ri200120 Emeralda SDG style: One of the many games for the gifts of life  

Other lands for playing 

After a day when I was designing a spinner and game board inspired by my friend Mavis Nduchwa in faraway Botswana, I wonder if there are many kinds of worlds where one can apply the design of Emeralda.

For example, instead of the imaginary place I know as Emeralda, maybe real places like Botswana can be where the game takes place.

My days

I begin these days making sure I have a directory for these ‘Zine essays. I refer to the calendar of my stays on the Islands-of-domains-of-expertise.

This one is RIISMA, the island of research and development on an international scale. It stands for Ritchie’s International Institute for Studies in Multimedia Arts

Surely, it’s here were my engagement with Mavis makes sense, as I am researching and developing my knowledge, skills and attitude toward her, her community, and the African diaspora.

As an American I live in a country guilty of racial prejudice based on ignorance. It’s incumbent on me as a scholar and artist to understand more about Africa in particular.

If I am a world citizen and global thinker-and-doer, I must think how the Emeralda theory I follow as an asset management and legacy transfer system might be have utility value to Mavis.

I may be able to do this by game design. The table in the Mini Art Gallery is covered with game theories in the form of cards, boards, dice, and now a spinner.

Spinner design based on a Botswana basket image

Spinner

We begin with the end in mind – time. Three-hundred sixty days await the Gates Prize winner. For me a paradisiacal region would be populated with poets, artists, musicians and all stripes of creative individuals.

I designed he region around my past experience as an art professor when I learned there were ten characteristics that defined the students who I thought were most successful.

Now I find the context has shifted, that despite I think artists and poets can, as Signora Maria Guaita put it, “Can save the world now,” the calendar may be more than ten islands – it may be eighteen.

The new number is from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, or SDG. It’s a prioritized list of goals necessary to save Earth’s human and other life sustainability. The body that put this list together four years ago listed 17; but they left out one: Printing access.

Printing is not limited to the centuries-old tradition of mechanical reproduction because printing evolved over the millennia to the Internet. However, access to the media is limited; therefore, I added an 18^th sustainable development goal – printmaking access.

Of course, the inspiration for this is my work with printmaking as an art form, but printmaking means more than what some people take it for. It’s not merely an art or craft. Printmaking is a geosocial art form with close ties to performance art.

Vocational school

On January 29^th I made a three-minute video titled, “Diamonds and honey,” which is a description of a book to sell for the purpose of financing a vocational college in Botswana. It’s an example of what MIT Business professor Rosabeth Moss-Kanter suggested as an insurance policy for hope, a structure for collaboration.

The book, in other words, despite it’s near fantastic magnitude and great tasks, is a structure for collaboration. My friend in Botswana, Mavis Nduchwa, has dreamed of better education in her country since she was a teenager.

To me, her story (Herstory) exemplifies all African mothers’ dreams.