Book Club
The Next Chapter in the Evolution of the Design Science Studio
DSS Book Club
Wednesday, July 3, 2024, 6pm Pacific Time
Our inaugural Design Science Studio Book Club meeting will be starting in July 2024 with Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.
Please subscribe to the Design Science Studio publication and join us in the private chat on Substack for more details about the Zoom meeting link for the online gathering.
Join the Chat
The DSS Book Club will be offering book and author suggestions, as well as other reading suggestions—articles, blog posts, communities, and projects—to engage in conversations and discussions about creating a world that works for all of life.
The Community is the Project
This is an opportunity to design our own experience. Members of the Design Science Studio came together in San Francisco for a year-end art exhibition, regen·era rising, and a retreat. At the retreat we considered the evolution of the Design Science Studio and dreamed about becoming an agency.
A Sense of Agency
To feel that sense of agency, we create our own ecosystem by imagining ourselves into being.
Some of the members of the Design Science Studio came together on Salt Spring Island on the West Coast of British Columbia to create a bioregional commons: Imaginal Futures: An Evening Of Local Visioning, Dreaming, & Possibility.
Jesse Wente, Chairperson of the Canada Council for the Arts is showing us “How Indigenous survival offers a blueprint for everyone's future.”
“The most important things to preserve are the human things: how we communicate, how we live, how we understand the world, how we dance and share with one another.”
Ways to live and survive are available to all, he told the McMaster audience.
“The future that you're imagining has already happened has already existed. What we need to do is remember that future. Remember what it was to exist before these systems that are harming us so much.”
Design Science Studio Book Club
Stacey Sude, Salem Jorden, Eve Rose, and Stephen Bau have been in conversation this year about the potential of forming a Design Science Studio Book Club. We have been so excited by the ideas that have come up in the curriculum of the Design Science Studio and in our conversations in the Zoom chat threads and WhatsApp groups and our collaboration in Miro boards.
Recognizing that we live in The Age of Insecurity and that we can solve the challenge of the enclosure of the commons by coming together in Solidarity, and we are drawing inspiration from the writing of Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.
We can be that commons, a community, growing new neural pathways by extending our minds as a collective body that becomes conscious through collective action.
So far, we have compiled a few informal lists of books that we have read and been inspired by or books and authors that have connected to the themes of our research, studies, and work in decolonization, decentralization, and deconstruction. In becoming self-organizing, self-sustaining, and self-regulating as living beings in a collective living organism, there is a process of recognition, restoration, regeneration, reciprocity, resilience, and revitalization.
July Book Club
The DSS Book Club is talking about starting with Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.
Here is the actual structure of the book
Preface: My Grandmothers’ Gifts
Part 1: Warm-up/Prep Work Warm-up: Into the Future
Prep Work 1: Who the Heck Is Modernity?
Prep Work 2: Why Read (Or Not) This Book
Prep Work 3: The Most Important Chapter
Part 2: Hospicing Modernity
Chapter 1: A Single Story of “Forward”
Chapter 2: Mapping Horizons of Possibility
Chapter 3: The House of Modernity
Chapter 4: Faster than Thought
Chapter 5: Surrendering Arrogance
Chapter 6: Getting to Zero
Chapter 7: Living and Dying Well
Chapter 8: Returning Home
Chapter 9: There Is No Away
Chapter 10: As Things Fall Apart
Eve and Salem and I discussed when it might be possible to meet and decided on Wednesday 6pm Pacific Time. Then we considered a possible structure for our gatherings.
Proposed Reading Schedule
Prep Work 1 + 2
Prep Work 3 + Chapter 1
Chapters 2, 3 + 4
Chapters 5, 6 + 7
Chapters 8, 9 + 10
DSS Book Club
Wednesday, July 3, 2024, 6pm Pacific Time
Please subscribe to the Design Science Studio publication and join us in the private chat on Substack for more details about the Zoom meeting link for the online gathering. (The meeting will be hosted in the Futurists Café.)
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