A Design Science Revolution
Integrating economics and art, quanta and qualia, physics and metaphysics
I am finding myself uniquely positioned to connect people to a movement that is happening within the social, economic, political, technological, and ecological contexts that has the potential to become a social revolution, a design science revolution, as Buckminster Fuller described it. I introduced myself today to a new cohort of artists and creatives in the WeMakeStuff Social platform.
“A design scientist, like many research scientists, does not wait to be hired by a patron or employer to do their bidding but rather takes the personal initiative to solve the problems that his/her experience has taught are important to solve for the betterment of humanity. Unlike “pure” science which sometimes claims to be value-free, design science is value-laden. Design is the development of structuring of environments in preferred directions. Our preferred directions, ‘where we want to go,’ are determined by our values…”
Medard Gabel, Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone
I am here because I am trying to make a transition from designer to artist, essentially starting over and reinventing myself, yet again. I have always been trying to figure out how faith and art merge as life and love, where physics is one with metaphysics and the imaginative possibilities of pataphysics. I am wondering how to be part of a qualis social revolution, transforming the inner world as well as our social architecture.
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I have been excluded from participation in my family of origin, regarded as an apostate, a heretic, a blasphemer, demon-possessed, a sinner, and an unbeliever who is destined for an eternity in hell for questioning our involvement as a family in promoting the culture of American evangelicalism, as owners of a Christian bookstore in Tsawwassen during the 1970s and 1980s and supporters of televangelists, Jim Bakker, Pat Robertson, Benny Hinn and other narcissists and charlatans. (The prefix “tele” means “distance” in Greek. Televangelists preach messages of distance, separation, and disconnection, which could not be further from the gospel, the good news of intimacy, unity, and connection within one new humanity described in Ephesians 2.)
I have been excluded from participation in the corporate creative industries and at the same time I have chosen to leave them behind.
I have been removed from executive leadership in a national design association for prioritizing Indigenous rights over Canadian copyright law.
I am horrified by an economic system designed to profit from theft, murder, abuse, extraction, production, exploitation, genocide, and ecocide.
During the pandemic, I joined communities who have been in the process of decolonization, liberation, and co-creation with nature rather than domination over nature, an organism of syntropy rather than a machine to accelerate entropy.
I am a member of the Design Science Studio (DSS) and the core team, the DSS Synarchy, where we are gathering a sort of Neo Bauhaus, a builders collective, an Agora, an emerging collective consciousness to make a world that works for all life, inspired by the geometry, poetry, and philosophy of Buckminster Fuller.
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I question the anthropocentrism of corporate design culture that prioritizes human-centred design as desirable (human), feasible (technology), and viable (business), leaving out nature and other living beings as “stakeholders” in an ecocidal industrial economic system.
I gave up my identity as an artist to become a designer and have worked as a professional designer since 1988.
Now that I recognize the role of a designer to be the invisibility of the artist in service of building the brand and identity of a corporation in order to create profit for the few at the expense of the many, I refuse to call people users and I refuse to offer my labour (Ruined by Design by Mike Montiero) to a system of organized abandonment, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it.
I am asking myself the question about what meaning, value, and significance art has in late stage capitalism, about a transition to a sharing economy, a sacred economics, in which we ask what Stephen asked the Sanhedrin before he was stoned to death, “What kind of house (oikos) will you build for God?” Oikos, Greek for household, is the root word for economy. I am a member of an affinity investment club connected to Don Golden’s impact investment company, Just Capital Quotient.
How do we monetize love? How dare we turn the Father’s house into a market?
I am the medium. I am the interface. My contribution to as a member of the Design Science Studio in the Living Systems Collaboratory was to design an interface for navigating metaphysical gravity.
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I am looking for the city whose architect and builder is God.
I am inspired by the Bauhaus, but a social utopian idea was co-opted by a capitalist military-industrial complex and exploited as a means to colonize the world as a global market for industrial production.
I question the impact of unlimited exponential growth that exceeds the resource capacity of the planet.
In the midst of multiple systemic crises, the new art is the old art of the Bauhaus: a new social architecture that can resist the fascist architecture that prioritizes and optimizes for social, economic, political, and technological power.
Jesus is political. Art is political. What is the impact we can have with the art of story—telling a different, restorative, regenerative, and transformative story?
By focusing on the apocrypha—that which has been left out of the canon of the religious, economic, and political traditions and orthodoxies—how can we transcend a religion co-opted by empire to build a toxic social architecture?
What would it mean to be authors of our own reality and designers of our own experience by recognizing a greater authority that is both personal and universal, internal and cosmic?
If we recognize the qualia of lived experience as integral to the quanta that we use as the measure for time and energy and matter, that there is also the inner sense of love experienced by the senses (perception), mind (cognition), heart (emotion), and body (action), would that change everything in regard to our sense of meaning, value, and significance as living beings who are of immeasurable worth?
What is the church (ekklesia) but the deliberative body of a democratic republic, inspired by the democratic experiment of Athens, having little relation to the creeds of an authoritarian empire based on the hostile take-over by a military-industrial power over an oppressed spiritual community?
If we understand the Gaia hypothesis in both physical, scientific terms and in metaphysical, poetic understanding, what is our relationship to Earth as a living being, embodying the wisdom of (according to our best scientific understanding) billions of years?
If the most important experience in life is to love God with one’s whole heart, soul, mind, and strength and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, how does that impact the practice and value of art? What is the art of living and loving in relationship with the more-than-human neighbours with whom our lives are interconnected and interdependent, including Earth as a living being? How might that connect to the ancient concept of living stones (cellular biology) or the unity of the body of the church (the Gaia hypothesis) or the temple and dwelling of the Creator (Earth as sacred architecture)?
How do the heavens declare the glory of God? In a time when our sense of the vastness and mystery of the cosmos is heightened by our ability to see images of light from the first billion years of the formation of the universe with the James Webb Telescope?
How is love expressed in figurative language, in symbolic imagery, as physical metaphors that point to a greater metaphysical or spiritually transcendent reality? The image of God as male and female, the breath of life, the tree of life, the seed of the woman, wisdom personified as a woman (Proverbs 8), the still, small voice, creation personified as a woman in childbirth (Romans 8), the light of the world, the water of life, the salt of the earth, a body, a temple, a marriage, a union of heaven and earth.
Qualis
A social revolution, shifting focus from the quantum and qualitative to qualia and the subjective, conscious experience of being alive in a living universe.
Qualis Social Revolution
A Shift from Quantum Thinking to Holistic and Qualitative Experience
What would happen if we began with the whole, with the full experience of being alive in a living universe where the quantum points to something beyond the physical and the quantitative? What if the physical is a metaphor for the metaphysical? What if the essence of reality is beyond what we can measure, quantify, and know? We know that we don’t know so much of what we don’t know. The attempt to know the infinite overwhelms the mind and we miss the opportunity to really live, because of that sense of overwhelm.
I feel like we need a shift away from centring the mind and the quantitative. What if the regenerative movement was a focus on what cannot be quantified, on life as the ground of being and the physical quanta merely evidence of that greater reality? That would be a paradigm shift in meaning, value, and significance.
What if qualia are the inner essence and the quanta are the outer expression of reality? A shift in perspective and perception might change everything. We might call that change a qualis social revolution.
DSS Synarchy!!! Is that a term or a thing?? FOMO me!!!