Dominique Gedanke Flaksberg
Livable Futures graduate student fellow 2023-2024
Design and Indigenous Studies, The Ohio State University
Biography
Dominique is an Earth Centered designer working within the realms of education, design strategy and intuitive entrepreneurship. She completed her undergraduate studies at The New School, with a BFA at Parsons School for Design and a BA in Liberal Arts, with a minor in Environmental Studies at Eugene Lang College. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Ohio State University Design Department, focusing on decolonizing design thinking through the integration of indigenous and Earth centered wisdom.
In her research and practice, Dominique works to bridge two worlds: formal, institutionalized knowledge that dictates our current systems of living and intuitive, ancestral action/wisdom which invites us to restore an authentic connection to our environment. Nature, tradition, spirituality and education are pillars to her research, which weaves different realities into coexistence. She centers design thinking as a lens to understand, dream and reshape the different futures we can collaboratively build upon this Earth.
Her previous and current work include designing and consulting for sustainability within the fashion industry, teaching design at different educational settings, facilitating ancestral soap making skills workshops, and starting a wellness company, Circular Bodies, which offers accessible and healthy home and body wellness, while utilizing circular design and production practices.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
To me, what makes more livable futures is CommUNITY and commitment to honoring all life as Sacred. When we step into a space of awareness of all the life around us, and the acknowledgement that humans are not the center, but just a part of a bigger system, we start taking action and walking our paths with a commitment to a more livable present (and future) for all. And when we do that we transform our practices, for we know they are little drops of a bigger ocean of live that exists in a grander scale on this planet and on the universe.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
Rest, Pause, Awareness, Acceptance, Grace. Tuning into my body’s cycles in how they connect to nature. Allowing my practice to be more intentionally crafted with the flows and seasons on the Earth, rather than comparMENTALized into disciplines, tasks or requirements. I have been feeling nourished by allowing for a gentle integration of all aspects of life and my practice into a bigger frequency, observing and dancing into a flow of life that exists beyond myself. I am asking myself: How can my life honor the existence of the whole?
What practices are sustaining you?
I am reading Jeremy Narby (The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge) and Jamie Sans (The 13 Original Clan Mothers) at the moment. I am listening to Nature and to people in my community, observing the frequencies and ideas that arise from the movements of Being a human, alive on this Earth.