About the Course: Design as a Worlding Practice
Our class, Design as a Worlding Practice, is about the relationship between creating new worlds and imagining them. Our goal over the course of the semester is to, using a series of critical readings as our guide (as well as the critical and empathetic imaginations of our students), give ourselves permission to dream and invent new cosmologies: new societies, social orders, cultures, patterns and relations of life.
Some of the writers and artists we engage are Adrienne Maree Brown, Wanuri Kahiu, Hazel Carby, and Octavia Butler. This worlding project takes on two forms: one, inventing the idea for the world; and two, creating a visual language to represent that world (maps, icons, languages, signs and symbols, and many other iconography).
It’s impossible, of course, to think seriously about the conditions of other worlds without pausing to consider the conditions and political arrangements of the one we inhabit currently. We embrace this critical consequence of our collective worlding project because it opens up some space, and gives us a chance, to wonder how things could be different. We invite you, the visitor to our site, to wander through the speculative imaginings of our class community, and take some time to reflect on the nature of the arrangements of our social and ecological world today, and what kinds of conditions might need to be in place in order for us to have a future in it.
Ana Llorente & Michael Washington
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