TagCloud for 2019

Food Futures: Design + Comparative Studies Class Teaching Cluster

Food Futures: Design + Comparative Studies Class Teaching Cluster

The central mission of the Livable Futures Collaborative is to explore effective ways of combining artistic, scientific, and humanistic methodologies in order to address near-horizon challenges that affect both planetary and human conditions. In that spirit, we brought together design arts and humanistic inquiry in a teaching cluster focusing on a topic that involves wide-ranging elements of genetics, environmental science, geopolitics, economics, and art: the future of food. Contemplating the problems and promises associated with how we cultivate, process, and distribute food is therefore an integral part of envisioning what shape our livable futures might take.   

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Intergenerational Community Gardening

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Intergenerational Community Gardening

With support from Livable Futures, Design student Susan Booher spent the summer working with Elizabeth Speidel and the elders and children at Columbus’ Champion Intergenerational Center to plan to a garden, maintain and harvest together. The intention of planting a garden is to foster intergenerational interaction and education.

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The Emerging Future of Design

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The Emerging Future of Design

In the evolution from making to thinking, Scott Denison collaborates with students from OSU’s Industrial Design & Visual Communications fields to create a piece of ‘design fiction’ — focusing on the livability and sustainability of human emotions.

Social Choreography

Social Choreography

Arts leader, performance curator and cultural producer Tonya Lockyer was called “one of the key cultural change-makers in the Northwest” by The Seattle Times, and she'll be at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) for a free talk and lunch (RSVP required) at noon on Thursday, May 16, as part of a residency with ACCAD, the Department of Dance and the Livable Futures project. Norah Zuniga Shaw, Livable Futures co-director and professor, recently spoke with Lockyer about her work, social engagement and the path to a livable future.  

Reports From the Field – Livable Futures in the Land of Many Voices

Reports From the Field – Livable Futures in the Land of Many Voices

The Choctaw name for New Orleans translates to “The place where many languages are spoken,” according to Monique Verdin, photographer, activist and member of the Houma Nation. But this land of many voices is slowly disappearing as the Louisiana coast loses approximately one football field worth of ground each hour and the coastal communities continue to exist under threat of hurricane storm surges rushing up canals and over the land. Yet, every eight square miles of wetlands reduces a hurricane’s storm surge by one foot, according to Britt Aliperti, the program manager at Common Ground Relief, an organization now devoted to wetlands restoration at the mouth of the Mississippi River and the generous host of The Ohio State University’s first Livable Futures Louisiana Field School, which this year comprised of eight undergraduates, two graduates and two faculty: Thomas Davis (Dept. of English) and Mary Thomas (Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies).

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Ecological Consciousness Raising Through Art

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Ecological Consciousness Raising Through Art

Livable Futures student fellow Calista Lyon presented her new work The Unknown and the Unnamed in March at the Urban Arts Space in Columbus, OH. A collaborative hybrid performance drawing from a range of forms including the educational lecture, essay, memoir and family slide-show evenings, the piece shares the natureculture narratives of Australian native orchids and their ecological, scientific and political entanglements. The narrative is woven around place, specifically Lyon’s childhood home in Australia.

Visiting Artist André M. Zachary Creates Afrofuturist Visions

Visiting Artist André M. Zachary Creates Afrofuturist Visions

In Autumn 2018, Livable Futures co-sponsored a residency by visiting professor André M. Zachary in ACCAD’s Motion Lab performance research space. Zachary worked with students from the Department of Dance, producer Norah Zuniga Shaw, and a team of ACCAD faculty and staff to explore all the possibilities of the incredible intermedia technologies on hand in the Motion Lab.

Tommy’s top 5 essential readings for a livable future

Tommy’s top 5 essential readings for a livable future

Livable Futures co-director, professor Thomas S. Davis, shares five of his favorite readings for a livable future. The list includes works across a range of genres, from politics and economics to poetry and fiction.

Emergent Strategy Gathering

Emergent Strategy Gathering

Recently we came together to discuss Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, a nourishing and galvanizing text by Adrienne Maree Brown (AMB) that has been circulating widely since it was published in 2017. Facilitated by Norah Zuniga Shaw, a group of 20 students, faculty, and interested parties met to talk about the book and about facilitating emergent strategies for change in our communities.

Analog Futures through Expanded Cinema Communities

Analog Futures through Expanded Cinema Communities

Experimental filmmakers Richard Tuohy, Dianna Barrie, Ohio State professor and filmmaker Roger Beebe, along with Ohio State professor and Livable Futures co-director Norah Zuniga Shaw held a public dialog to discuss strategies for building thriving community through creative living and skills trading as demonstrated by the artist-run film lab movement. Both Tuohy and Barrie, who are from Australia, were in town to share their works at the Wexner Center as part of Beebe’ Expanded Cinema series. Beebe describes the series as a challenge to the “traditional single-projector black box theatrical screening” with live performance of the films by the filmmakers using multiple analog projectors.