, GCRP, City As Text etc.) will be used as provocations, to open up dilemmas encountered by people in their contexts.
Food will be used as an enabler (as a medium, material and metaphor) to steer some of these conversations. They will collectively explore how their work can be more responsive to contemporary challenges or complex realities shaped by conflict, geopolitical power plays, neo-imperialism, climate crisis or AI.
This workshop would entail some of these following elements: understanding similarities and differences due to cultural contexts, knowing each other better through values, beliefs and inter-cultural teamwork, Delving deeper into identities, positionalities, intersectionalities while identifying and sharing cultural strengths. It will act as a reflective and evaluative process to look at their own practices.
About D.epicentre
D.epicentre is an award-winning trans-disciplinary design-led systems innovation collective of narrative designers, strategic futurists and creative practitioners, led by Sudebi Thakurata (https://linkedin.com/in/sudebi/ and at https://instagram.com/sudebithakurata/) and
Probal Banerjee (https://linkedin.com/in/probal/ and at https://instagram.com/probalxdepicentre/).
In 9 years, D.epicentre has worked on more than 100 global and local projects, with collaborators from more than 30 countries, including European contexts (especially in the context of art, design, and social, cultural, or environmental impact) directly and indirectly impacting more than 100,000 people, especially as it has been able to directly work with CEOs, COOs, directors, policymakers, etc. who can impact many. D.epicentre delves into a process of inquiry in experiential, immersive, embodied, dialogic, contextual, participatory ways to co-create, collaborate, and curate regenerative, transformative, emergent, and inclusive possibilities.
The work ranges from business/service design to learning/ecosystem design; game and toolkit design to futures literacy; evaluation to instruction design; exhibition to publication design; creative facilitation to leadership; research to user-experience design; and mentoring to socially-engaged arts initiatives. The contexts range from climate change, cultural relations, intergenerational fairness, organisational transformation, archives, education, refugees, technology and making, health, elderly, youth and future consciousness, and crafts to care and social innovation to entrepreneurship. D.epicentre is a collective of practitioners sharing a common vision about shifts in patterns of thinking, ways of seeing oneself and the world, connecting the dots, and looking at the bigger picture while not overlooking the small. Elements of Storytelling, Dignity-Fairness-Inclusion, Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight, Design, Complex Systems Thinking and pedagogical explorations are interwoven into multiple media, modes, and materials while crafting experiences at D.epicentre.
Date and locations:
- Friday September 4th 2026
- Begijnhof (#9), Zuivelmarkt 33, 3500 Hasselt (visiting adress)
- Timing: 10h00 - 16h00
- This event is free for everyone, but registration is required
Registration
For PhD students and postdocs, we would like to draw your attention to the cancellation and no-show policy of UHasselt.