From the designer’s vantage point, pattern-mind has been the most important and the first and foremost requirement as it facilitates one’s capacity to see the whole, and approach design-centric solution development from a holistic perspective. Inevitably, then, kinship-mind must come next from the creative practitioner’s point of view, and, it seems to me, that if I were to draw relationships between these minds, then kinship-mind and pattern-mind would have to stand together in parallel, since it is this orientation that relationships and connectedness (key to an Indigenous-inspired stance) that allows us to grasp the complexity of life on earth and complex socio-technical-ecological systems as a whole.
Story-mind, as any multidisciplinary team in design or product development would recognize, is the back and forth of ideas and concepts being worked out in collaboration and conversation until they coalesce into a coherent direction. Thus, it would seem, story-mind stands in parallel to dreaming-mind as a reflection of the creative activity within a team or group, particularly when feeding ideas off of not only each other but also drawing inspiration from user research on the walls and working with post-its. This, imo, needs more working out – probably through observation of teams engaged in the design process.
And finally, ancestor-mind, who stands alone, for deep engagement and connection with our own ‘alpha wave state’ is the being in the “zone” of creation that each must do alone as they work their way through all the inputs and ideas and information. From the perspective of the design process, this could happen at the beginning, after fieldwork but before a workshop, or it could happen after a workshop or team session, when the form begins to manifest in the form of sketches or other embodied and experiential modes of thinking (for example, model making, early prototypes from scrap, etc).
Ancestor-mind might be the foundation or the frame of reference within which the other minds situate themselves, since it is channeling ancestor-mind that allows for patterns and relationships to find their way to each other in the form of understanding. It brings all the work done by the other minds together. It is the magic of creativity.
Link to original blogpost and to my review of Yunkaporta’s book
