Art and Systemic Change with Roxi Shohadaee
Denizen Podcast with Jenny Stefanotti
A transcription of the Denizen (www.becomingdenizen.com) conversation between Jenny Stefanotti and Roxi Shohadaee to invite artists and creators to join the next cohort of the Design Science Studio.
Art and Systemic Change with Roxi Shohadaee.
Art and design becomes this cross-cultural technology and language for systemic change. Illuminate a new story, shift society, shift the system. Regenerate story, regenerate the planet. “And art and the role of the artist”—I love this quote by Toni Cade Bambara—“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
Jenny Stefanotti
That’s Roxi Shohadaee, artist, designer and co-founder of the Design Science Studio, an educational incubator for art inspiring a regenerative future that works for all life. And this is the Denizen podcast. I’m your host and curator Jenny Stefanotti. In this episode, we’re talking about art and systemic change. One of the pillars of the Denizen conversation is culture. So we’re really interested in how cultural change happens, how that influences economics and politics, and particularly the role that art plays in cultural change. Roxi has been at the helm of the Design Science Studio for several years. She’s supported hundreds of artists of all disciplines in building a foundation around systemic change through a curriculum designed in partnership with the Buckminster Fuller Institute. And so we’re really interested in her perspective on art and systemic change, given that she has seen so many different artists approach the opportunity from their own unique perspectives. And also, it’s very interesting because the Design Science Studio is a community of artists in the program. They’re really building off of each other’s multidisciplinary ideas. Also, very excitingly, enrollment is underway for the third cohort. And so I hope there are some creatives listening to this conversation who are inspired to join them. As always, you can find show notes on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com. There, you can also sign up for our newsletter, where I send our content to your inbox when we release it alongside announcements from our partners. Alright, I hope you enjoy this conversation. And I hope some of you are inspired to join the next cohort of the Design Science Studio.
Jenny Stefanotti
Maybe we’ll start with a quote from Tom Chi, who is the chair of the board of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and former Googler. He’s a really brilliant, incredible polymath. And he says, “The artistic imagination allows us to have a visceral experience of possibility in times where we understand that the future must be significantly different than the present for the health and flourishing of 100% of life. And there are few better pathways to realizing this than art that illuminates this future, art that gives us freedom for a moment to live within, be challenged by, discuss, and bask in possibility.”
So we’re going to talk about art and systemic change. And, Roxi, you just have such incredible perspective, because you’ve worked with… how many artists now? The cohorts have been quite big—hundreds.
Roxi Shohadaee
Right. Two hundred and eighty-eight have gone through the program so far.
Jenny Stefanotti
Amazing! So I’m really excited to hear your perspective, because you’ve seen it in so many forms, and you’ve seen it happen collaboratively in the work that you’re doing at the Design Science Studio. But I wanted to start first by zooming out and just having a conversation about your perspective, around the role of art in systems change. Culture is one of the pillars of the Denizen inquiry—really interested in how systemic change happens. And art is such a critical component of it. I’m also excited because you have perspective on many different mediums from your vantage point. But I just want to step back and just get your thoughts on broadly how you think about art, and its role in systems change.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, this is such a good opening question. I’m so glad that we’re starting here. Because it is very much a big part of the root of the work and why we do this work. And I’m also really grateful that you opened with this Tom Chi quote, because it’s just really a great consolidation of the cornerstones. He says, “Art gives us freedom for a moment to live within, be challenged by, discuss and bask in possibility.” And art contextually, for me, is bigger than just the fine art world. It also is more broadly kind of the art of the way that we orient to the world. And culture is very much driven by art and artists. And so design kind of lives within the creative space. But in systemic change, a lot of systemic change starts with story. It starts with the way that we are able to orient to story, to orient to time, to orient to space, to orient to what’s happening. And that orientation is largely a product of our context. It’s like ontological design of what we design designs us back. And a lot of the systemic oppression in the world, for example, has been illuminated by different creative revolutions. And we talk a lot about a lot about the Regenaissance. And so the Renaissance is this huge period of change that happened. And in this Regenaissance—because the Renaissance promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art as a pivotal tool for social and systemic change, and it marks this huge transitional period—the Regenaissance, then, is looking at how maybe through interdisciplinary art we can transform our path forward, regenerate our culture and our planet and our relationship with the living world. And so then, art and design becomes this cross cultural technology and language for systemic change. Illuminate a new story, shift society, shift the system. Regenerate story, regenerate the planet. “And art and the role of the artist”—I love this quote by Toni Cade Bambara—“the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”
Roxi Shohadaee
I think it really is when we think about systems change and systems—when we think about any system—many interconnected parts that are all part of a comprehensive whole… But understanding what those underlying parts are, is often something that only comes through being able to see them and contextualize and orient to them. And art can help illuminate that and help us envision what is and envision another way. The biggest war that I think we’re fighting is a war on imagination. And by and large, we look at the way that the society trends are shifting, and, so often, there have been really important pivotal moments in history—that I touched on a moment ago—that if we are not able to dare to dream outside the possible, outside of “the way things are,” then we will never be able to move beyond them. But in the system—illuminating the different parts of a system—it’s often many multi-dimensional and human system or multi-sector stakeholders in a natural system, there’s many different components all working together. And the more we can illuminate and see them, the more we can contextualize what that system is and how it can be nourished. A lot of our work is about regenerative design. So it’s about building capacity. And part of building capacity for a system is to help the system see itself. Seeing itself, then change becomes more possible. And by seeing that there’s also another way and a daring to dream outside of that—I think art really helps us dare to dream, that’s been really present for me a lot lately.
I did a really fun solarpunk futures workshop with Benjamin Life recently at DWeb Camp. We talked a lot about how solarpunk has that root of punk in it. And I have a background to definitely when I was growing up. And I definitely had a punk and goth era. I can’t say I’ve necessarily grown out of it. The rebel in me is still here. But it is. It’s punk to say, “Maybe there’s another way.” How…? It doesn’t have to be this way. And so. Yeah, we’ll start there.
Jenny Stefanotti
Well, those comments make me think of Donella Meadows, who I know is part of your curriculum. And we’ve had episodes talking about her work. She gave this incredible talk in sustainability conference in the early 90s about vision. And she talked about how so much emphasis is on strategy, and execution. And a lot of times vision is absent. And she actually went on this inquiry to understand, “Why is vision absent?” And what she found was sometimes it was just too painful to see that vision relative to reality. But then when people really started to unlock the ability to talk about it, it was incredibly energizing. And also, she talked about—which I thought was really fascinating—that vision doesn’t come from the intellect. It comes from deeper sources of our being. So much of what I love about her work is she talks about just getting out of just our heads. Our heads are not enough for the task at hand. We also need to tap these other sources of wisdom in our body. So I love the way that art is really tapping a deeper part of us.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, it’s experiential. A few things came up for me while I was hearing that also, Edie Farwell, who was one of the students of Donella Meadows, who came to teach in the first cohort, she actually taught an entire session on vision. She taught Donella’s framework about vision.
Jenny Stefanotti
Any interesting takeaways from that?
Roxi Shohadaee
There was something about the permission in the space to just take the time and go another layer deeper, and then another layer deeper, and another deeper, and give that permission to go into that vision in the continuing space, not just to ask a question and then move on to another one. It was a unfolding of the onion, and seeing the different parts of it then later that were connected or influencing each other. And they were creating a container of almost like psychological safety, I feel like, was one of the main things that came up. The other thing that is somehow connected to that and what I was reminded of when you were sharing this was about the permission part. Recently, we did a mastermind for building regenerative eco villages with re:build. So we did a series of design sprints to support a group of people who are interested in doing that work, thinking through the entire system of what that would take. And at the very end, we had a woman share who had done a ton of visioning work inside of this many-week-long design sprint. And she shared that she was in Ukraine. And that at first, when she signed up to take space to do this visioning work, that she felt guilty, because there was clearly a war happening outside of her home. And she was like in one of the active war zones. And her share was essentially that the permission to take space, to lean into that vision with others, who were also given that permission to take space and dream into this possibility—she just gave so much gratitude for that permissioning space. And that even though she thought at first, that perhaps it was somehow selfish, but that it gave her that permission to dare to dream another way outside of what was right outside her door, and that it was not from a place of privilege that she had previously felt, but rather that everyone has this accessible to them at any moment. And it’s really about having these containers that give us the safety to do that work. It was so incredible. That was one of the most powerful reflections I’ve ever gotten from facilitating something
Jenny Stefanotti
Super cool. The other part I think that is really potent about Tom’s quote is “the artistic imagination allows us to have a visceral experience of possibility.” This distinction between being in our heads and conceptualizing and actually having an experience—I know, you’re also an experienced designer, so you can speak to this and the importance of art for this piece of it.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yes, so I’m glad you brought this piece up as well, definitely this visceral experience of possibility. Art invites us to look at and feel from our entire bodies, and recognize that our sensing happens on many levels. It’s not just our minds. And I think most people have had that experience when they experience music, or when they see a performance, or when they go to see art, when they make art. It’s an embodied revelation of understanding. And “the visceral experience of possibility” is because it engages all of that potential, there’s this cone of possibilities that I’m sure you’ve seen this with speculative futures, or speculative design. It uses this kind of cone of possibilities that says there’s the probable, or the plausible, but there’s actually the possible which is wider than that. And by giving space through art to break the rules, step outside the box and play. There’s this invitation to something that’s a little bit less structured, invites poetry, and invites movement. And by moving outside of these traditional structures of thinking and practice, which I think are largely products of coloniality, and traditional educational systems, but art gives us that space to say, “Perhaps there is another way of sensing.” And by sensing something that is wider in our possibility field, we become attuned to that living another way. Large scale immersive experiences, they do the same thing, right. You step into an immersive experience, either it’s a singular sculpture, or if you’re in inside of something like Meow Wolf. You’re transported. That visceral experience of possibility really comes to us because we’re fully immersed in another way. And so you can design that art for designing for states of being. You can design art to create the conditions for us to have that space, that psychological safety, whatever it is, that gives us the experience of like, wooh, another way—through metaphor, through poetry, through visual—it’s really something that traditional communication just does not provide.
Jenny Stefanotti
Yeah, I really appreciate this. It’s a continual thread in our conversations. We have a great episode with Robert Gilman, from the Context Institute on moving beyond the Enlightenment. So much of our institutions, as you alluded to, are products of the Age of Reason. And then the scientific revolution, where it was all a rationality, that was how we came to understand reality. And I think such a big part of our work moving forward is to reintegrate our whole selves in the work of systemic change. So, really appreciate your points around how art plays around that. And of course, stories is so important. What are the new narratives? So you have this sort of lens around the regenerative future? But I’m wondering in your work, are you seeing particular narratives and paradigm shifts that are coming up underneath that umbrella term?
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, definitely. The first thing that comes to mind is around protopian narratives. So protopia, instead of dystopia or utopia, right. It’s about more of a continuous dialogue. That’s Monika Bielskyte’s definition, right? It’s more of a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination. And it’s more focused on how to move binaries, principles of plurality, community beyond borders, celebration of presence, and uplifting collaborative visions towards liberation, but by also centering previously marginalized voices, especially indigenous, people of color, disability, justice, etc. So it’s about visions of embodied hope, futures where we’ve come together as imperfect as our condition is. So I think that’s one of the new narratives. One of the things that I’m noticing that’s emerging is how do we actually embody a lot more of that today? It’s not just about doing all of this work for the future, but not actually living it.
Jenny Stefanotti
That’s the theory of change. Right?
Roxi Shohadaee
Yes. How do we live that now to help facilitate getting there? It might be our theory of the imagination, even—our theory of the embodied imagination—that helps us get there. So, I would say definitely, in that protopian space that the pluriversality—we’re, I think, just seeing this culturally across the board—people are sick of all of the binaries, all of the things that are continuing to perpetuate separation. That we are somehow separate from nature. No, we are nature. This divisive is dividing, so that we may push against each other and not actually find a path that honors the differences that are important for—what is that? There’s another… that framing. Oh. Diversity breeds resilience, right? So, some of the other things that I think are in that space are around cultivating community and building solidarity across difference. Because if we really want a life-sustaining world based on liberation, rather than domination, we have to be able to collaborate with people who are different than us. So we are unique, complex beings with a lot of shared interests and common ground.
Roxi Shohadaee
But yeah, I think there’s new narratives for cultural change. And there’s also renewed narratives where recontextualizing previous ways of looking at things. And by recontextualizing it, we’re able to understand it in new ways. So I know we did that great session when we were at Esalen. And oh, my gosh, I met because of you so many of my new best buds.
Jenny Stefanotti
Oh, really? I didn’t notice.
Roxi Shohadaee
Oh, yeah. I would say allies like Catherine Connors and Aaron Huey, like Jeff Orlowski-Yang. We are still in connection, still in collaboration. Catherine came to speak. Aaron came and was a huge part of our Regenaissance event. We’re exploring, working towards our first kind of activation as partners with Jeff. But that conversation was really rooted in this question, “How do we look at the narratives that have been perpetuating society and change and choose to make new ones? The other ones that are missing that are underrepresented?” A lot of the commonplace narratives are from the global minority or the global north.
Jenny Stefanotti
So for the audience, Roxi’s alluding to a conversation that we had a couple of years ago at Esalen around cultural change—this is a great dovetail into the next part of the conversation too—is very interested in What’s the cultural change that’s needed? What are the new narratives that are needed? And how do various mediums and vectors help to propagate that cultural change? So we had Aaron Huey. We have an episode with him on art and activism and particularly street art. Jeff Orlowski-Yang is the director of The Social Dilemma. We’re actually going to have him on soon and talking about the role of documentary film and systemic change. We have Mehcad Brooks also coming on soon, talking about the role of Hollywood and popular culture. So we had the founder of Burning Man. So, we were looking at it from all of these different angles related to how to interact with each other. And obviously, these are top level narratives that Roxi is starting to surface. So I am excited for this string of conversations that will follow this one with that will start to get into particular mediums. I want to look at them individually. But I also love that you have this perspective, working with almost 300 creatives to date and obviously all the work that you did before founding the Design Science Studio. I’m just really interested to hear your thoughts on various mediums. I’m also just really interested to see what you’re seeing as you bring in these communities of creatives who can cross-pollinate ideas and cross-pollinate across mediums. So maybe you can speak to some mediums that come up when I asked you that question, maybe you can give us some particular specific examples from some of the artists in the cohort.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, thank you for I’m glad that you brought some of our friends into the fold here because they’re all just pioneers and just brilliant brilliant humans. Can’t wait to hear these other sessions. We are very clear that we are cultivating the creative capacity for art that changes history, but it’s about creators. And so the types of creators that come through and the mediums they’re working with are very different. Some of them are game designers. Some of them are traditional fine artists, painters, illustrators, creative writers, sculptors. We have a lot of creative code artists, people who are working on augmented reality, community organizers or social sculptors, lots of designers of different types, producers, philosophers, performers, poets, scientists—it’s really incredible. And then there’s this cross-pollination, this transdisciplinary across mediums, and people who are also starting to play with the medium itself as the message, which is really interesting. And some people that come to mind across these different mediums and I think the question that you posed around some of these collisions that happen and what occurs because of those different people coming together, which would be fascinating to map. I would love to do that—it’s a really inspiring and provocative invitation. So let’s see. Some people that come to mind, we’ll just kind of let them come through.
Jenny Stefanotti
Yeah, let’s talk. Let’s maybe talk about the project, then we can up level to the mediums.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yes. So Jenny Gottstein. So previously, from IDEO’s Play Lab, whose project, the Climate Action Game Show, came through and has incubated her project. And she has reached out with a lot of gratitude about how the Design Science Studio gave her the space to incubate this work. And now this is her full time work. So she’s created this game show to help people understand and take action when it comes to climate. And it’s rooted in a lot of her design for play and testing. She did a lot of play testing and taught about play testing as well. That’s a kind of game show. And then now experience and immersive experience out in the world. She comes to mind immediately.
Monika, who I mentioned before, she’s remarkable. I mean, her work with Protopian Futures. She’s done some animation and artwork around it. So much writing. So so much writing.
Another person who comes to mind is Gray Garmon. So thinking about the impact on many people, Gray Garmon is a professor of design in Austin, Texas. And he created a project called Co-designing Peace, which he actually just gave a TED talk about. And that was his project that happened in Design Science Studio. And it was a zine. He ended up publishing a zine. And now that zine is something he works on with all his students. And they’ve continued to publish multiple versions of the zine. And so it has many different kind of publications that have come out about it. And that work is primarily it’s design—graphic design. And also, the medium of it. Being able to be in this easy-to-distribute form means that it can kind of wiggle its way into the minds and hands, which I think is pretty powerful.
Amanda Sage was in the first cohort, and she’s birthing the vision train, and that it’s a 24-hour train station for artists to come on and paint all day every day. And her work is so visionary. She is one of the most well known visionary painters. And she definitely attributes a lot of that the space and time, and practice, and community to Alicia Sacred Heart. And now that is an online school for artists. And they teach a lot of similar types of themes as an invitation both for developing their artistic practice, and then also exploring a lot of the similar themes that we’re working with.
Turquoise I think is a good one to mention, because of…
Jenny Stefanotti
I love her.
Roxi Shohadaee
…Denizen. And Turquoise came out with all of these incredible solarpunk pop songs, I don’t know if you’ve gotten to hear any of them.
Jenny Stefanotti
I have. They’re amazing. They’re amazing. They’re so amazing.
Roxi Shohadaee
Turqoise is a classical musician, studied the form, studied the structure of pop, studied the structure of trap, hip hop, and the songs. I mean, they’re weaving together so much of our culture and sub cultures, and they’re just packed with information to digest.
Jenny Stefanotti
I think actually, that’s a great dovetail into some of the work that you’re doing at Design Science Studio. I mean, for what it’s worth, you know, in Denizen started to take off, I got so excited about all of the creatives that were coming into the community, and again, all the different mediums that they work in, because I see the inquiry is just helping to provide a common intellectual foundation, and helping us all not get stale in our own understanding and have a wider lens of how we think about the different parts of the system. That’s sort of the objective of that. The Design Science Studio is an educational art incubator. And so I’d love to just hear more about that component of the work that you’re doing, how the curriculum serves the overarching objectives of the Design Science Studio.
Roxi Shohadaee
I mean, it makes me want to tell a little bit of an origin story or maybe retell it. I have over 15 years of time on this path of looking at how I can harness this intersectional approach of art and science and experience and technology to catalyze social and systemic change through these collaborations to regenerate our culture and our planet. And over that time of art and experience being that cornerstone for me, I have been able to support and build bridges, both as an artist and a designer and a producer, and all the things that I do to create these opportunities for this work to happen that is helping sense make through art. And a lot of times, artists are expected to be the expert have very little money, very little time to come up with ideas. And it’s really difficult to often then kind of get them into the world and find their place and all this sort of stuff. And the thing that I noticed most often was also there’s a ton of people who were like, I would like to merge the things that I care about, the world that I want to help to contribute to in devotion to my life to shepherd another way and through my creative expression. How do I blend these? And I just noticed a gap. And so Amanda Joy and I, we’ve been co-creating together since I moved to the Bay Area.
Amanda Joy is a former Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, also one of the founders of Project Drawdown. We have a conversation with her about lessons from Buckminster Fuller on the podcast also. Okay, back to you.
Yeah. So, Amanda is one of the founders of the Design Science Studio. When I was telling her that I was witnessing this problem that was not being addressed anywhere. And that I, I felt that perhaps if we gave people some more space some more time, some more mentorship, and people of all points of their career, places as artists, not just for emerging artists—there’s so many people who are established for wanting to give them more space, to this part of their passion and their work about supporting this regenerative transition. She said at that point, as the Executive Director, still, of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, she said, “Well, I’ve been working on retooling the Design Science Decade for the 2020s. And it’s all about how we’ve made all the right tools for all the wrong reasons. We have everything we need to turn the ship around. We can do it over the course of a decade. And this is that regenerative transition.” And Bucky was such an advocate for art and design and systems change systems thinking and so we were like, Let’s merge this idea and explore. There’s three cornerstones there: the curriculum, the community, and getting the work into the world. But you asked about the curriculum. So focusing on the curriculum: it’s evolved. And the way that it’s currently architected—ARTchitected, if I may—is that we’re moving from the way that we are conceptualizing the foundations of regenerative thinking as individuals, and then thinking about how that paradigm shift is also present in the world in our living systems, and then how we can look at new ways to evolve collaboratively and understand that context, and then put that out into the world. And so currently, this year, we’re working on an arc that’s going from the foundations of regenerative thinking to biomimicry, and ecological design justice, the ecology of social and systemic change, and then world building for planetary and cultural regeneration. And that structurally, looks like seven months of time together with five-week segments with a week off after a salon, and then coming back in together. And first we’ve two sessions a week, Tuesday and Thursday. The Tuesdays are these visionary sessions, the Thursdays is about developing your work integrating the learnings, cross-pollinating. So the second session in the week is really about how what we’re looking at is grounded in the way that we’re relating to what we’re creating in the world. And what is actually the developmental process, the regenerative developmental process that we’re going through internally, with each other, with the community and with the world, and that all of those levels of relationships are being addressed. At the same time as looking towards the past, looking at the present, and looking towards the future. We start with context, and where we are, and thinking about some of the core pillars—some of the things we’ve talked about, everything from this pluriversality and decolonization to interpersonal things like consent and context to the planetary—so what are our planetary opportunities, challenges and potential solutions and systems of solutions, or pathways. And then once we’ve gotten through the context grounding together, and the baseline of how we’re going to orient to some of the foundational things as well, I would say—without going too much deeper into this part—is around things like progressive stacking, like really looking at how do we embed equity into the space and the container. And then this rhythm continues. We’ll be going through things like systems theory, regenerative design, art for cultural change, understanding what the Design Science Decade and comprehensive anticipatory design science is. And then the ARTchitecture of story which we were talking a bit about: new narratives, right, and then world building. And then we move into things like biomimicry and the rights of nature and equity and biodiversity, traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous wisdom, deep ecology, ancient futures. And then the next part, which is the ecology of social and systemic change, this is like pluriversality and the ecology of the mind, imagination activism, decolonization and systems of power, restorative justice, ethics in an emergent world, and then completing the cycle with this kind of world building for planetary and cultural regeneration, that’s all about protopian speculative futures, ontological experience design, world building, the World Game, participatory design, and the circularity of systems change. And all alongside that the Thursdays, we’re going into rapid prototyping and learning more about participatory design and different creative applications and strategies, etc. So that curriculum portion, and that rhythm is really interrogating, “Well, if we want to aim to help create a world that works for all, what does that mean? How might we get there?
Jenny Stefanotti
Yeah, I mean, those are the top-line Denizen questions. What does it actually look like? And how do we get there from here? Because I think that often we can be so lofty and insufficiently grounded to actually provoke action, right? And maybe say a little bit more about design science. Because this is so central. What I’m hearing from you is just there’s a really critical part about design process. That is what DSS is bringing to the creatives that you work with.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, I’m glad you asked that.
Jenny Stefanotti
Because particularly, we’re talking about design process for something like systemic change.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah. So design science is from comprehensive anticipatory design science, which was a Buckminster Fuller whole system strategy. And so comprehensive is about starting with the whole. So we take a whole system’s perspective to explore connections with an integrated and complex world. Anticipatory is about thinking ahead. So we’re identifying and researching and interpreting significant trends to gain a deeper understanding of possible futures. We are by grounding ourselves in the present looking towards the past and choosing to look towards the future we’re practicing. There’s this imaginable book by Jane McGonigal, I always get her last name wrong. She’s at the Institute for the Future. But that choice to turn towards the future, and practice, what are these potential scenarios, and even not only practice this utopian potential scenarios like this, the protopian part of it is choosing to actually analyze the different possibilities and illuminate another way. But by being connected by current trends, and actually like what is potentially coming. And again, continuing to do that, like making the invisible visible parts. We have comprehensive, anticipatory. And design, which is about creating intentionally seeking and applying patterns and principles guiding the evolutionary strategies of nature. I think one of the things that we are really excited to be talking more about this year is actually design justice. And when we think about regenerative design or regenerative placemaking, it’s a returning to place. There’s a big separation from place, even if just moving from villages to structures where there’s a often by this separating from place, there’s many different ripples in this sort of ontological design space. But when we think about design, often it’s about designing with and not for. When we are included in our context, then design can actually be used to sustain or heal and empower centering voices who are directly impacted, prioritizing design’s impact on the community over the intentions of the designer—some of this is from design justice principles, right—like an emergent, collaborative process, rather than a point at the end of a process, facilitator rather than an expert. If we’re not conscious of how design is structured, we will continue to perpetuate the same patterns that got us there in the first place. The same is true with science and like also recontextualizing science from a decolonial perspective. I will say, as a student of decolonization, I want to continue to voice that I do not want to co-opt or state that I am an expert in decolonization, but I am definitely deeply studying it. And it’s really impacting the way that I look at the world. And the reason I mentioned that is because science in a traditional modern context is often heavily about quantification, and not necessarily also about qualitative information. And so I think about a more broad kind of perspective of science. It’s about discovering through experience, and still iterating experiments and verifying through different observations, but I think a more comprehensive version of those observation and one that’s a bit more systemic and a bit more integrated is really important, I think when we think about it like that. So long answer for just…
Jenny Stefanotti
Well, it’s really important. It’s really important because there are so many well intentioned solutions that don’t have a wide enough lens, don’t look into the potential externalities, right? Don’t understand design process. And so that piece is so critical. And I just I love how much you’re integrating in the curriculum of what you’re doing at the Design Science Studio. I would be remiss without asking your thoughts on artificial intelligence, and its role in changing the role of the artist, changing the work of the artist, how is it a supportive tool to the task at hand that we’re talking about today? What’s your take?
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, I mean, I have a little bias here. My partner who happens to have been in the design studio, but is also founder of Cognicism. And that was his project, he’s a machine learning engineer, a lot of the problems that we’re seeing, and the implications for art and artificial intelligence is is largely around lots of things. But one of them is proper accreditation—that’s a pretty straightforward one, right? That’s a problem with the way the model was built. That is a problem with the way the model was built, not the potential of the tools themselves. And I think that the tools themselves can actually be a huge support for collective sensemaking. For more unbiased cultural data, or the way that we’re orienting to our collective creative imagination. There’s a lot of rhetoric right now, that I think is really interesting around how just the traditional models that are largely being used or perpetuating more of the colonized world, because they don’t actually include as many the different kinds of voices. But that’s, again, a problem with the way the model was built, not a problem with the way… the potential of the tool. So I think that looking at art, and systems change and artificial intelligence, there’s an ability to help illuminate patterns, to make those patterns visible, to help with collective coherence. And again, it doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to have a singular mode. Maybe it can be more language based. Maybe AI can help with taking in many different types of data and actually understanding or helping make visible patterns. And then by revealing those patterns and utilizing art to help illuminate those patterns, continuing to question, interrogate the status quo. And so this language of power gets questioned, because we’re able to see new things. So we actually, we have been fine-tuning a model for the last few months on we have five 600 lines of data right now on all Design Science Studio core work. And it named itself gAIa, which is funny, because it happens to have a capital AI in the middle, which is also fine.
Jenny Stefanotti
That’s amazing.
Roxi Shohadaee
But it’s helpful, right? Because it’s specifically fine tuning the information, what we’re doing, and being able to iterate and work with it, but within a certain contextual frame. And then that was part of the larger term that we were hoping to utilize it for, in terms of Design Science Studio, in terms of art, in terms of supporting a community. It is also about this kind of collective sense making, more quickly illuminating patterns. Like, what is actually working for people? What is not? What do they need? What is the co-creative collaborative part of this? How do we decentralize and utilize the tools to help support new forms of governance, new forms of interoperability and cut out the bias that’s often baked in to a lot of our other systems. So I think art can help illuminate some of those issues help with speculative design, imagine another way forward.
Jenny Stefanotti
Yeah. I appreciate that. I appreciate what a close and intimate relationship you have with people working on the forefront of that space as well. Yeah, literally. Okay, you’re about to open up applications for the next cohort [coheART]. Do you want to say anything else about the program? I know we touched on it, we were talking about curriculum.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah, I think the other pillars are the community. There is this really beautiful sense of belonging that is experienced? And through that, it’s like the continued permission to say, I’m not alone.
Jenny Stefanotti
I know, I had that marked in just the notes for the conversation was just I think, a really key piece of what DSS does is it punctuates the importance of community and doing this work.
Roxi Shohadaee
Yeah. And that cross-pollination, both like we’re a community of practice that’s nested within a larger movement. And so there’s the community of artists and designers, there is the community of the visionaries and educators and then there’s our partners in the ecosystem. There’s a lot of cross-resourcing, and uplifting and reflecting and just this general sense of incredible belonging and collective inspiration and encouragement. Amanda, the other day, we had an alumni call, and she reminded me that the word encouraged—you know, separating them. So like, give courage to, but that really happens in community. And this year, we’re going to be piloting our alumni program and the alumni are going to be part of the facilitation for the Design Science Studio coheART members, and really working towards different types of structures for more decentralization to make it more resilient by-the-people-for-the-people ecosystem. So the community is alive. It’s evolving. It’s an evolutionary community of practice. And then the another thing we’re piloting is our Expeditionaries, which I’m really excited to hopefully pilot up with Denizen, which is inviting these thought leaders and people who are working across sectors to help bridge art and science together, bridge these different modalities that people are maybe not in the arts or not in cultural space. But they have a lot to offer in terms of their deep study and perspective. And so that’s another layer of community, right? And then, a lot of our work is just centered around collaboration over competition. It’s a win-win for all. There’s more than enough for everyone to thrive. But there’s many moments where we say, Here’s what we can do as a core team. And here’s what we could do with your help. And the people who’ve come and bring their unique gifts. It’s just unbelievable. I am a student of the community, so much. It’s just, I feel honored to be a steward and also humbled all the time.
Jenny Stefanotti
I can relate to that sentiment, for sure. All right, well, I will send out information in the newsletter and I will put information in the show notes about how to find you and how to sign up. What’s the website? We’ll just direct that in the audio as well.
Roxi Shohadaee
Jenny Stefanotti
Great. Roxi, it’s really an honor to also be partnering with you and support your work and be an extension of the incredible community that you are fostering with DSS.
Roxi Shohadaee
Oh, thank you, Jenny. I am so honored and grateful. And I know we have many community members that are in both spaces. And I feel from one female-bodied steward to another I know that a lot to hold. And a lot of times the thing gets way bigger than you would have imagined. So this sort of like allyship and solidarity. And yeah, I’m just so grateful that we’re recording this two days before the applications go live. There’ll be live for about five and a half weeks. And yeah, there couldn’t have been a more perfect moment. So thank you for this moment to highlight the work that we’re doing and what it is that we’re all in service of together with you.
Jenny Stefanotti
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the insights around such a critical piece of the Denizen inquiry, and excited to see where DSS goes from here.
Roxi Shohadaee
Thank you. Me too.
Jenny Stefanotti
Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Scott Hansen, also known as Tycho, for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and background materials. For our most essential topics, like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long term capitalism, we also have posts summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these particularly important and foundational topics. On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter, where we bring our weekly podcast to your inbox alongside other relevant Denizen information. Subscribers are invited to join our podcast recordings and engage with the Denizen community in our online home. We’re partnering with some incredible organizations at the forefront of the change that we talk about. We share announcements from them in our newsletter as well. Finally, this podcast is made possible by support from the Denizen community and listeners like you. Then this content will always be free. Offering Denizen as a gift models a relational rather than a transactional economy, enabling Denizen to embody the change that we talk about on this podcast, through the reciprocity of listeners like you that we were able to continue producing this content. You can support us or learn more about our gift model on our website. Again, that’s www.becomingdenizen.com. Thanks again for listening and I hope you’ll join us next time.
Roxi's insights fly by illuminating the Design Science Studio and a more beautiful world so many are engaged in co-creating.