part one
What are we doing at the moment?
Working through a series of exercises, together, so that we can develop a sense of the specificity of this group, its current and potential dynamics, what we’re all good at, and what design ideas we might generate, together. Along the way, the exercises are constructed to target the acquisition of particular research skills, such as how to ask good questions that lead to new thoughts and generate discussion, as well as how to read deeply (abstract, difficult material), process that reading into your own understanding, and use this as part of generating ideas.
Going deep is not easy.
Lynch on Ideas

part two
Perhaps the way to deal with and direct change into the future, is by grasping the moment: by mastering our capacity to be in the present.
[>> discuss post comments re awareness of presence]
Lynch on iPhone

part three
The Present Moment & the ideas of Daniel Stern.
important concepts for discussion:
vitality affects & activation contours (– ‘there, there, there’ + rock-a-bye baby)
affect attunement: (p302) “imitation renders form, attunement renders feeling.”
affect misattunement: (p303)
the present moment & micro-analytic interview.
[>>post comments: signatures/hand writing]

part four
“Install yourself within change, and you will grasp at once both change itself and the successive states in which it might at any instance be immobilised.” Bergson

Installing the present in the future + designing for it.
Bio-See. film
The Shower. film. – responding to dense viscosity.

Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus, p31:

Paraphrasing the political economists, one might go further and argue that we live in a world in which the debt form is no longer referenced to any known terrestrial reserves, at least as far as the current state of science is concerned… Fuelling this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth’s actual limits, at least for a while. This is a delirium that operates between the poles of utter exhaustion and manic overproduction, premature obsolescence and the promise of surplus. In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ultimate limit, to be deflected at all costs.

Plasticity and affect; affecting and being affected.
An ethico-aesthetic know-how.

Reading and preparation for activities next week: Download