We are at a branch in our evolutionary path across the cosmos. The question is, what future do we want to design?

Traditionally, art schools and corporations were perceived as disparate entities, with one focusing on aesthetics and abstract thought, while the other emphasized profit and pragmatism. This was the era of separation, where art and business operated on parallel tracks, seldom converging. Companies sought efficiency, often at the cost of creativity. Art and design were isolated, seen through the narrow lens of galleries, museums and service.

The heated distance between institutions of art and design education and its customers grows — engulfing itself in hollow inclusion efforts, outrageous debt, siloed knowledge, dehumanizing metrics, and outdated curricula. Creative education in this era need no longer be confined to traditional institutions of education; education has been forever decoupled from institutional place.

Art and design education develops our ability to look anew and expand perspectives helping us create — from the movement of the heart — in the relational possible, adjacent to the questions.

“*The way we learn today is very much related to the way we
live under the capitalistic paradigm, where the production
of knowledge is a financial enterprise.*”
–Alessandra Pomarico

In the current collapse of cultural monoliths and mythological structures, artists, designers and creative educators are writing and teaching and making possibilities for living in the vortex of this late-stage capitalism. Humans live drenched by infinite and endless information. This same information is not necessarily knowledge, and constant dopamine harvesting has resulted in numbness and desensitization.

In the new story, we cultivate the freedom to aggregate knowledge as nourishment including the critical skill to cull the knowledge that is extractive. Deep thinking is the way to bio-hack the tictokian dissonance.

In the awake story, can we facilitate and accelerate shifts in consciousness away from ideologies and systems that have created the current unlivable conditions that humanity has been conditioned to accept? Can this shift harmonize both centralized and decentralized approaches extracting the kernels from each? How do we create the conditions so that we can continuously cocoon? How do we talk about this time in a way that can hold the fear of the unknown and misunderstood?

“*If you want to teach people a new way of thinking,
don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool,
the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.*”
–Buckminster Fuller