The Power Flower project began as an exploration of how our identities, histories, and lived experiences shape the way we interpret the world, what we prioritize, and what we unintentionally overlook. These forces do not just influence how we imagine futures; they shape how we move through everyday life, how we understand others, and how we make decisions in personal, professional, and communal contexts. While this work has been used extensively with designers, researchers, educators, and futurists, the Power Flower itself is not a discipline-specific tool—it is a method for anyone seeking to understand how identity and power shape perception, behaviour, and meaning-making.

The original Power Flower was introduced in Educating for Change (Arnold et al., 1991) by Canadian social movement educators as a visual and participatory way to help facilitators and learners “link the social identity of educators” with those of their students. It mapped identity categories as a series of petals, each divided into an inner and outer ring representing experiences of marginalization or dominance. This simple but powerful diagram made complex intersections of power both visible and discussable, helping people understand how their social positions shape their experiences in the world.

Our contemporary iteration of the Power Flower began as a collaborative academic project in 2023 within OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation program, developed by a five-person team: Morgan Bath, Muskaan Chandwani, Danny Ghantous, Beyza Ozmen, and Nadia Tabassum. During this initial phase, the team introduced the third, context-dependent ring which expanded the original binary model to reflect identities that shift between advantage and disadvantage depending on environment, culture, or situation. This foundational adaptation significantly broadened the tool’s reflective capacity.

After this initial academic project concluded, Danny Ghantous and I continued developing the Power Flower beyond the classroom. Through ongoing workshops, practitioner dialogues, and iterative refinement, we expanded the tool’s identity petals, clarified category definitions, and articulated the three levels of reflection, personal, collective, and social as distinct scales through which the tool could operate. These developments emerged from real-world facilitation and participant feedback, grounding the Power Flower in a flexible, “break-the-tool” ethos that encourages users to adapt it to their own contexts, communities, and needs.

At its core, the Power Flower offers a visual, accessible, and conversational way to explore positionality. It invites us to reflect on our biases, with the understanding that holding bias is not a flaw, it is a function of human cognition and asks us to think about:

Where might I hold power?
Where might I carry blind spots?
How might these positions shape the knowledge I produce, the relationships I form, or the decisions I make?

The Power Flower encourages this kind of reflexivity as a practice of care and accountability. It offers a shared vocabulary for navigating difference, enabling people to move beyond the myth of objectivity toward a more honest, relational understanding of how identity shapes perspective. Whether used as a private journaling tool, a group reflection exercise, or a collective mapping activity, the Power Flower becomes a catalyst for more ethical, inclusive, and self-aware practice.

What began as an academic experiment has since evolved into a multi-year, multi-format exploration. Across each iteration, the Power Flower has remained grounded in a simple premise: that if we can begin to understand how we move through the world, we can be more empathetic towards others, make more thoughtful decisions, and expand the possibilities of what we imagine and create together.