Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World

(MIT Press, 2018)

By Ann Pendleton-Jullian

Tools for navigating today's hyper-connected, rapidly changing, and radically contingent white water world.

Design Unbound presents a new tool set for having agency in the twenty-first century, in what the authors characterize as a white water world—rapidly changing, hyperconnected, and radically contingent. These are the tools of a new kind of practice that is the offspring of complexity science, which gives us a new lens through which to view the world as entangled and emerging, and architecture, which is about designing contexts. In such a practice, design, unbound from its material thingness, is set free to design contexts as complex systems.

In a world where causality is systemic, entangled, in flux, and often elusive, we cannot design for absolute outcomes. Instead, we need to design for emergence. Design Unbound not only makes this case through theory but also presents a set of tools to do so. With case studies that range from a new kind of university to organizational, and even societal, transformation, Design Unbound draws from a vast array of domains: architecture, science and technology, philosophy, cinema, music, literature and poetry, even the military. It is presented in five books, bound as two volumes. Different books within the larger system of books will resonate with different reading audiences, from architects to people reconceiving higher education to the public policy or defense and intelligence communities. The authors provide different entry points allowing readers to navigate their own pathways through the system of books.

Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by and For Refugees

(Interlink, 2019)

By Becky Thompson, Co-edited with Jehan Bseiso

Making Mirrors began on two continents, envisioned by Palestinian poet and aid worker, Jehan Bseiso, and Becky Thompson, a US-based poet changed by months of greeting refugees after their perilous journey across the Aegean Sea.

This anthology uses mirrors to reflect imagistic connections that allow us to see ourselves in each other, those on rafts and those standing on the shore, those waiting/writing in detention and those writing from places of relative safety, those who lift their children to the sky and those whose bodies are at the bottom of the sea.

Making Mirrors offers a poetics of belonging- to the earth, family, and memories packed into backpacks. The poems go beyond refugee/citizen binaries and illuminate exile as a forced/creative space.

As the refugee crisis fades from the front page of newspapers, this collection is a plea against historical amnesia and inertia; the poems are an antidote that reaches beyond despair to renewed action.

Contributors include: Abbas Sheikhi, Abu Bakr Khaal, Adele Ne Jame, Ahmad Almallah, Ahmed Qaisania, Angela Farmer, Baha' Budair, Becky Thompson, Bronwen Griffiths, Eman Abedelhadi, Fadwa Soleiman, Fady Joudah, Fatima Al Hassan, Fouad Mohammed Fouad, Gbenga Adesina, Golan Haji, Hajer Almosleh, Hayan Charara, Ibtisam Barakat, Jehan Bseiso, Jose A. Alcantara, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Marilyn Hacker, Marisa Frasca, Merna Ann Hecht, Mohsen Emadi, Mootacem Bellah Mhiri, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nathalie Handal, Nawwar Kamal Al Hassani, Nisreen Aj, Nora Barghati, Omar Mousa Alsayyed, Rewa Zeinati, Ruth Awad, Saad Abdullah, Sanaa Shuaybe, Sara Abou Rashed, Sara Saleh, Sharif S. Elmusa, Sholeh Wolpe, Zeina Azzam, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Zoe Holman.