I was delighted when Grace Gilliam agreed to assist me through the Spring 2023 session of Design Thinking for Social Change at the Pacific School of Religion (PSR). As Associate Director of Community Engaged Learning at PSR I knew I could count on her to help student align their projects with community need. Grace was keen to get a grounding in design thinking to help ground her work.
As a practicing Buddhist who took her Bodhisattva Vows in December 2017 Grace was keen to bring a Buddhist perceptive to our conversations about design consciousness and “towards a theology of creative praxis”. In this presentation titled “Compassion and Creativity” Grace reaches beyond the customary design thinking of empathy into it even more radical soul cousin compassion to inform our design consciousness and practice.