What’s Cooking at the BILD?
In August, me!
An amazing place. A powerful approach. Caring and creative friends.
People beginning to gather…
What's the next limiting factor?
Also me!
The truth is, I studied social systems because I could never quite crack that nut.
How do they do it? Seemingly without effort.
What’s required here?
Outdoor gathering spaces. Shade. An outdoor kitchen. Windproof workspaces. Food forest. Swimming pool.
Water tanks. Solar. Materials. Knowledge. Relationships. Skills.
And, of course, money.
Money matters. But it is not the only form of capital.
How you can Help
Your support helps build the capacity for all of this to happen.
Help someone carrying a big vision join this Founding Cohort and contribute their knowledge, perspective, relationships, and capabilities to BILD.
The Founding Cohort of the Living Design Lab
October–December 2026
The first Living Design Lab has a special purpose.
This first cohort isn't simply learning Living Design.
We're using it to raise the BILD.
The founding participants are all BILD Fellows: a carefully curated group of talented people working to bring big things to life.
Each is committed to test-driving Living Design on their vision, to help us see what works across different projects and contexts.
Feedback, insight, stories, and case studies.
Fellows work primarily on their own projects.
But all have visited BILD and are willing to contribute their talents to grow capabilities in this place, and to bring their special knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and perspectives to grove possibility in this place
The Founding Lab is a living experiment in Living Design.
Living Design Lab
Founding BILD Cohort
An 8-week practical intensive for bringing your vision to life.
Beginning the week of October 20, 2026
Life has been creating, adapting, and finding its way through seemingly impossible constraints for nearly four billion years.
This fall, I am bringing together a small founding cohort of makers, creators, organizers, innovators and builders to find out.
Each person will bring something real they want to bring into the world—a project, place, organization, community, creative endeavor, or idea whose time has come.
Over eight weeks, we'll use Living Design to understand what you're trying to create, what is getting in the way, what resources and relationships are already present, and where small actions could create surprisingly large effects.
This is a founding cohort
This first Living Design Lab is also helping bring the Borrego Institute for Living Design to life.
BILD is an emerging 501(c)(3) institute and place for learning how life creates—and putting that knowledge to work on the things we want to bring into the world.
Our 86-acre desert site adjoining Anza-Borrego Desert State Park gives us something unusual:
Members of this founding cohort will help shape not only the Living Design Lab, but the culture and possibilities of BILD itself.
What you'll work on
You bring your own vision into the Lab.
Something you really want to see happen.
Maybe you've been carrying it for years. Maybe pieces already exist. Maybe you can see exactly what it could become, but getting from here to there feels overwhelming.
There may be constraints of money, time, people, institutions, regulation, history, resources, personalities or simply not knowing where to begin.
That's our material.
Over eight weeks, we'll use Living Design to explore your vision as a living system:
What is it really trying to become?
What does it require?
What is already present?
What is limiting it?
Who and what does it depend upon?
Where are the relationships, resources and capabilities that haven't yet been connected?
And what is the next meaningful thing you can actually do?
Because life doesn't find its way by having the whole answer first.
Life finds a way by doing.
Who we're looking for
For this founding cohort, I am looking for people who make things and are ready to spend some time at The BILD.
I’m especially interested in bringing together a diverse ecology of:
builders and fabricators
artists and designers
makers and technologists
organizers and community builders
ecologists and systems thinkers
filmmakers, photographers and storytellers
entrepreneurs and innovators
and people carrying meaningful projects that need to move.
The BILD Fellowship
For this first cohort, BILD Fellowships make it possible for us to recognize multiple forms of contribution.
That might include some combination of a financial contribution, sponsored participation, and meaningful contributions of time, skills, capabilities, materials, relationships or other resources that help bring BILD to life.
October–December 2026
The Founding Cohort begins the week of October 20 and runs for eight weeks.
This gives us unusual opportunities to connect the Lab with San Diego's creative communities and with hands-on activity at BILD.
If the prospect of bringing your own vision to life while helping create a place where other people can bring theirs to life too sounds exciting—
I'd love to hear from you.
What you'll receive
The Founding Cohort includes eight weeks of Living Design curriculum and collaborative sessions, ongoing access to the cohort community, office hours and individual Living Design Reviews with Dr. Tamsin, and opportunities to participate in creation at the BILD.
You'll develop a Living Design Brief for your project and use tools for seeing systems, constraints, relationships, resources, possibilities and leverage differently.
And you'll be part of documenting what happens—creating the first stories and case studies of Living Design in practice.
What you would love to have happening eight weeks from now?