Urgency Cookbook (2019)

Deck of 80 cards
Risograph printing
Wrapped in paper and enclosed in plastic bag
4 in. x 6 in.
Edition of 30

Urgency Cookbook is a collaborative publication in 80 parts, authored and hand-drawn by participants in Urgency Lab, a class I taught in spring 2019 at Rhode Island School of Design. Urgency Cookbook documents the language that evolved during the class, with ingredients and recipes for collective care—presented as terms, definitions, quotes, drawings, photos, and stories, presented as a deck of 80 cards. I edited, designed, printed, and assembled the edition of 30.

Terms/concepts included in Urgency Cookbook—access, accountability, archive, authenticity, boundaries, bread, building, collaboration, communal care, community/classroom, critique, design in the wild, eating, failure, faking, family, for who?, futures, humor, identity, (il)legibility, institution, institutional memory, (in)visibility, joy, lack, listening, making, meal plans, memory, microcosm, money, neglect, opportunity, post-apocalyptic practice, privilege, publishing, radical generosity, rage, refusal, salad, scam/steal, scavenging, sharing, soup, space making, trust, undercommons, urgency, urgency lab.

Contributors: Xingyang Cai, Adam Chuong, Ana Cristina Espinosa Pérez, Maria Gerdyman, Olive Godlee, Natalie Linn, Noa Machover, Eleanor Meshnick, Mo Naseem, Bobby Joe Smith III, Caroline Smith, Paul Soulellis, Tongyi Zhang.