Drawing on Derrida’s premise of deconstruction and examples from fashion that include designers such as Comme des Garcons, Martin Margiela and Dries Van Noten, deconstruction approaches can be viewed as not anti establishment but marked by innovation in the process of construction that simultaneously looks both forward and backward.
So why speak of fashion when reflecting on the recent CX conference?
It struck me, in a similar approach to the aforementioned fashion, that this was a deconstructed conference. That is when all the conventional constructs and conventions of a conference were deconstructed what remained was a delight in the individual components and in the process of reconstruction that looked on one hand to heritage through conversations in coffee shops and on the other towards innovation in exchanges through for example, the paper presentations.
The conference created a platform for knowledge exchange that involved the careful consideration of conversation and conviviality as fora for the creation and sharing of exchanges. The quality of the interactions through a series of interventions created an atmosphere and an environment whereby the body and the voice as an instrument taught us to observe, to pay attention, not to jump to analysis and trust in a process that parallels deconstructive approaches. In this way, a more intense relationship to individual encounters, the creative experience and, of course, planning ‘research outfits’ emerged!
