Workshops are ways to try things out, without necessarily committing to a long-term project.
By gathering together for events, we will begin the discussion that lead to the possibility of working together to learn how design can be a transformative process for imagining possibilities, testing concepts, and building solutions.
Workshops can be a way to engage everybody in creativity and collaboration that helps create buy-in to new ideas and change. Design is a proven methodology for applying the scientific method to the process of creativity.
Just over 100 years ago, the Bauhaus designed the workshops of the modern age.
After a century of building our modern societies, we have discovered several fundamental flaws in these initial prototypes of social organization.
For example, the nation states that dominate North America are grappling with the legacy of imperial colonization upon which they have been founded. Land appropriation, resource extraction, and the marginalization of Indigenous Peoples that is part of the ongoing genocide are the foundation of the economic, legal, and governance systems.
The same logic that built these nations are being extended into the logic of market economies that are built for the extraction of value from human resources. These systems are socially, economically, politically, and ecologically unsustainable.
Through co-creation workshops, it might be possible to explore how we imagine, design, and built the future together by reimagining our social architecture.
Design is evolving, and people have an opportunity to be part of the evolution that is happening to extend what we have learned about transforming our physical environment to the transformation of our metaphysical world. That which is beyond the physical includes the economic, the social, the political, and the ecological.
How can we use the proven processes of design to creatively and collaboratively take back power from hierarchies to create change through networks of innovation. If we are going to fundamentally transform our societies for the better, it is going to take all of us working together to replace obsolete models of social organization and governance into a ecologically interdependent, sustainable, and resilient society.