Scale Your Impact Without Scaling Your Capacity Through the Power of a Framework

For the Worldbuilders Ep. 069

Torkwase Dyson, Selections from Tuning (Hypershape, 200–410), 2018, gouache, ink, and pen on paper, 9 × 12 inches. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery.

Dear Worldbuilder,

Today we are reminded of the power of frameworks, a worldbuilding tool that shapes our relationships, planet, politics and imaginations.

Some familiar framework favorites might include:

• The 12 Step Program

• The Astrology Wheel

• The Kongo Cosmogram

• Human Design

• #8toAbolition

• And so many more…

Then there are the more nefarious frameworks, informed by patriarchal and colonial ways of being, seemingly animating our lives in the background…

• The Constitution of the United States

• The Black Codes¹

• Project 2025

Once you start learning about frameworks you see them everywhere. They are some of the most powerful worldbuilding tools that we invent, rehearse and embody as a species. Now the question is: How do we use frameworks to seed irresistible revolution for the purposes of building irresistible worlds? Our community agreements and relational guidelines are simply creative constraints that gives our freedom form.

May we honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by imagining new frameworks for shaping more livable worlds.

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What to Do?

What do we do with all this death, with all this smoke, with all this ash, with all this spit, with all these bills?
Arundhati Roy said another world is on her way and on a quiet day we can hear her breathing.
                         Well, today she’s roaring.

Quick baby, find the water. 
You are the only one that can give yourself permission to remember the water 
The smell of sankofa soup.
Quick baby, find the water.
Lap up the memory milk and learn to breathe inside it before they kill us all. 

What do we do with all this death, 
                         with all this smoke, 
                         with all this ash, 
                         with all this spit, 
                         with all these bills?

Here I am again, treading water, swimming through my fear to get to you.
What to do? What to do?
How about I keep stroking til you smell it too?

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If you’re anything like me, you dream of serving folks through your process not your persona. Your desire is rooted in being an artist, not an influencer. But your process can sometimes feel illegible, even to you. We’re clear there are life affirming benefits to illegibility, opacity, poesis and abstraction. We’re also clear if we want to serve communities we care about through a creative offer that resources our practice, there needs to be an outline of the transformative journey we will take them through. This is your framework. In this episode we dive into the power of frameworks and it’s creative capacity to build worlds that extend far beyond us.

Tune into the 69th episode “Scale Your Impact Without Scaling Your Capacity Through the Power of a Framework” on the podcast For the Worldbuilders via Spotify or Apple Podcast.

“I needed a new set of geometric scale strategies to develop my ideas around nomadicity, liberation, movement, and perception. The collective spatial intelligence of Black refusal provided a foundation for transformation. Hyper shapes are both compact and expansive, porous and opaque. It is a system to maintain a discursive practice. It’s a living algorithm.”

— Torkwase Dyson, “Torkwase Dyson Reflects on Hyper Shapes”, Metropolis Mag, August 26, 2021

Abolition is a living algorithm.

Your values are a living algorithm.

Your journey of transformation is a living algorithm.

Your creative process is a living algorithm.

A framework is a proposal for a way of being and each one of us can invent one unique to our lived experiences and interdisciplinary skillset.

What’s your proposal? Your living algorithm? Your framework?

And how might it serve as the bones of your creative offer?…The architectural scaffold of your world.

Let’s find out together…

This is the last full week of open enrollment into Seeda School. If you’re curious about building your own framework then I want to invite you to register for our Worldbuilding Workshop Series where you will discover your creative offer and learn how to financially resource your practice without compromising your values and the pleasure of your creative play.

The last two public workshops of the season are on Tuesday, January 21st and Thursday, 23rd at 12pm EST. Join us to learn more about Seeda School’s worldbuilding framework, a living algorithm supporting you in dreaming up your own.

Hope to see you there.

So be it, see to it, breathe through it,

Ayana

1. Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin. “Canisia Lubrin’s debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

Accompanied by black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson, and with a foreword by Christina Sharpe, Code Noir ranges in style from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction. This inventive, shape-shifting braid of narratives exists far beyond the boundaries of an official decree.”