Scaffolding the Future: Notes from the Field Paperback – August 2, 2023

Written during a worldwide pandemic, from a place that is raging with an unprecedented fury of forest fires, in a world that is convulsing, socially, economically, and politically, this book tells the story of a project that started more than six years before. One that I took on because of its potential to make tangible progress through these entangled, erratic, and explosive times. It was primed by a series of earlier overlapping projects that grappled with designing contexts – not things – that would make a difference - that would open windows of change on seemingly intractable situations; that would pursue desirable, not default, futures; that would move the needle on how we engage and act more thoughtfully with each other and with the worlds we enact. From Montana to Maine, from DC to LA, from Bangladesh to Singapore to the Arctic, I have been charged with the exhilarating task of helping others re-architect crucial parts of our world. Governmental operations, the future of a region, the schools of a state in the US, the renewal of the North American university, the future of the library, the education of women. In and through these processes, I have developed a practice that demands its own vocabulary, that unsettles some notions and reaffirms others, that achieves agency in the world. Complex, demanding and capacious, visualizing, modeling, and operationalizing the way forward through the latest and most developed of these projects is the story this book tells. Read more