Join a workshop
The Unautomated Workshops are small, participatory gatherings built around attention, curiosity, creativity, making, conversation, and the experience of being fully engaged in what we are doing.
Take part —
The Unautomated Life grows through people who want to help make something real.
You might have an afternoon to give, a useful skill, books gathering dust on a shelf, a connection we should know about, a place where a project could live, or an idea you have been carrying around for a while.
You might simply want to come to a workshop, follow the work, and see where it leads.
There are many ways in. Start with the one that feels like yours.
Find your way in
Give your time
Public projects need people. Help with an event, research, outreach, documentation, building, organizing, stewardship, or the practical work that turns an idea into something people can actually experience. Some opportunities may take an hour. Others may grow into longer collaborations.
Share what you know
Useful knowledge comes from everywhere. Teachers, librarians, writers, artists, researchers, historians, technologists, designers, builders, gardeners, makers, community organizers, local businesses, and people who know a particular place deeply. Tell us what you know how to do and what you would enjoy contributing.
Support the work
Projects need resources as well as ideas. Books, materials, printing, tools, space, transportation, technology, fabrication, food for a gathering, professional services, funding. If you would like to help make a project possible, we would love to hear from you.
Bring an idea
Maybe there is something your own community needs. A place for books to circulate. A gathering that gets people making things together. A project that helps children ask better questions. A reason for neighbors to notice the place they live. An experiment nobody here has imagined yet. Tell us what you are thinking.
Projects you can join
The Unautomated Workshops
Gatherings where the ideas behind The Unautomated Life become something people can experience together.
Workshops are designed around participation: conversation, observation, making, thinking, learning, and spending time fully engaged with other people and the world around us.
We welcome participants, hosts, facilitators, educators, community partners, and people interested in helping us develop future workshops.
Hercules Bay Trail Library
A small public library for walkers, readers, neighbors, and anyone who happens to pass by.
The project began with a box of free books encountered on a morning walk and grew into an idea for a permanent place of exchange along the Hercules Bay Trail.
We welcome help with books, building, installation, permissions, stewardship, sponsorships, community partnerships, and the many practical details that make a public project last.
Own Thinking
A learning project exploring how children can grow up alongside AI while continuing to strengthen curiosity, reasoning, judgment, and confidence in their own minds.
We would especially love to hear from teachers, parents, librarians, education researchers, youth organizations, and people interested in testing and improving early ideas.
Books & writing
Books and essays are another part of The Unautomated Life. The writing explores attention, place, technology, creativity, memory, presence, and everyday human experience through lives actually lived.
If you run a library, bookstore, school, publication, podcast, community group, reading series, or event and would like to collaborate, host a conversation, invite a reading, or create something together, get in touch.
Bring it where you live
The first projects began in Hercules because Hercules is where we happened to be paying attention.
The idea can travel.
A trail library will become something different in another town.
An Unautomated Workshop will change with the people in the room.
A project about knowing a place will begin with different streets, trees, histories, landscapes, and communities.
We would love to see what people create from these ideas in the places they know. If you want to bring a workshop, adapt a project, or start something new where you live, tell us about your place and what you are imagining.
Stay close
You can also begin simply by following the work. We send occasional notes about new projects, workshops, books and essays, things we are experimenting with, opportunities to participate, and ideas we think are worth carrying around for a while.
Choose what you want to hear about.
Help us find the next person
Sometimes the most valuable contribution is an introduction.
You may know a librarian who would understand the trail library immediately. A teacher thinking deeply about children and AI. A carpenter who enjoys unusual little projects. An artist with an idea for a workshop. A local business willing to sponsor something. A historian with a missing piece of a story. A community organization looking for something meaningful to bring people together. A person whose work simply feels as though it belongs in this conversation.
Bring us together.
Have something else in mind?
Good ideas rarely arrive already sorted into categories. If you have a question, partnership, invitation, resource, proposal, collaboration, criticism, or strange little idea that feels as though it belongs here, write to us. We would like to hear it.