What kind of world do we want to live in?

I think of the Bauhaus as the futurists who turned intention into pedagogy, practices, designs, artifacts, and architecture. They turned intention into the modern world. Now that we live in a postmodern world, we are thinking through the errors and mistakes in our designs and iterating on those designs with incremental changes to the way we live modern life. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.

A letter to the future in the form of a manifesto:

“Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”

— Walter Gropius

Builders Collective

So, they put together a team of individuals who could collectively imagine the possibilities of building the kind of world where they could all live together in peace. They made a simple declaration:

We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

In our second meeting as a team, I introduced the idea of inviting people into a story where they were protagonists in an adventure. I proposed that this could be a way to include everyone in the process of imagining the kind of world that we might want to live in.

Mythopoeia

This is a writing prompt or design brief for building a world that we want to live in. You can find the original article on Medium.

"When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power — upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes... we may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

A review of Duanne & Raby's Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, by Cameron Tonkinwise.

How does this statement apply to the pluralistic, decentralized, anarchistic world(s) of solarpunk?

This is what Transition design needs, and what solarpunk is currently doing in an undisciplined way—but is ultimately very much capable of.

!!!! Not just world-building, but sub-creation—theological!

This is Coleridge's power, per Gareth Knight—the power of mythopoeia.