All Tomorrow’s Problems take a short break this week. We’ll be back on Monday, April 8th at 7pm to tackle problems big and small. Come hang out with us.
Here are just a couple of examples of the things we’ve done recently in exploring how to bring people together to talk through their concerns with the future of this city.
See you next week.
Introducing: All Tomorrow’s Preserves, a special version of All Tomorrow’s Problems happening this Monday, March 25th at 7pm! (CIVIC SPACE, 411 Pelissier)
We’re pleased to announce that tomorrow, March 25th at 7pm, Jen Delos Reyes is teaming up with All Tomorrow’s Problems and this time we’re making jam. This idea came out of an exercise included in her current exhibition up at CIVIC SPACE, The Social Practice Workbook, wherein the Fallen Fruit collective suggested jam-making as a practice for changing the way you see the world (and making new friends along the way).
The All Tomorrow’s Preserves jam theme of the evening is as follows:
It’s About Thyme! Strawberry Jam!
We’re starting with a simple but delicious natural-pectin strawberry jam, made with fresh thyme and your loving hands. This thyme it’s personal, so bring your friends and come jam with us and talk about the ideas whose time have come for the City of Windsor.
We have the ingredients covered, but if you’re attending, consider bringing along an apron or two! See you Monday, March 25th at 7pm!
All Tomorrow’s Problems (ATP), a weekly Design Night focused on creative and speculative problem solving. ATP focuses on collaborative, Windsor-focused problem solving and project making, informed by weekly discussion and design nights. We’re looking for collaborative critical thinkers, problem solvers, and action-takers with an eye on the future of this city.
All Tomorrow’s Problems doesn’t aim to necessarily solve anything, but it takes up the position that we can’t wait for anyone else’s solutions either. Every Monday night, a group of people (artists, communicators, designers, academics, students, researchers, strangers, and just all-around passionate people) get together and try to spark conversations around the problems we’re encountering on an everyday basis and the long-term, large-scale potentials of them.
Those conversations are sometimes focused, while other times they’re rather sprawling. The work last night revolved around a decision to make a series of posters on a range of issues the group might continue to tackle at large. Nudges, adjustments, conversation starters were the general description we gave to the rationale behind the posters. The form was also constrained by these rules.
5-minutes to design and then we discuss.
The posters captured prompts and positions.
Some were interactive sketches.
Others a plan for a serial conversation.
Some riffed off of existing campaigns (CCS, talk to your kids about art).
Others attempted to claim new territory.
Fill-in-the-blanks.
Familiar interfaces.
Companion pieces.
Promises.
Sketches of thought patterns.
Most of the results at the end of the night.
Sketching ideas, but no commitments to production yet.
We used Letraset to typeset the posters.
Tanya and Veronica sorting through sheets of random fonts…
…there’s an immediate gratification to applying the letters one by one, as we all became designers for the evening.
Flip me and change Windsor for ever.
Randy working his green pen to annotate the grammar posters, with Phil’s notebook of ideas.
Dan’s ‘Take me to your neighbour’ idea.
Windsor, you are unpredictable.
Nicole working with a very heavy font.
More grammar, by Randy.
Great Windsor (forthcoming).
End of the evening.
Phil’s interactive poster, part 1.
Phil’s interactive poster, part 2.
You should come by next week. Not sure if we’re making posters or not, but you can be sure it’s going to to the best two-hours you’ll have spent on a Monday night in a while. As always, it’s free and open to all ages.
Remember Letraset? Here are some examples of what we’ve done with it in the past.
Join us tonight for another edition of All Tomorrow’s Problems. We’re making a series of posters with vintage letraset. I’m not sure what else you really need to know, but for some background, ATP is a weekly design night where we focus on how to reframe, solve, or invent the big and small problems we’ll face in Windsor tomorrow, next year, and decades from now.
ATP is open to everyone and free. It runs Monday (tonight) at 7pm at CIVIC SPACE, 411 Pelissier.
All Tomorrow’s Problems: the Weekly Design Night for Future-Focused People
We’re hosting another round of All Tomorrow’s Problems (ATP), a weekly Design Night focused on creative and speculative problem solving.We’re going to kick things off by picking up where we left off in 2012, working through the future of local transit and mobility issues, and then moving onto other expansive and localized future-focused issues.ATP focuses on collaborative, Windsor-focused problem solving and project making, informed by weekly discussion and design nights. We’re looking for collaborative critical thinkers, problem solvers, and action-takers with an eye on the future of this city.
BCL’s Visiting Researchers/Designers Dan McCafferty and Veronica Samek will guide a 1–1.5-hour open studio every Monday, which will involve discussions, walks, field trips, rapid prototyping and wrap up with an exhibition, installation or beautiful intervention in the summer of 2013.
Plan to bring the following:
The dates to mark in your calendars:
Didn’t this already happen?
Yes, it did. We had a great response and many inspiring ideas were developed during the first iteration of ATP, from September 2012–December 2012. The Second / Spring installment (February–April 2013) will be focused on turning all that thinking and inspiration into action and tangible projects. We will focus on making things happen and projects that address our concerns.
You know that the name of this is really similar to All Tomorrow’s Parties, right?
Yes, absolutely. We appreciate the tone of that event and thought it was a nice way to reference doing things at a different scale.
Do I have to be prepared to make art or design anything?
Think of this as a very loosely organized place to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make something every night, but we will aim to creatively respond to the issue at hand. Ultimately, our thinking and discussions will materialize into something.
Do I have to commit to attending every design night?
We understand schedules change, so you are free to participate as your schedule allows. But YES… plan to attend as much as possible. Let’s make stuff happen. We need you at the table!
Who are these people anyways?
Long-time Windsor-Essex resident, Veronica Samek, first began her career journey unknowingly overseas. After graduating from the University of Windsor, she worked in England where she uncovered a passion for telling the Windsor-Essex story. Shortly thereafter, she returned to studying Journalism Print & New Media at St. Clair College and began helping others find their career paths as the Director of Communications for Workforce WindsorEssex. Through her work with this organization, Veronica is committed to a holistic approach to workforce development, emphasizing the importance of living, working and playing in a region with deep roots and a transformative pallet. Veronica is a member of the United Way GenNext Committee and a founding member of the Awesome Windsor-Essex Foundation.
New to the Windsor area, Dan McCafferty identifies as a Winnipeger, though he has also called Ottawa, Halifax, Toronto, Chicago and Raleigh, “home.” Dan is a multi-disciplinary designer, artist and researcher who teaches Design in the Art and Art History Department at Wayne State University, in Detroit. He co-founded the critical design collective Public Design Unit in 2011 and their first project, Parkdale Versions, was installed at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche. His interests include relational, critical and speculative art and design practices which are participatory, socially engaged and community oriented.
Last Monday night, a small group of us gathered around the table to talk about All Tomorrow’s Problems. This is an open event that invites anyone to attend and think of this as a very loosely organized group to discuss and exercise your ideas on a specific topic. We may not actually make anything, but we will aim to creatively respond to the issue at hand. It picks up again tonight, Monday, October 15 at 7pm!
Huge thanks to Sam Lefort, Eric Boucher and Dan McCafferty for joining me and Danielle. The goal of this biweekly design night is to articulate and imagine the problems and solutions facing the city in a longer horizon, and which have already begun to reveal themselves.
The topic of the first-week: youth retention. It’s not a secret that this has been an area of ongoing concern for me, personally, and so it was great to talk through ideas of how we could address this problem, without them being tethered to the all-too-familiar limits and and realities regularly articulated in the community.
Some of the notes from the evening … I particularly liked the idea of making it easier for people to find their place in the community here, rather than assuming their place is waiting for them somewhere else. The big question framing the entire discussion — what are the barriers in place that prevent recent graduates from staying here?
Also discussed — more focus on mentorship, a guerilla marketing campaign for parents to “talk to their kids about Windsor,” a head-hunter for every single graduate, an effort to more coherently articulate the local, and a completely revamped set of bylaws to jumpstart entrepreneurship here that doesn’t look like entrepreneurship in other cities and places.
All Tomorrow’s Problems isn’t aiming to necessarily solve the problems we discuss, but instead, open up an imaginative dialogue around these issues. Solving problems is over-rated anyways, asking the right questions is so much more important. Around the table on the first night, we had artists, designers, filmmakers, teachers, and a soon-to-be lawyer. In my mind, that’s a dangerously good combination of people asking a variety of questions. But, I’m also pretty sure that having you around the table would make it even better.
We’re not dismissing or avoiding actionable ideas, we just don’t want to get caught up in the limits of logistics and pragmatism — the city already seems to do that really well. See you tonight at 7pm.