We are all individuals forming our own lives. From our individuality we interact collectively in the form of communities. We can grow beyond our selves by harnessing our collective understandings. There is a need to bring together unrelated specialties to create new and unknown fields of study. We can recognize our fragile connections between social systems as politics, healthcare, economics, religion,  into a more flexible robust society. We can cross train individuals to bridge specialties to fulfill changing needs of our society. We can connect collaborators and open up closed rigid structured systems into a flexible malleable world ready to shift and change to meet unexpected circumstances.

We need clear and strong leadership. Leaders must give individual freedom and guide groups toward clearly set goals. Individuals can give equal input for their own unique solutions and offer these at a fair value. Leaders will distribute our collective knowledge and wealth to maintain individual freedom and rights.

These connections are built into our subatomic particles, to the electrical forces, the cells in our bodies, our relationship with plants, animals and inorganic things. We need to integrate our human systems into our natural world in order to maximize our resources and extend our life on Earth.

This is a holistic design philosophy. It is not restricted to any one strategy or process such as, textile, visual, industrial, product, or service design. This is a multifaceted way to make all considerations interconnected. We need aspects such as sourcing, supply chain, manufacturing, management, economics, end users, end-of-life, and life expectancy to be integrated to work with one another. There are a few things that can help to make this possible by extending product life, minimizing consumption, recycling our waste, responsibly sourcing materials, equitable pay, and equal opportunities. We are broadly a society of rigid specialized individuals that tend to compete against one another. Designing a noncompetitive, interconnected, collaborative, and holistic system would balance our relationship with the world and honor our individual freedoms.

– Jeremy Paul Ripley | May 2020 | New York City