A New Platform for the New Design Congress

In July, I wrote on the New Design Cables about our busy second half of 2022, where two years of collaborations had started to bear fruit. Today, we’re launching a new research platform to document and publish our work on the Para Real, economic solidarity, digital identity, research and archiving, and community-led infrastructure. Alongside our main site and Discord community, this is a space for research notes and experiments, upcoming IRL event and livestream invitations, and news or event recaps. Following the positive response from The Imperial Sensorium and Expectations as Reality, we hope to platform more like-minded friends and co-conspirators through writing and research commissions.

Read our first two Research Notes – both dropping today as part of this launch – one by Benjamin Royer and the other by myself:

Material Dematerial

The blind optimism and political naivete of technocratic tenets have shaped a confused understanding of the world, built on brittleness and exploitation.

The New Design Congress

The Coming Game Engine Inflection Point

In 2022, game engines sit at the centre of a key ideological and economic battleground and the two most popular game engine companies face uncertain futures. What is the alternative?

The New Design Congress

We’re also launching NDC Members. This is a subscription membership for individuals and organisations who believe in our work and want to support our independence. Members who support us financially get perks like:

• preprint access to our reports, notes and publications, and access to raw data sets where applicable,
• guest list invites to IRL and livestream events,
• early access to our tools, such as Underscore and some yet-to-be-announced apps we’ve been quietly working on.

As always, all of our work remains open access, and base memberships are free.

Your subscription to our mailing list has been converted to a free NDC Membership. If you're supporting us via Substack or OpenCollective, we will migrate your current support to NDC Members in the coming month. We will honour the amount you currently support NDC with, and give you an Individual Plus NDC Membership as a thank you for believing in our work. We will make every effort to make this migration seamless, and will update you personally as we complete the transition.

This new platform is running on infrastructure we control and with minimal analytics and no third parties. You can read our privacy policy, and if you have any concerns about the migration, please contact us on Discord or at members@newdesigncongress.org.

Thanks to Philiph, Aaron and Kami from Simply Secure for supporting the development and logistics leading up to the launch of this platform. And thank you for being part of NDC.