Tag: between

#5 Sketching + Podcast With Elena de Kan | June 2026

5 imagination einstein quote - fireside.rs - newsletter image

Welcome to the fifth newsletter from fireside.rs, ‘unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively.’

This past month, I had the good fortune to facilitate the first ever fireside.rs workshops (in Wellington and Christchurch).

This is a learning experience designed to expose participants to a multitude of collaboration shapes / models of gathering in an attempt to ignite their imagination to the array of possible ways to work and create and be together.

For me as a facilitator it was also an attempt to ‘sketch with humans’ and observe how others interact with the curricula, to deconstruct how to improve, what to drop, where to add etc.:

Timelapse from the first ever firesider.rs workshop

As illustrated above, the first and last shape participants experience is the conceptual fireside, where darkness is used as a design element to engender safety, trust and reflection. What happens in between is a myriad of human forms which can be adapted / adopted into future cooperative ventures (beyond the simple ‘meeting’ shape).

Deep gratitude to those who entered the space(s) with curiosity and kindness, thank you for your presence and contribution.

Here’s what a bunch of people said about it:

“Thank YOU DK!! Such a treat of an evening – all the gathering experiments you did on us all sparked so much connection and insight. My data-driven-nerdy-gathering-mindset absolutely loved how your creative flair hosted and created the spaces for everyone to experiment widely. THANK YOU!”
Antonia Milkop, Leadership Coaching & Facilitation + author of Team Spirit: the power of purposeful gatherings
“Invigorating evening DK. Thoroughly enjoyed the experience.”
Ian (Harv) Harvey, Founder at Collective Intelligence
“This was a great evening. Was so different to anything I’ve done before and really brought me out of my comfort zone. Thank you DK.”
Cory Hay, LLB/BCom Student | Social Innovator

Big thanks to host partners Goodlife Collective (Wellington event held at two/fiftyseven) plus Unchatter (Christchurch event held at Mt Pleasant Community Centre).

If you’re interested in bringing this unique offer to your community whilst it’s still a ‘no-fee’ workshop experience (just cover my expenses), please do get in touch and I look forward in collaborating with you in the future,

DK
fireside.rs Founder and Creative Gatherer

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Where we feature, celebrate and learn from those who craft spaces for humans to actively belong and be, introducing:
5 Elena de Kan - fireside.rs podcast - episode image - small

SHOW NOTES & PULL QUOTES

00.55: “That means that we are trying to be a good, I would say, companion and guide through transformations in the space of professional work and education.”

05.23: “So I think here we went through a period of time that was actually quite long where sort of the extremes were tested and where this became a topic that was raised, I think, above the usual smaller crowd and maybe design, real estate, facility, strategic team to really a topic that CEOs were talking about, the press was talking about, the newspapers were talking about.”

06.11: “And now the most disruptive thing that is happening is certainly artificial intelligence and how that might shape and change further how we are working. That then I would say has quite an impact on things like attention, well-being, some fears have for sure sparked again both individually and collectively so I see a little bit of a parallality to what happened to the pandemic and again it raises questions around well-being and with that I come to the to I think the biggest topic and that is underlying of the other trends that we see around privacy, around working from home, around the collective coming together, everything that happens on a social sphere is that element of well-being and how much that aspect that we all rely on heavily, physically, emotionally, cognitively, being well is something that we all have an interest in, companies that we work for and we ourselves.”

08.40: “And if we think about modern workspaces, often we have, especially in open offices, we see rows and rows of desks. So here there’s a lot happening, of course, in front of you, behind you, next to you. And that also means that a part of your brain is always going to scan for danger from where you can’t see it. So that in return means we don’t have a lot of brain capacity left to actually, first of all, relax. Second of all, have our default mode network working well and then be able to actually form and articulate a thought and work well. So I think sometimes it comes down to those very basic aspects of what do we need physically to be safe.”

12.13: “I would say trust by default happens when vulnerability is possible. So only when people and systems at large are able and willing to be vulnerable to share something that feels a bit risky, maybe, to themselves, only then can you create trust, right?”

13.35: “So environment can never solve for everything that happens sort of on an emotional and cognitive level, but it can nudge you into different modes. It can nudge you to write something on the wall. It can allow you to actually see other people in the office. So if you have only built walls and all you see is a hallway and separate rooms, it’s hard to be, it’s hard to connect with what’s happening on the other side…”

16.49: “Now, we will always have some tensions because there will always be some people, some brains that really need impulse, that they need color, they need light, they need change, they need texture. And there will be other brains that really need the absence of all of this. So how do you decide, right? How do you design one space? I think there’s a few things, a few general principles that can help to not overcome this tension completely, but at least to mitigate that and make a lot of space. And one of them is biophilia.“

17.51: “Everybody feels good when you have a mix of texture, when you have biophilic elements. We need less medicine, less painkillers. When we look into nature, we learn better when we are in a biophilic or natural environment. So there’s lots of fascinating data, actually, how impactful this can really be. So when you design with nature as your role model, you cannot really go wrong.”

27.04: “Also, the representative aspect of a space is, I think, not to be forgotten. If you think about law firms, if you think about doctor’s offices, if you think about professor space, their office has a function that goes beyond the individual work that they do, that has a function also in shaping that identity and representing a certain role that is taken by them in the spaces that they operate in.”

30.42: “But think of an intern maybe or somebody who’s new in a role, sitting next to someone, they might have ideas, questions, wonders that they might just be able to ask in the space, like, “Hey, what are you doing here? Can I have another look at your screen, at your table at whatever you’re doing, they might never have the idea to even ask that question when they never share the same space.”

37.16: “I hope that as humans, we get strong in understanding where we actually need to defend space from AI. Where does it actually cost us more than we can gain from it?

Podcast music attribution: All I Did Was Wait For You: The Upbeat and Positive Track for Podcast or YouTube by kjartan_abel — https://freesound.org/s/543781/ — License: Attribution 4.0

Some creativity, productivity and gathering related content for the brain / heart:

“He once said that his aim was “to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress” and even in 2013, just before his retirement, he was arguing he still had much to do: “People say, ‘Sonny, take it easy, lean back. Your place is secure. You’re the great Sonny Rollins; you’ve got it made.’ I hear that and I think, ‘Well, screw Sonny Rollins. Where I want to go is beyond Sonny Rollins. Way beyond.’””
Sonny Rollins, colossus of jazz saxophone, dies aged 95 | Sonny Rollins | The Guardian

“Globally, the number one reason people say they go to the office isn’t to do their best work — it’s because they’re required to.”
Blueprint for a Better Office – Steelcase

If you’re a music artist check out Subvert as a cooperative-owned marketplace to sell directly to listeners (the platform itself is owned by the community who use it).

Some wicked Artemis II Mobile Wallpapers – NASA.

Thank you again and please do get in touch with any ideas / comments / insights / suggestions etc. plus encourage others who care about ‘unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively’ to subscribe also:

Published

#4 Interstitials + Podcast With Topaz Adizes | May 2026

4 uncover levin quote - fireside.rs - newsletter image

Welcome to the fourth newsletter from fireside.rs, ‘unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively.’

There’s an uncomfortable tension in the world—scarcity blankets simple interactions and collaborative considerations.

And yet, the space(s) between any human encounter / interaction is always heavy with positive promise.

If ‘humanity moves at the speed of trust’ then a way to achieve this is to match or exceed the expectations of the communicated intentions between those involved. This needs a literacy-set which is wide-ranging, from creating and delivering clear, agreed approaches with forging the appropriate conditions that moves the potential into a ripening actual.

Which is why I’m ecstatic to announce the first fireside.rs evening workshop experiences:

“Through immersive activations and in an environment of kindness and curiosity, participants will experience a direct understanding of a variety of assembly forms and how they impact creative / productive outcomes.

Huge admiration and appreciation to our wonderful host partners Goodlife Collective and Unchatter:

WELLINGTON:
MAY 4th 2026

Hosted by Goodlife Collective at two/fiftyseven

REGISTER NOW

CHRISTCHURCH:
MAY 14th 2026

Hosted by Unchatter at Mt Pleasant Community Centre

REGISTER NOW

Am also in Queenstown and looking for an opportunity to collaborate on 17th, 18th or 19th May, so if you’re an organisation / company / community collective / human-focused entity and would like to host a no-fee workshop, then please get in touch via fireside.rs/contact.

Will be reporting back next month on what we’ve learned together, until then, enjoy the rest of the newsletter below!

DK
fireside.rs Founder and Creative Gatherer

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Where we feature, celebrate and learn from those who craft spaces for humans to actively belong and be, introducing:

Topaz Adizes, Founder, The Skin Deep:

4 Topaz Adizes - fireside.rs podcast - episode image - small

SHOW NOTES & PULL QUOTES

1.37: “And the idea there is that by seeing both the speaker and the listener, you’re getting a deeper sense of what connects them. You’re getting a better sense of the threads that bind them. You’re getting a better sense of their relationship because you’re seeing both how they speak and listen to one another, how they interact with another.”

4.46: “…the long-term purpose is that we’re creating an archive of human conversation that illuminates the experience of what it means to be alive right now at this point in history. We’ve been going for 13 years and we’ll continue going. And in two or three generations, there’ll be an archive where they can go back and say, I wonder what it was like in the year of the great pandemic. What was happening in Black Lives Matter and how does that affect relationships while people are in quarantine and whatnot?”

13.18: “So we do a lot of things to implicitly, explicitly hand over the space to them, such as having them count from one to ten, from a whisper to a yell. At the end, I say it’s for sound, but also if you yell in a room, you start to own it. So even before recording, they yell and then they’re starting to own it.”

18.09: “…the great line I have that I like to use is, you know, you don’t sleep in the kitchen and you don’t cook in the bedroom. The space already tells you what is the action that’s expected and allowed and permissible and invited. How often do we do that in our conversations right so if we do that in our conversations…”

18.37: “…that’s part of the thing that people miss and what they also get confused with is the difference between safety and discomfort, just because you’re uncomfortable does not mean you’re not safe, matter of fact you want to be safe but you want to be uncomfortable because uncomfortable is where you don’t know, where you’re exploring, where you’re growing, where you’re stretching.”

21.03: “So there’s both the construction of the question, which is important. There’s a lot of things there. And then you get exponential or compounded synergies if you do the sequence in a certain way.”

23.31: “However, the nuanced ones, the ones that will deepen your relationship, that will give you a more fulfilling one, an even more resilient one, are the ones that have an intention, have a starting point, and not an outcome.”

29.38: “Even though I know the architecture of conversations and how to create the space and how to construct good questions, I’m even hesitant of like, oh, my God, I don’t even want to have these conversations because they’re uncomfortable. But I know, like emotionally, I don’t want to have them, but cognitively, I’m aware like, well, on the flip side of that discomfort is a lot of growth.”

31.54: “I think being seen is a fundamental desire that every one of us has, and a form of being seen is being heard and really fully listened to.”

32.12: “And there’s different forms of vulnerability which we can get into because it’s not just the one who’s sharing. It’s also we often overlook the vulnerability of the one who’s listening.”

40.29: “…because I feel that feeling is the closest thing I feel to humanity. Humanity is not within us. It’s what’s between us. And when I see an and conversation what I’m seeing is, I’m seeing the humanity between people illuminated.”

45.29: “…there’s an opportunity anytime you feel constrained because you’re feeling scared or fearful and uncomfortable breathe and lean into it because on the flip side of that is growth I know that for sure.”

Podcast music attribution: All I Did Was Wait For You: The Upbeat and Positive Track for Podcast or YouTube by kjartan_abel — https://freesound.org/s/543781/ — License: Attribution 4.0

Some creativity, productivity and gathering related content for the brain / heart:

“Beauty tells people: we believe this moment matters.
It shows that someone thought about how you would feel.
It tells staff that the small things are part of the big story.
It tells students: this place has standards, care and imagination.
Don’t tell me Creativity matters as a word on your values poster, and then not give a thought to the beauty of the everyday.”
Don’t just tell me you value creativity…

“What are people doing instead of shooting each other in this ravaged world? Many are teaming up to take down the robot monsters, which range from flying drones to spherical balls that blast fire. Others try to sneak quietly around them to scavenge rare resources. Grøndal says players also hold spontaneous rave parties, where people play music through their microphones. But often, players are just talking. A YouTube video called The Humans of Arc Raiders, inspired by the photographer who interviews strangers in New York City, includes conversations with randomly encountered players. They talk about family struggles, work lives, depression, autism and, in one case, a lung collapse. In one conversation, a heavily armed player in green armour named Poopy candidly asks another raider: “What’s it like having kids, dude?”
‘Seeking connection’: the video game where players stopped shooting and started talking | Games | The Guardian

Write Your Name in Landsat via NASA Science.

Simply, WOW, check out Every train, a note to listen / watch.

Thank you again and please do get in touch with any ideas / comments / insights / suggestions etc. plus encourage others who care about ‘unlocking creative productivity by gathering humans effectively’ to subscribe also:

Published