Zen Learning Lab/Embodied Systems: Design, Relation, Ritual, and Living Infrastructure

Free course

Embodied Systems: Design, Relation, Ritual, and Living Infrastructure

A 12-week survey of how systems shape bodies, relationships, technologies, and collective life — and how to design for aliveness instead of extraction.

Start learning — free39 lessons · ~30 hours · self-paced

What you'll learn

Systems are lived arrangements of power, meaning, relationship, memory, labor, and sensation — experienced in bodies, reproduced through ritual, negotiated through relationships, and materialized through interfaces and infrastructure. This facilitated-studio survey draws on systems theory, cybernetics, somatics, Black feminist thought, queer theory, decolonial scholarship, ecology, participatory design, design justice, infrastructure studies, ritual studies, and transformative justice. Each week pairs a lineage lecture with a hands-on mapping or design practice, a reflective check-in, and an artifact for your systems fieldbook. The course culminates in an Embodied Systems Intervention: a small, real intervention designed to increase a living system’s capacity for care, agency, reciprocity, or repair.

Curriculum

Orientation — Entering the Container

Week 1 — Systems Are Ways of Seeing

Week 2 — Feedback and the Politics of Control

Week 3 — The Body as a System and a Source of Knowledge

Week 5 — Feminist and Queer Systems Thinking

Week 6 — Coloniality, Extraction, and Design

Week 9 — Participatory Design and Design Justice

Lineage Atlas — Sources and Further Reading

Your instructor

Zen Lara

Interdisciplinary systems thinker

Free, funded by supporters

There is no paywall on this course. If it helps you, you can choose to support it — that keeps it free for everyone else.