Gather
Gather
As an anthropologist and public health educator, I enjoy an excuse to read and create with others. The first book club I joined was reading fiction with a sexagenarian group of women who met monthly at the top of Potrero Hill in San Francisco. We met at the library, starting with snacks that were snuck in and ending with dinner nearby. This was 2016: right before the elections, before I lost my first “adult” job, and before the birth of my first child. Meeting over books with these wise women and connecting to what we were feeling those months, I realize looking back, was helpful in processing the changes going on around me.
When I moved back to my hometown of Los Angeles in 2018, I knew one of the first things I wanted to do to connect to other designers and creators was to start a book club. The in-person Design Book Club has been going strong since then. Another excuse to connect with local creators has been through keeping an "accountability” group of sorts—of will wishers and cheerleaders that meet regularly online to support one another through brainstorms and back burner projects.
Join us for Lunch Club!
Maybe you want to launch a business or write that book. Maybe you want to finally finish that website (me!). Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, join us for Lunch Club.
This is a weekly gathering of women ready to create across 8 short weeks. At one of our last Design Book Club gatherings of 2024, people shared how they missed the Los Angeles design community post COVID and felt like it never really came back. This community continues to shift in the midst of the devastation of the LA fires. In 2025, this is one way I wanted to start, in a small way, to build back some of that community.
Inspired by Abigail Rasminsky's writers' lunch club, we will meet Mondays from 12-1pm PST starting February 10. This is open to anyone who wants to give herself a time to design and create this winter. Interested? Learn more here or sign up directly on Eventbrite.
Join us for Book Club!
Join us for our quarterly book club discussion and an opportunity to meet other local ins interested design and research.
Since 2018, we have been meeting to read and discuss a design-y book. Sometimes this can be a direct design read—like our very first book club where we read This is Service Design Doing or one of our more recent reads where we met with author Dr. Elizabeth Turnstall to discuss Decolonizing Design. Other times, we pick books that bring new questions to design—like The Art of Gathering on creating memorable experiences and interactions or God’s Hotel on the low-tech and human-paced slow medicine movement. For everything we’ve read, check out our BookShop.org shop.
We meet quarterly on Tuesday nights from 7-8pm PST at Johnny’s Pastrami in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles. Interested? Learn more here or sign up directly on Eventbrite.