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Now it's time again, and you can see that this is a cyclic thing and we go through a process and we reflect on it,
to give ourselves a time and a place to reflect on it again. To do a self assessment.
To make sure that you're being objective. And, think about what's new.
What new understandings have you come up with? What new possibilities have you come up with? Not solutions, even yet
not solutions. Even though things are bubbling away, write them down, put them over there, and then keep going with the process.
What's new?
OK, and we might begin to think of things like ethical implications. For example with our chair I might look at something like
imagine you were designing a chair for a disabled person. Now on the surface of it, that might seem like a good thing to do.
However, it's important to maybe think about how undertaking this task might in fact, highlight that person's disability.
It seems like a contradiction, but in actual fact, they're the sorts of things you need to think of.
So, would we widen the parameters if we were designing a chair so that it would function for a whole range of people?
That might include people that have disabilities or however we want to term it so in actual fact we don't highlight a person's disability
but we cover a wide range of parameters. I mean, could we say that an elderly person who has difficulty in movement
is disabled? Would a short person be disabled? Definitely.
Is a child disabled in that sense, in terms of using that chair? So we need to think about, with the example of the chair
designing it in such a way that it covers a broad a range of aspects as possible, so that it doesn't highlight or disadvantage anyone
or point out disabilities or things like that. For instance, overweight, seriously overweight people
on public transport, is the seating coping with them?
Or on an aeroplane? On an aeroplane, yeah. Big issue.
Big tall people ... You've got to pay for two seats. Well, people who've got really long legs
on an aeroplane. But, it also raises a whole lot of other aspects, you know, seating for children.
Generally speaking is low so that they can sit on it, but that means that they're not in the range of normal people.
Seating for handicapped people, for instance in a wheelchair, which raises a whole number of issues,
not only about ethics, but the fact that they live their lives in that chair.
That that becomes part of them. Almost like somebody with a wooden leg or somebody with eyeglasses, or we all live part of our lives with clothes.
So the chair becomes like that for them and so we get a different way of looking at it, not only is it a handicap to them,
for instance, as we said with children, they're always at a different height to everybody else, but also
it offers them a positive aspect as well in that they have mobility and they are able to
assume some of the functions of people who've got normally working legs and so-on.
There's also the Gestalt psychology idea, or the Gestalt therapy idea,
of putting yourself in another person's role. So, typically there's a little red chair.
It's not communist, but it's a chair that is specifically for adopting another role.
So imagine you put yourself in that you use the idea of the chair or whatever task you're doing, to put yourself in another role.
What does it feel like to be ... whatever your issue is that you're discussing, whatever task it is that you're trying to expand on.
So we already have some experience of this, what do you already know about it?
How do you expand on that possibility? Typically in Gestalt therapy the little red chair is used for adopting another role.
So if you look at your lunch box you say, 'Look at this rotten lunch my mum's given me this morning.' Then the teacher might say to you,
'Well go and sit in the little red chair and imagine what it's like to be your mum making your lunch everyday'. How can you take your task and put yourself in another position in it?