Ascolto Attivo Workshop
Marianella Sclavi and Agnese Bertello have begun a training course that aims at the acquisition of skills related to effective communication, active listening and the creative management of conflicts that will allow our young professionals to know and experience the basic principles of a different and innovative approach in the elaboration of architectural and urban planning projects.
Ascolto Attivo conducted some of the most important participatory planning projects carried out in Italy over the past few years, significantly contributing to disseminating good participatory practices in our country. Over the years they have gained experience in very diverse contexts: cohousing and social housing interventions, urban redevelopment and recovery of abandoned areas, public debates and social inclusion projects in multi-ethnic contexts.
The seven rules of the art of listening:
1 Never be in a hurry to reach conclusions. Conclusions are the most ephemeral part of your research.
2 What you are seeing depends on your point of view. In order to see your point of view, you have to change it.
3 In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that he/she is right and ask him/her to help you to understand how come so it is.
4 The emotions are basic tools of knowledge if you understand that they speak a language of analogies and relationships. They don’t tell you what you are looking at, but how you are looking at it.
5 A good listener is an explorer of possible worlds. The signals which he or she finds most important are the ones that seem both negligible and annoying, both marginal and irritating, since they refuse to mesh with previous convinctions and certainties.
6 A good listener is happy to accept the self-contradictions that come to the fore in personal thoughts and interpersonal communications. Misunderstandings are accepted as occasions for entering the most exciting field of all: the creative management of conflicts.
7 To become an expert in listening you must follow a humorous methodology. But when you have learnt how to listen, it is humor that will follow you.
The workshop was conceived in two phases: the first, that has just ended, was focused on the knowledge useful for managing social conflicts. This will then have a projectual realization in the second phase planned in the mid-cycle of SOS6, when our students will also have acquired a whole series of useful knowledge to face the great theme of participatory design.
