The Stamps School celebrates the launch of Utopia Toolbox: An Incitement to Radical Creativity on Monday, April 25, 2016 at 7 pm on the main floor of Literati Bookstore (124 E. Washington St.). A collaboration by Juliane Stiegele and Nick Tobier, Associate Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design and the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, this book is a hybrid between a how-to manual and a theoretical framework that invites artists, designers, planners, architects, and cultural producers to consider their actions in context.

Think of a hybrid between something like a how-to book and a theoretical framework that asks artists, designers, planners, architects and cultural producers to consider their actions in context. Utopia Toolbox contains an anthology of texts, quotations, interviews, documentation of art and design projects, and do-it-yourself actions and performances.

The contributions in practice and in text are from a broad array of disciplinary rubrics, including philosophy, art, science, technology, economics, and spirituality. They also provide perspectives from across the stages of life - from an 8 year-old child to octogenarian physicist Hans-Peter Duerr. In content and in proximity to one another, the wide-ranging contributions offer unexpected and fresh impulses, directions, estimations, suggestions and approaches to serve as a catalyst for creativity. The book encourages new and unknown combinations of thinking and also contains a number of empty pages for readers to sketch their own ideas and thinking processes.

Nick Tobier is an Associate Professor at the Stamps School of Art and Design and the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. His focus as an artist and designer is with the social lives of public places, both in built structures and events.