Stephen Bau (Page 5)

Stephen Bau

Proposal

A proposal for the Living Systems Art + Design Collaboratory presented by Design Science Studio at the Buckminster Fuller Institute in partnership with habRitual + The Emergent Media DesignLab at the University of California, Irvine.

Community

The systems we design, as we are in the process of discovering, have unintended consequences on our biology and the global ecology when human population and activity are amplified through technology at a global scale.

Hello World!

My goal for the project would be to document the emerging community as a means to better research and understand how a model for metaphysical gravity could replace the existing model of hierarchical dominance.

Gravity

The existential crises of this moment are revealing the gravity of our situation and our moral dilemma. While we have been busy building the modern world, we forgot to ask essential questions about truth, beauty, and good.

Awakening

My attention has been tuned toward a search to discover how I might make the most of the time, energy, and resources that I have had the privilege to experience through this life. Most of my life has been spent, so the urgency is increasing to discover meaning, purpose, and belonging.

Listen

We are artists. We are designers and scientists. We are listening to the universe to hear the wisdom of billions of years of creative, collaborative, self-organizing learning community in conversation with humanity through living matter.

Inspiration

I am inspired by Universe and the iterative design process evident in the evolution of species and the development of human consciousness to perceive the wonder and beauty of the physical world and the complexity of biological and ecological systems.

Regeneration

By telling and listening to stories we allow the transition from an old story of separation, domination, exclusion, destruction, and extraction to a new story of wholeness, inter-being, integration, equality, creation, and regeneration.

Present Awareness

Present Awareness

We are journeying beyond the gates and borders of cloistered imagination to realize a different identity, defined less by national borders and more by interconnected present awareness of future possibilities, a regenerative venture into interbeing, creativity, collaboration, and community.

Impact

The smallness of individual human actions in juxtaposition with vast geological landscapes is a contrast that is at once a feeling of helplessness, but also a recognition of the power of the collective to employ technologies with little realization of the unintended consequences of our actions.

Ideology

The public relations machinery of the Dominion of Canada distracts the population from the actual pursuits of the British Crown and its corporations, founded upon the Doctrine of Discovery, to extract the resources of the colonies and its labourers to secure economic power.

Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness

We have internalized a sense of helplessness and abdicated our power and our ability to think to celebrities, billionaires, and politicians. This is our moment to take back our power and to reimagine our social architecture.

Regenerative Future

Regenerative Future

How do we define the different elements of the social system to be designed through the lens of our core values? In a holobiont, we are a host to multiple symbiotic biological communities that require the equilibrium of the relationships of the individuals for the health of the whole.

Pattern

The problem with my family of origin is the inability to confront problems. We yell at each other, and someone slams the door and drives off. Then we retreat into silence. The same toxic pattern for my entire life.

Public Relations

Public Relations

The British Crown is pathetic in its posturing, public relations, and disinformation campaign to cow its ill-informed population to serve its economic interests. There is no longer any point maintaining any military presence in the colonies. The banks are working just fine.

Time

Human time, energy, and creativity are the new currency. When our time and love are considered precious, as living, breathing human beings, then money, capital, property, corporations, and nations become worthless.

Clarity

Ancient storytelling illuminates recurring patterns in the histories of humans when thinking about the never-ending struggle between the hierarchies they create and the people who serve them.

Invitation

If you do not listen, we need not speak again. I will know that you don’t love me and you don’t care. I will not throw my pearls before swine. But, if you do, we can share our table and break bread together. I pray only that we be one, I in you and you in me.

Exile

Who am I? A stranger in a strange land, an exile. David Bohm’s story helps me to reframe my own as an exile who turns exile into an advantage.

Game

I played your game. I built your wealth. And you burned it to the ground. How can we win? How can we win?

Options

The silence of the corporate and business class maintains the status quo in a social, economic, and political system designed to kill people for profit. However, we have options to redirect human behaviours in a more positive and life-giving direction.

Conversion

How to think differently about doing good as a creative person: A guide to avoiding “creative savior complex” when working on social impact projects.

Power

As designers, we have power to give our time to what is important and necessary and required. We also have power to withhold our labour from the very systems that are built to oppress us.

Design for Resilience

Design for Resilience

My application for the Design Science Studio was submitted on the day of the application deadline on Friday, June 12, 2020. I learned of my acceptance into the Design Science Studio in early August 2020.

A time to tear down and a time to build

A time to tear down and a time to build

The design industry faces a reckoning. We either continue to build the fascist empire of corporate control or we dismantle it by refusing to offer our labour to perpetuate the existing systems.