Review of the 2006 Session

The Gesundheit Institute Hosts the School for Designing a Society, June 06

by Mark Enslin

The Department of the Obvious -- reread that and consider it for a moment -- was one idea among many that were elicited and nurtured at the School for Designing a Society this past June. Talking Shoes painted with messages recommending "Positive Gossip," and declaring "Not Disabled" and "Citizen of the World"; a clinic with a medicinal garden; a program showing kids how kids live in other cultures, collaborative urban garden concerts: a few more of the social inventions arising in the 2006 summer session.

For the third time this millenium, the Illinois-based School for Designing a Society brought a condensed, 4-week version of its desire and design curriculum to the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia. The quirky utopian architecture, landscape, and staff of this future site of a free, silly hospital again provided a welcoming environment for the quirky utopian activist school project. At the edge of a waterfall-fed lake we held classes, met in design groups, altered clothing, swam, danced, wrote books, designed projects in a ferment of listening, discussing, imagining, experimenting, making, observing.

Who was there? The full-time teachers were composers Susan Parenti and Mark Enslin, permaculture designer Rob Scott, and artist and alderperson Danielle Chynoweth. Guest presenters were political economist Bob Naiman, clown/doctor/activist Patch Adams, independent journalist and artist Chris Evans, education philosopher Nel Noddings, political folk duo The Prince Myshkins, movement-based theater artists Lisa Fay and Jeff Glassman, cybernetician and UIE vice-chancellor Larry Richards. The twenty participants brought questions and concerns from college, highschool, homeschool, home, jail, circuscamp, music school, medical-school-scoffing-at-traditional-medicine, from Auckland, Houston, Cornwall, Boulder, Milano, Olympia, Montreal, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Miami, Vancouver, Urbana, Northampton, Johannesburg, Pittsburgh.

For what, exactly? To have and be good company for reflection on the society we live in, and allow ourselves to imagine that it could be different, influenced in some way by your, my, our desires. To wish for, imagine, formulate, develop, work on a project, the consequences of which might help bring about desired changes. To have a crash course in design / composition / language / performance-in-everday-life / systems-look to help with such projects. There was a daily class of the whole, called the Block Party; there were smaller "design groups" in which there was focused discussion and work on desires and projects--including writing towards a multimedia periodical; out-of-date compliments and new ways of connecting statements; a play on "the clichês I narrowly avoid"; a book of new social patterns and imaginary jobs; an art/discussion table for producing artifacts of a not yet existing society. Discussions: of economic systems and health care systems; of documentaries on self-determination in Venezuela and Argentina; of the bankruptcy of the War on Drugs in Champaign County; of how stave off a US war on Iran. Every weekend we shared our work in an evening cabaret called Cafe Deluge. Plus walks in the woods, boating on the lake, food from the land, daily etudes for unknown skills, gardening, solar shower, dance, fog, fireflies, fire.

What did the neighbors think? On Flag day (and the same week Nel Noddings presented on the psychology of war) we took advantage of Gesundheit's costume closet and clowned at the Veterans Administration hospital in Beckley. Both the temporary and long-term patients expressed gratitude for the wacky and tender attention, in light and profound moments, and we accepted the invitation to return the following week. Two of the Cafe Deluge performances took place in the nearby ex-mining, ex-forestry, ex-factory town of Richwood, with cameo appearances by locals, including the poet laureate-mayor. During a break the audience filled the wish flags with messages.

What were the outcomes? The last days of the session, we had a rotating project workshop in which each participant presented a plan and listened to groups respond with distinguishing descriptions, additional elements, connections, potential blind spots, ideas for implementation. Further outcomes remain to be created--for each of us to take the loose ends offered by all and create something that will perturb the society out of its current state.

(No two School for Designing a Society sessions are alike!)