Design Science Studio

Design Science Studio

Share this post

Design Science Studio
Design Science Studio
Book Club

Book Club

The Next Chapter in the Evolution of the Design Science Studio

Stephen Bau's avatar
Stephen Bau
Jun 22, 2024
∙ Paid
3

Share this post

Design Science Studio
Design Science Studio
Book Club
1
Share

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.

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.

Thanks for reading the Design Science Studio publication! Subscribe for free to join the private chat and connect with the community on Substack.

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.

User's avatar
Join Design Science Studio’s subscriber chat
Available in the Substack app and on web

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.

The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart by Astra Taylor

Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

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.)

Thanks for reading the Design Science Studio publication! Subscribe for free to join the private chat and connect with the community on Substack.

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to Design Science Studio to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2025 Design Science Studio
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start writingGet the app
Substack is the home for great culture

Share