certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

Gall's Law is a rule of thumb for systems design from Gall's book Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail. It states: .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Nabokov’s working notecards for “Lolita.”

Group Flow StateWorld Builders and Collective Consciousness

An organization of designers collectively advocating for the ethical practice of design and for the bargaining power of employees, freelancers, and educators against the commoditization of design by corporate and capitalist value extraction that is actively undermining the flourishing of humans for the sake of monopolizing social communication through advertising and marketing and the accumulation of profits for the benefit of a select few at the top of the corporate hierarchies.

The Ministry for the Future

If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

The Ministry for the Future

Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together

It is critical to understand that within systems, there is no isolation from the context, though we often view context as the invisible elephant in the room. When context is not addressed explicitly, equity issues are overlooked, and conversations about diversity in the science curriculum become only necessary for the poor, or students of color, or bilingual students. Issues of equity and context must be integrated in a wider systemic approach for the implementation of the NGSS to be deemed useful. We have to allow for boundary crossing and interdisciplinary connections into domains that make context and students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, girls, students of cultural and linguistic diversity, and students in urban, suburban, and rural areas want to engage in science and see themselves in science. We believe that a culturally responsive approach to the implementation of the NGSS will achieve this goal.

There needs to be a term for an alternative way of building worlds, the world-building-in-negative that is practiced by Kavan and Abe (and forebears and contemporaries like Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, and J. G. Ballard). Some have called this process “inferred world-building” or “world-conjuring,” but “world-blocking” may be more apt. The term works in opposing directions to get at the paradox of these types of texts. A “block” is something that obstructs, but is also a unit, like a brick, for building (i.e., “building block”). The verb “to block” means to hinder or hamper, but it also means to plot out the movements of an actor on a stage or movie set. World-blockers, then, build worlds through obstruction; they block out the moves of their world by blocking our full access to them.