Accidents on Purpose: RULES

​Fall in love with indeterminacy.

​Discover joy in creative risk.

​Play with the uncertain world.

​Welcome to the third of six workshops designed to push the envelope in creative practice by engaging techniques of randomness and chance. In this series, taught by Justin Scherer for the Institute for Relational Intelligence in Design (irid), participants learn about great works of procedural, process-focused art, music, film, and writing, and apply these techniques to produce new experimental pieces in their own medium.

​​This week's theme: Rules.

​In this workshop, we will explore rules as sources of uncertainty in creative work. We will cover aleatoric art, oblique strategies, exquisite corpse and other forms in which rules and procedure generate art through mediated control. How might we incorporate these approaches into our own crafts?

​​About the series

​This is the third workshop of a 6-week series that forms the first part of Accidents on Purpose: Creative Practice in an Uncertain World. Part workshop series and part studio intensive, the full course weaves theory and practice together in an exploration of how craft and chance interact to make some of the greatest art in history.

​Read more about the full course on our website here.

​​About the teacher

​Justin Scherer is a designer, musician, and researcher. Lately, he has been designing reading experiences for Wikipedia, where his work supports the curiosity of about a half billion people per day in over 300 languages at "the last, best place on the internet." Before that, he designed software as a job for 15 years at global top-10 websites, big corporations, national marketing campaigns, small not-for-profits, and early-stage startups. As the improviser and synthesist waivestate, Justin explores intuition, physicality, and the emergent properties of complex systems to make improvised electronic music with modular synthesizers. His latest album, lithics, was released in 2026.