Newport Lakes Stories and Contributive Practice

When we first published Designing for Hope, Chrisna and I laid out a set of 10 values that felt daring in their simplicity.

Values like respect, fellowship, and non-attachment. These values ask that we show up as designers, practitioners and participants in place.

Ten years later, these values are as essential as ever, and we continue to learn how to live with them.

What happens when the work evolves you

While revisiting Designing for Hope, Chrisna and I discovered that these values aren’t fixed. They’re lived, and they too change over time.

I don’t just apply these values to my work, I apply them to me. They shape how I think, how I collaborate, how I show up in the world.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve seen more climate disruption. More social fragmentation. More rigidity in the systems meant to serve us. And in the friction of all that, values like humility, mutuality, and responsibility have proven harder—and more necessary—than ever.

Soft values in a hard world

One of the ideas I keep coming back to is that these “soft” values aren’t soft at all. In fact, they might be the hardest part of this work.

It’s not difficult to write a policy document that mentions respect.

It’s difficult to hold respect when the timeline is tight, the community is frustrated, and the budget just got slashed.

It’s difficult to sit with difference and complexity without rushing to simplify it.

It’s difficult to listen with real curiosity when the stakes are high and your expertise is being challenged.

And yet—that’s the real work.

Chrisna once said something that stuck with me: “Listen with the intent to learn.”

 Not with the intent to respond, but just… to learn.

That shift changes everything. And it’s something I’m still learning to practice.

Co-creation is a mindset, not a method

Teaching placemaking over the years, I’ve seen this shift happen for others too.

I remember a student who said to me after a course, “You’ve just made my job easier—I don’t have to have all the answers. I just need to listen.”

It sounds simple. But in architecture, planning, sustainability—even education—there’s still so much pressure to “know;” to arrive with the solution. 

What Chrisna and I talk about, and what Designing for Hope pointed toward, is something different: stepping into a space not to perform expertise, but to invite wisdom.

Sometimes that wisdom comes from traditional knowledge.
Sometimes from kids.
Sometimes from the soil, the pigeons, the winds.
Sometimes from someone society has tried to push to the edges.

I’m still learning how to hear it.

Letting go of the need to be right

Another value that has aged with unexpected relevance for me is non-attachment:

Letting go of outcomes.
Letting go of the plan you thought you had to stick to.
Letting go of the policy that no longer serves its purpose.

In the podcast, we talk about the frustration that builds when systems refuse to adapt—whether it’s governance, education, or our own habits.

I put it this way: “How do we step out of fear and step into care?”

That’s the real heart of non-attachment, not detachment, but care without control. Action without rigidity.

It asks us to stay flexible, open, and willing to evolve.

And again—I’m still learning.

We’re seeing these values in practice

We’re beginning to see these values in practice, in tension, in our real-world experiences.

I’m realising more and more that we don’t need to be experts in these values, we need to be in a  relationship with them.

Let them shape us. Let them challenge us. Let them inform how we work: not because we’ve mastered them, but because we’re willing to stay in conversation.

Learning to live the values

Even now, I’m still learning.

Some days, it’s humility: the courage to admit I don’t have all the answers.
Other days, it’s mutuality: remembering that I’m not in this alone.
Often, it’s respect: not just for place, but for the people, stories, and systems I’m connected to.

Living these values isn’t about getting it right once. It’s about returning to them, again and again, as the world changes and as we change with it.

That’s the work.

Not racing toward completion or chasing certainty but staying curious and open.

 And learning to begin again.