Sunday, September 30, 2007

Make false statements

Some descriptions of this design exercise:

Make statements which are false in your current society and true in the society you desire.

Make statements which, in order to become true, would require that society changes.

Make false statements that, themselves, want to be true.

Make statements that complete the sentence, "While it is not the case, I desire that..."

An oft-used provocation:
Go further than declaring what you don't want: "There is no war." has the same acoustic gesture as its opposite. Add something new! "Peace is a need, met by conflict"...

Another:
Ask of one false statement, "What additional statement could be made, for which this statement would arise as a consequence?" In this way, link your utopian future to a utopian present.

This is all happening in a big way in the design groups at SDAS. I have collected some desirable false statements over two years, but have not taken the next steps in making them true, which is where the real excitement lies. I have not (yet) coordinated my desires for society into a project with other people, other than the overall School for Designing a Society project. (But of course the School project does not equal the designing society project; the school has trouble directly designing a society because it remains so busy teaching and learning and maintaining, retarding the decay of "how to do it.")

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