School for Designing a Society

Upcoming Sessions in Urbana, Illinois

Autumn School for Designing a Society
August 30 - November 20, 2010

This 12-week course provides a thorough introduction to concepts fundamental designing a society. Classes in language, systems thinking and design, experimental composition, indymedia, performance, and political economy will seed group projects.

$3000 covers tuition for new students. For more information and to apply, fill out the contact form. Early Bird Discount: $2600 until May 15.

Spring Semester (Feminist Composition School)
February 15 - May 1, 2011

More info soon!

Upcoming Sessions with the Gesundheit Institute

Thinking Outside the Box: Re-Design our Health Care System
May 27 - 30, 2010 at the Olympia Community Center (Olympia, Washington)

The aim of this working conference is to seed designs of a variety of local projects that move the health care system away from the corporate-business context into models of compassion and service. We'll show current innovations in health care system design that can be replicated back home, as well as teach concepts and ideas that enable you to build your own.

Break-out sessions will invite participants to create songs, stories, poems, theater to spark imaginative community action toward health care system change. Our criteria throughout: to combine innovative thinking with an insistence on health care justice for all. All stakeholders in health care systems are welcome: doctors and nurses, med and nursing students, health care support staff, patients and families, dreamers and organizers.

For more information and to register, go here.

Composing Community
June 23-July 16, 2010 at the Gesundheit! Institute (Hillsboro, West Virginia)

When is community? What makes an intentional community intended? What would your ideal community look, sound, taste, smell, feel like?

Composing Community, a three-week design intensive and living lab at the Gesundheit! Institute, is an opportunity to explore alternative models of cooperation, leadership, decision making, labor distribution, and organizational structure. Gesundheit's philosophy will be a starting point; in the course of eating, working, studying together, participants will reflect upon their experiences and collaboratively design a new community model. In the second half, we will try out our designs as supporting hosts for the 10-day "Composing Music, Composing Activism" session.

$500 covers room, board, and tuition for this unique interweaving of education and volunteering. Students receive a tuition waiver to Music and Activism classes. Within their community design, students face the challenge of determining a desired way of participating in Music and Activism classes that does not conflict with completing work tasks.

For more information and to apply, send an email to tim(at)Patchadams(dot)org.

Composing Music, Composing Activism
July 5-14, 2010 at the Gesundheit! Institute (Hillsboro, West Virginia)

Question: What could music and activism have in common? Answer: Composition.

1. Composing Activism: We want to change the world, but are faced with the same tired out language and tactics. How can activism be an invention? A composition? Can art socially intervene? We will learn compositional concepts, and design activist interventions for the issues that participants bring to the workshop.

2. Composing Music: What is to become music now, that has not yet been? Which traces in sound, of which thoughts, of what contemporary relevance, toward what desired consequence? When, where, how, & with whom? We will learn compositional concepts to help formulate and try out answers to these questions, and hear how they interact with issues that participants bring to the workshop.

$1000 covers room, board, and tuition. Enrollment is limited to twenty students. For more information and to apply, fill out the contact form. Early Bird Discount: $800 until April 15.

Social Change: Desire, Design and Composition
Residency at The Evergreen State College
March 29 - June 11, 2010 in Olympia, Washington

The School for Designing a Society's full-time teachers have been invited as scholars-in-residence to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington under the Daniel J. Evans program. See the Evergreen course description for details.

Questions? Contact us.

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