School for Designing a Society

Upcoming Sessions

Composing Community
June 23-July 16, 2010 at the Gesundheit! Institute (Hillsboro, West Virginia)

When is community? What makes an intentional community intended? What would your ideal community look like? Composing Community, a three-week design intensive and living lab at the Gesundheit! Institute, is an opportunity to explore alternative models of cooperation, leadership, decision making, labor distribution, and organizational structure. Gesundheit's philosophy will be a starting point; in the course of eating, working, studying together, participants will reflect upon their experiences and collaboratively design a new community model. In the second half, we will try out our designs as supporting hosts for the 10-day "Composing Music, Composing Activism" session.

$500 covers room, board, and tuition for this unique tangle of education and volunteering. Students receive a tuition waiver to Music and Activism classes. Within their community design, students face the challenge of determining a desired way of participating in Music and Activism classes that does not conflict with completing work tasks.

For more information and to apply, send an email to tim(at)Patchadams(dot)org.

Composing Music, Composing Activism
July 5-14, 2010 at the Gesundheit! Institute (Hillsboro, West Virginia)

Question: What could music and activism have in common? Answer: Composition.

1. Composing Activism: We want to change the world, but are faced with the same tired out language and tactics. How can activism be an invention? A composition? Can art socially intervene? We will learn compositional concepts, and design activist interventions for the issues that participants bring to the workshop.

2. Composing Music: What is to become music now, that has not yet been? Which traces in sound, of which thoughts, of what contemporary relevance, toward what desired consequence? When, where, how, & with whom? We will learn compositional concepts to help formulate and try out answers to these questions, and hear how they interact with issues that participants bring to the workshop.

$1000 covers room, board, and tuition. Enrollment is limited to twenty students. For more information and to apply, email admissions(at)designingasociety(dot)net.

Autumn School for Designing a Society
August 30 - November 20, 2010 in Urbana, IL

Classes in language, cybernetics, composition, indymedia, performance, with various guest presentations.

$3000 covers tuition for new students. For more information and to apply, email admissions(at)designingasociety(dot)net.

School, Prison, Clinic, Society: Your Desires and Designs
Residency at The Evergreen State College
March 29 - June 11, 2010 in Olympia, Washington

The program will begin with an introduction to notions and practices that have proven indispensable for the composition/design approach to social change taken in the School for Designing a Society, in which the instructors have taught as an ensemble for more than ten years. For the purposes of this approach, "society" will be taken as susceptible to, and in need of, deliberate, fundamental change—although agreement as to which are the needed changes will not be assumed. Following the introduction, there will be three 2-week concentrations on different subject areas of society: education, justice, and health care. These 2-week concentrations will be followed by gathering and connecting of insights and productions from the three concentrations in a final composition project. In conjunction with the third concentration on health care, students will participate in an international conference on health care system design and imagination.

In many areas of life, there are acute problems that at first glance seem simple, but under a closer look show themselves to be of social complexity. Such problems may then appear slippery, circular, unsolvable—and even the words available to describe these problems become problematic. What to do? In the attempt to grapple with such problems, two related, overlapping, underused approaches are called for, one only slightly better known than the other: design and composition. Both approaches hinge on desire. Desire: an image of not-yet-existing reality, deliberately formed as a critical reflection on images of currently existing reality. From the initial attempt to elicit, imagine, and formulate desires, the composition and design approaches embark on a process of creation -- of works of art, music, theater, or perhaps an electronic circuit board, a wearable installation, a new form of protest, an architecture of a new way of living. The emphasis in composition is to bring about that which without you would not happen—building on premises stipulated by you, in a medium chosen by you, in terms defined by you, according to criteria appointed by you. The emphasis in design is to engage in dialogue with a situation. Along the way, the problem's problematic language is taken to task, interrogated, altered and refreshed, thus casting a new light on the initial problem.

This course is being offered to students at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington under the Daniel J. Evans program.

Questions? Contact us.

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