Scores for Designers 30 instruction cards
A deck of 30 performance scores

Scores for designers
who want to think
with the body.

Thirty instruction cards for designers who want to use more body and sensorium in their practice. Each score is a brief, performative instruction - drawn from the lineage of Fluxus event scores, Marina Abramovic's method, and inspired by the philosophical insights of Donna Haraway, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Isabelle Stengers into how thinking becomes material and embodied.

Format
30 cards, drawn one at a time
Lineage
FluxusAbramovicHarawayBourriaudStengers
Framework
Philosophy as inspiration, not citation. Concepts turned into things the body can do.
Use
Draw a card. Do the score. Or just hold the question.
Duration
Most scores: under 10 minutes. Some: a full day.

Draw a card

Pull one score from the deck. Turn it over for the question on the back.

--
Draw a card to begin

Press "Draw a card" to pull a score from the deck of thirty.

SCORE --

Draw a card to reveal the question.

No card drawn yet

The deck has thirty scores. Each one is a small instruction for your body, your attention, and your senses. Draw one to begin.

The full deck

All thirty scores. Click any card to draw it.

Where these come from.

These scores sit at a crossing of several traditions. Fluxus artists in the 1960s - George Brecht, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles - wrote event scores: brief, often one-line instructions that anyone could perform. "Make a salad." "Draw a line until you disappear." The score was the artwork; the performance was its realization.

Marina Abramovic developed a method over decades of long-durational practice. Her Cleaning the House workshops asked participants to fast, abstain from speaking, and perform repetitive physical tasks for hours - counting rice, walking in slow motion, drinking water glass by glass. The Abramovic Method, published as a deck of thirty cards, distills this into instructions for presence: "Look at yourself in the mirror for thirty minutes." "Clean a floor on your knees."

The theorists shape the why. Donna Haraway asks us to stay with the trouble, to make kin across species, to practice situated knowledges rather than the view from nowhere. Nicolas Bourriaud named relational aesthetics: art that produces encounters between people, where meaning is elaborated collectively rather than consumed privately. Isabelle Stengers proposes an ecology of practices, a cosmopolitics where different ways of knowing meet on unequal but non-hierarchical ground - every matter of fact turned into a matter of concern.

These scores do not illustrate theory. They take philosophical insights - about situatedness, encounter, material entanglement - and ask what they become when a designer's hands and feet have to carry them. Haraway's making kin becomes sitting with a plant. Bourriaud's relational aesthetics becomes hosting a stranger. Stengers's matters of concern become tracing a cable to its origins. The concept is the seed; the score is what grows from it in the body.

The point is not to get the philosophy right. It is to let the body think through doing - to let the hand, the breath, the feet, and the senses participate in what the mind usually does alone, and to discover that materialization is itself a form of thought.

Fluxus1960s - present
Event scores. Brief written instructions for actions, often quotidian, that constitute the artwork when performed. Pioneered by George Brecht, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Alison Knowles, and the broader Fluxus network. The score is the art; the performance is its realization.
Marina Abramovic1946 - present
The Abramovic Method. Long-durational exercises in presence, stamina, and attention. Developed through Cleaning the House workshops and published as a deck of thirty instruction cards. Repetitive physical tasks as a way to change consciousness.
Donna Haraway1944 - present
Situated knowledges, making kin, staying with the trouble. The partial perspective over the view from nowhere. SF as string figures, science fact, speculative fabulation. The Chthulucene as a time of multispecies entanglement. For designers: knowledge is always made from somewhere, with a body, among other bodies.
Nicolas Bourriaud1965 - present
Relational aesthetics. Art as interhuman encounters, not objects for private consumption. The artwork creates a social environment; meaning is elaborated collectively. The artist as catalyst, not author. For designers: form is completed in use, not at the moment of making.
Isabelle Stengers1949 - present
Ecology of practices, cosmopolitics. An ecology of practices that does not pacify conflict but creates concrete, interlocked, asymmetrical graspings. Every matter of fact turned into a matter of concern. Speculative thinking as a lure for feeling. For designers: every material carries a history and a set of relations that design must learn to answer to.
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