For the three-part workshop series, the participants were invited to send in up to 3 words that they encountered in their respective fields of research and wished to collectively disambiguate. These words were submitted prior to the workshop via a Google form – we wrote these down into a total of 52 words on small slips of paper and placed them in a bag. The participants were then divided into groups of 5 and asked to pick and define 3 randomly chosen words from the pool of words every three minutes. They were asked to add multiple layers of semantics to the words drawing from their own contexts and disciplines. The keywords and ideas mentioned in these brief but insightful moments about each term were jotted down in the miro boards in the group work.
After the 4 sessions of rapid discussions on the definitions, we concluded with a group discussion, where participants questioned and defended the created definitions. They were then asked to think about the mode of communication, and how their group decided to create a collaborative definition. While some groups were more focused on creating a concrete sentence appropriate for a dictionary-like style, others were more engaged in guessing what the person could have had in mind while submitting the word in the first place. Certain terms, however, stayed specific, as their meanings and relevance. For instance, the term ‘Urban Village’ had a specific implication in urban planning and design, as its meaning is unanimous to addressing locations where their original establishment were agrarian communities and have transformed over time due to urbanization, and did not additively gain significance in its definition. However, it did find adjacent and relational words such as ‘urban margins.’ Other words such as ‘walking’ for example, highlighted more subjective experiences of moving through a city. It was by and large apparent in the conversations that the introduced words and terms were relativized with one another.
