Social Change: Desire, Design and Composition

This program will be taught primarily by the visiting Evans Scholars for 2009-10: Susan Parenti (music composition), Mark Enslin (music composition), Danielle Chynoweth (politics, art) and Rob Scott (sustainable agriculture), who have taught as an ensemble for more than ten years in the School for Designing a Society, in Urbana, IL ( http://www.designingasociety.net/ )

Some acute problems at first glance seem simple to understand, but on closer look reveal their social complexity. Such problems may then appear slippery, circular, unsolvable—and even the words available to describe these problems become problematic.

What to do? In the attempt to grapple with such problems, two related, overlapping approaches are called for: design and composition. In this program we will explore design and composition as approaches to slippery problems. Both approaches hinge on desire.

Desire: an image of not-yet-existing reality, deliberately formed as a critical reflection on images of currently existing reality.

From the initial attempt to elicit, imagine, and formulate desires, both composition and design are processes of creation -- of works of art, music, theater, or perhaps an electronic circuit board, a wearable installation, a new form of protest, an architecture of a new way of living. The emphasis in composition is to bring about that which without you would not happen--building on premises stipulated by you, in a medium chosen by you, in terms defined by you, according to criteria appointed by you. The emphasis in design is to engage in dialogue with a situation. Along the way, the problem's problematic language is taken to task, interrogated, altered and refreshed, thus casting a new light on the problem.

This program will begin with an introduction to the composition/design approach to social change. For the purposes of this approach, "society" will be taken as susceptible to, and in need of, deliberate, fundamental change—although agreement as to which changes are needed will not be assumed. The middle part of the quarter will be spent concentrating on different areas of society: media, justice, arts, agriculture, education, and health care. Students will participate in an international conference on health care system design and imagination. These concentrations will be accompanied by gathering and connecting insights and productions that arise into a several composition/design projects.

Texts for the program will included selected readings from When Music Resists Meaning by Herbert Brun, A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, "Re-designing the Character of the Care-Actor" and "Re-designing the US Health Care System" by Susan Parenti, The Permaculture Activist journal, Rich Media Poor Democracy by Robert McChesney, Civil Wars by June Jordan, among others. Program themes will be explored through work in small design groups, seminars, workshops, lectures, as well as large group discussions. Students will be expected to complete and present several small low-risk compositions in various media.