The School for Designing a Society, in its 16th year, is a project of teachers, performers, poets, and activists. It is an ongoing experiment in making temporary living environments where the question "What would I consider a desirable society?" is given serious playful thinking discussion, and taken as input to creative projects.
Rather than orienting participants to find a comfy spot in the current social system, the School offers time, ambiance, tools, and company in which people can imagine and design a system they would prefer.
Most of the organizing and the activity of the School takes place in Urbana, Illinois in the United States. The project arose from the political awareness of the need for creative tampering with communication formats in order to trigger social change.
At the school, composition ideas are taken beyond the traditional boundary of the arts and applied to social structures.
There are no more than a handful of schools, in any country, based on the desire for social change; this school proposes in addition, that social change be based on desires. In no other school are the desires of its students given such a high priority.
Participants who don't want the current society are invited to formulate their critique of the current society in terms of what they do want. These desire statements are then used to formulate proposals that become a cause for collaboration.
This school invites looking for links between composition and designing society, where composition is taken to mean broadly the putting together things that have never before been put together in such a way that together they do something they wouldn't do apart.
According to this view of composing one might learn from writing a piece of music a new way of organizing a kitchen, or see analogies between new ways of painting a canvas and new ways of thinking about friendship.
Structure influences content. This school tries out new learning formats and watches how these new formats affect what is discussed.
This school is not an academic institution; is not anti-intellectual; is not interested in doing what once worked and does not now work; is not interested in doing what was then now yet is now then; is not interested in basing arguments on what comes naturally.
Further information, upcoming sessions, and admissions can be found at this website: http://www.designingasociety.org/
