How do we apply Sourced Design to our lives?

By Jessica Yamamoto

What is Sourced Design, and how do we apply it to our lives?  That is a question I have been exploring since I took the Sourced Design Lab last Summer.  I have found it to be an answer that slips from my fingers when I try to grasp it, yet looking at it from a distance I can see that for me it is experienced as a practice.  A practice of continually coming back to oneself and looking in a new light at what is important, and what needs to be done, or adjusted, or changed, or appreciated.  I have found that it can be similar to a lighthouse, whose light illuminates rocks in the path.  A practice of bringing forth vitality from one’s life, and likewise from those around you- a process of nurturing the breath of life.  I am reminded of the words of Sam Quinones as he explores addiction in his book The Least of Us, and reminds us that what each person really needs is to be able to breathe, and be seen.  The principles behind Sourced Design can help us all to breathe:

“The twelve months ending September 2020 tallied the highest number of overdose deaths in the country’s history….  Then the Black Lives Matter movement gained renewed urgency from protests over what a jury later decided was the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.  …These seemed separate moments, yet I came to see all three as connected.  …Each was about who in America could breathe and who could not.  George Floyd’s final words were those, too, of the addict dying under the overpass, and the trucker expiring from COVID-19.  Each asked us to consider who was worth our attention.”  (pg. 8, The Least of Us; The True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)