Welcome to the one and only newsletter for irid.space, Toronto’s experimental design school founded by Michelle Jia and Chloë Lim. Each issue, we promise to dispatch only the sweetest updates in the midst of a rapidly changing world. Thanks for supporting this local project.

IN THIS ISSUE: Last day to apply for full courses!

Important Dates:

Sept 20 - Applications due for full courses (Ruth Silver, Justin Scherer) –
apply here [IRID.SPACE] by 11:59PM ET tonight

One of my favourite fall memories was auditing “Early Analytic Philosophy” at the University of Toronto by Prof. Imogen Dickie. She had an aura about her – Walter Benjamin, not Gen Z – of a person doing the one thing she was meant to do. She’d stride in, chin aloft, dog (“Agnes!”) on a leash, and proceed to command the room from the lecture floor re: Frege (“Are numbers real?”) or Bertrand Russell or Wittgenstein. 

The older I get, the more I come to appreciate the particular kind of radiance that comes with folks doing what they are so clearly meant to do on earth. It isn’t quality, per se, or even charisma. It’s a kind of – I don’t even know. Transparency, I think. That place where the person disappears and becomes one with the doing of their work. Because yes, this is about working, about creative work, about labour the way Marx talks about in Capital, that is part and parcel of the human condition: unalienated, liberatory, undeniable, singular. 

If this project could be an engine for that kind of work…!!!

Once Again, 50$ for Friendship

We posted this last time but we’ll post it again in case you missed it. For those who have been reading carefully, apologies for the reiteration: 

In order to experiment with the relational composition of the classroom, we’re excited to offer some tuition back for those applying together. Specifically, if you enroll with a friend, you each get 50$ off the full tuition. You can put their name and email in the “referral” part of the application form and we’ll handle the rest.

That’s all. See you in class.

Other Things To Look Forward To

We’re cooking up a few things for after the official semester starts, and will post here and on IG about them as things proceed. They are:

• The “community dinner” at 1RG (!) – an irid-style dinner party that was much-requested after our launch party

• The release of the “à la carte” workshops for Justin’s course, for those who can only make a handful of the dates

• Module 2 of Ruth’s course, as well as Digital Gardens by Aaryan and Omama in November

Thanks for following along as we bumble forward in the spirit of curiosity and hope. You make it all worth it.

Yours,

Michelle Jia
Head of Academics
on behalf of irid.space

P.S. Check this out…