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I am currently benefiting from the Transiency Program offered by FoAM. The Transiency program is designed to help creative people perform a transition in their personal and/or professional life. As a 25-year-old, fresh out of the school, why would I like to already perform a transition ? There are actually some reasons.

I have been involved in scientific/technical/engineering studies & work for seven years. Together with some moment of intense satisfaction, I also noticed a scary underlying long-term imabalance I would like to adress. This imbalance seems to come mainly from an extreme proportion of indoors mind-centered theoretical tasks. I would like to spend more time outdoors. I would like to have my body exercised through my work. And finally, I would like to get my hands dirty and learn practical down-to-earth know-hows.

I benefited from an excellent training in a very pleasant engineering school. However, I notice that I do not know how to fulfill my basic needs otherwise than by buying stuff. I don't know how to grow my own food. I don't know how to make or repair my own clothes. I don't know how to take care of my health in a preventive way, for instance, by enliving my body as much as my thoughts.

This is for the personal level.

On the intepersonal level, I live quite uncomfortably since I understood how every single action I was performing during the day was oppressing other people somewhere else.

Turning the heat on means extracting more oil, while global warming kills more and more people through Tropical storm, or while Romanian are beaten and put into jail as they try to defend their homeland from well drilling oil companies.

Buying a computer means destroying essential ecosystems and polluting heavily groundwaters local populations are drinking. Is it possible, nowadays, to have a decent life without severely harming anyone ?

I guess self-sufficiency, and designing to reduce the need to consume are part of the answer. Which happily connects with the personal level desire for more outdoors body-involving practical activities. Perfect.

Let's get started !

Here are some more insights on my motivations and objectives within this program.

On-the-Fly Diaries

I periodically update a Transiency Diary where I chronologically pile up content varying from highly theoretical statements to methodological findings, including various quotes, experiment reports and working hypothesis. It may feature more questions than answers, and contributions in the form of comments are most welcome.

If you are eager of fresh and crispy content, you can follow me on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Some pictures will be posted on FoAM's Flickr account once in a while.

Reflexive Documentation

Some more structured “libarynthic” pages will be updated here as the project progresses.

You can already read some contents on the Project definition process and some Know-Hows I learned about.

I also started to document my research on Daily Schedule Scheme and Documentation Strategy.

Landmark Papers

Here are the links to several articles I consider as Landmark Papers. They have played a role in designing the objectives of this Transiency.

These papers outline inspiring thoughts or actions helping to understand that change is possible, as well as shocking observations and analysis helping to understand better why change is desirable.

Connected Projects

I periodically update a Pearltrees which displays Connected Projects.

They are projects I stumbled upon during some online or real-life wanderings, and happened to kind of connect to in the spirit.

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