In an increasingly fragmented and fragmenting world, where conventional, accredited, institutionally sanctioned education becomes less accessible with each passing year, the NOW WAS workshop offers a selective admissions graphic design workshop through which students / participants design their own design education using a plurality of resources: local, far flung, virtual, on-line, accredited and un-accredited, self-directed, guided, and otherwise.

Instructors from a range of institutions, whose number will grow over time, maintain relationships with NOW WAS, and space permitting, allow students to attend classes at their institutions. Students may also solicit non-participating instructors for temporary admission into their courses. In addition, modules are not limited to activities officially designated “courses,” and may also include screenings, exhibitions, lecture series, workshops, or anything relevant to the students' interests.

The students of NOW WAS come together periodically with a cohort of other roving students in a workshop to discuss and critique their educational experiences through designed responses to the external curricula that the students themselves are developing.

Individual curricular 'itineraries' of varying scopes will be developed and carried out by each student, with guidance and feedback from peers and faculty within the program. Progress will be tracked and documented as this itinerary is carried out, with a digital educational 'passport,' containing documentation and critical reflection of each module of the student's self-assembled itinerary, which is 'stamped' upon completion of the module, and self-assessed by the students themselves.

The Passport

for capturing the path…

What is the one concrete thing we want to teach? That there is actually no one way. The skill of putting pieces together in a coherent, complimentary and productive way is the plural and fosters the plural. One institution is too limiting. A curriculum, by it's very nature, is not plural.

• frameworks not syllabi
• design educator as …curator …host …facilitator
• knowledge_s_

What if design education was modular? What if design education could be measured in units of value? What if design educators were co-authors with the student of their own educational experience(s)?

PLURALISM

• a condition or system in which two or more states, groups, principles, sources of authority, etc., coexist.
• a form of society in which the members of minority groups maintain their independent cultural traditions.
• plural noun: pluralisms
• a political theory or system of power-sharing among a number of political parties.
• a theory or system of devolution and autonomy for individual bodies in preference to monolithic state control.
• a theory or system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle.

BITCOIN / BLOCKCHAIN Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a digital payment system invented by an unknown programmer, or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It was released as open-source software in 2009.

The system is peer-to-peer, and transactions take place between users directly, without an intermediary.

These transactions are verified by network nodes and recorded in a public distributed ledger called a blockchain. Since the system works without a central repository or single administrator, bitcoin is called the first decentralized digital currency.

Besides being created as a reward for mining, bitcoin can be exchanged for other currencies, products, and services in legal or black markets.

implications of bitcoin

• globalism, lack of connection to nation, institution
• trans-national, trans-institutional

INTERSECTIONALITY “a critique of power that takes into consideration the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”

implications of intersectionality

• systems of oppression are interconnected
• way of talking about power

SYNTHESIS combination or composition, in particular.

• the combination of ideas to form a theory or system.
• the production of chemical compounds by reaction from simpler materials.
• (in Hegelian philosophy) the final stage in the process of dialectical reasoning, in which a new idea resolves the conflict between thesis and antithesis.
• the process of making compound and derivative words.

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https://www.are.na/ Arena is a platform for collaborative research; part bookmarking tool, part index, part social media

http://www.inventorypress.com/product/blueprint-for-counter-education Blueprint for Counter Education

ehauber-3078407792-120117-1022-82.pdf Launch a Tribe, Erin Hauber

ehauber-3088524338-120117-1021-70.pdf Build a learning path for others using a wiki template, Erin Hauber

https://degreed.com/for-me Learning platform for user generated content. Any url can become a unit of education

https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2017/hammer-projects-simon-denny/ Simon Denny Exhibition at the Hammer about Bitcoin

https://www.sfu.ca/iirp/documents/resources/101_Final.pdf Intersectionality 101

Learning map, Ramon Tejada

“I will Venmo you my tuition”, Erin Hauber