Mobile Design Lab

Working with Gardening the Community in Springfield, MA we are engaging in a two day design and install blitz focusing on a lot in downtown Springfield.

Bring plants to swap and visit the montview diaspora table to adopt and build your own montview polyculture to take home. More details to come.

Dynamite Space, Thorne’s Marketplace

150 Main St.
(Basement of Thorne’s)
Northampton, MA (edit map)

Description:  This four-credit course includes in-class lectures, field trips and a hands-on field component. It offers students a foundation in permaculture history, ethics, principles, design process, and techniques. The framework behind the theory and practice of permaculture is rooted in the observation of natural systems. By observing key ecological relationships, we can mimic and apply these beneficial relationships in the design of systems that serve humans while helping to restore the natural world. This course trains students as critical thinkers, observers, and analysts of the world(s) around them, and then goes on to provide students with the tools needed to design and grow for inspired and positive change.

Permaculture uses ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production, housing, appropriate technology, and community resilience.

In this weekend fundamentals course we’ll cover definitions, history, ethics, and principles & techniques. The Earthdance campus will be our canvas as we learn permaculture design by exploring and creating a design concept for Earthdance.

You will walk away with:

* A framework for understanding the connections between social and ecological health

* A method for designing abundant solutions that you can apply in your own landscapes

* Hands on techniques for promoting soil, water and personal healing.

Tuition: $200/$250/$300; Room & Board: $250

Faculty

Lisa DePiano

Lisa DePiano is a certified permaculture designer/teacher and faculty member for the Yestermorrow Design/Build School and the University of Massachusetts. She co-founded of the Montview Neighborhood Farm, a human powered urban-farm and edible forest garden in the Connecticut River Valley, and rode with the worker-owned collective Pedal People where she helped to shape the compost to farm program.

She received her masters degree in Regional Planning from the University of Massachusetts and loves working with communities to create the world they want to live in. She currently runs the Mobile Design Lab which specializes in participatory community design and placemaking.
Registration is open NOW:

http://earthdance.net/calendar/2012/04/permaculture-fundamentals

EARTHDANCE Workshop, Residency, and Retreat Center
252 PROSPECT STREET, Plainfield, MA 01070
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A unique phenomenon in the U.S. and the world, Left Forum convenes the largest annual conference of a broad spectrum of left and progressive intellectuals, activists, academics, organizations and the interested public. Conference participants come together to engage a wide range of critical perspectives on the world, to discuss differences, commonalities, and alternatives to current predicaments, and to share ideas for understanding and transforming the world. The conference is held each spring in New York City.

Guest Lecture by Mobile Design Lab

Join Mobile Design Lab’s Lisa DePiano for a workshop on no-till methods

Assets Based Mapping: Using permaculture and whole systems thinking participants will be guided through a process to take inventory of the skills, resources and knowledge in the room. We will create an interactive installation that visually represents what we discover and share that with the rest of the conference. The map will counter the myth of scarcity and be used as a building block for redesigning our worlds.