— Co-hosted by Doelenia, 706 Youth Space, and ODY CELL Book store
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| Thesis | How can we forge human faith in the future? |
|---|---|
| Forms of deliverable | Any medium or form can be your outcome if can be shared online. And of course, with reverence, love, and inquiry toward humanity and the world. 🫶 |
| Format | Selective co-creation cohort where you meet, exchange, and connect with cross-disciplinary humans around the world shared caring for this thesis. Your deliverable would be published and presented publicly through Ausna in the end. |
| Language | Primarily English; multilingual support where possible |
| Location | Ausna online community |
| Time commitment | Starting July 13th · ~1 month · flexible but expected co-create 2–6 hours/week |
| Application deadline | July 19th |
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Issue 0 gathers around one thesis:
How can we forge human faith in the future?
The world has become fractured, loud, uncertain, overloaded, anxious, restless, indifferent, absurd, numb. Increasingly out of our control.
Political conflict, war, climate crisis, economic decline, accelerating technology, information overload, algorithmic echo chambers, consumerist exhaustion, fragile intimacy, urban alienation, and the self-examination that follows disenchantment. It all layers together. We feel dizzy and lost.
We still care about the world, yet find it harder and harder to understand it.
We still want to believe in humanity, yet find it harder and harder to sustain that belief in public life.
We still carry ambition, curiosity, and responsibility, yet no longer know where these forces should flow.
What still deserves belief?
What future is worth building?
When the world gets unstable, how does a person recover the power to act?
How do we create a faith that is not self-deception, a hope that is not naive, an action that is not numb?
We want to gather those already pulled by this question. You might be artists, philosophers, scholars, founders, educators, community builders, designers, and others, or simply someone who keep running into this question through their own lived experience.
This is where Issue 0 begins.
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Ausna was built by a group of people struck by this same question.
We no longer feel we understand the world. This hurts us, but also excites us.
It hurts because we still care for this world, still hold a deep belief in humanity.
It excites us because it makes an impulse to act. We are people with ambition and drive, with curiosity and reverence toward the world, as honest as we can be with ourselves and with reality. The harder the circumstances, the more we want to move closer, to understand, to change something.
But one person's fire only reaches so far. We've grown less able to believe that isolated expression, fleeting socializing, passive watching, identity labels, résumé credentials, or the exchange of resources can carry what truly matters.
Those with real curiosity, real ambition, real responsibility should not have to retreat into private space to explore alone, burning by themselves in the dark, seen only briefly, only by chance.
We believe these fires should draw close to each other.
Ausna means what humans leave to the world.
It refers to the trace a person leaves behind, the full weight of a person: the experience of being human, the wisdom accumulated, the character formed, the wounds endured, the questions returned to again and again, the work created, the judgment formed through life, and the reason they can never quite look away from a certain question.
Conviction is a word that matters to us, because it carries the weight of being human. It comes from love and sincerity, and from a refusal to yield. Ausna wants to bring these faint but steady fires together, let them enter the world, and give rise to new possibility.
The format that carries all of this is the Ausna Issue.
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An Ausna Issue is an intensive co-creation cohort built around a thesis that matters.
Every Issue begins with a thesis that touches the human condition. The thesis differs each time, but it always holds two things at once: an essential thesis humanity has long faced, and the reality we're living through now. It must be deep, true, urgent enough that people from different backgrounds bring their experience, work, judgment, and trace into it.
Inside an Issue, you co-create with people from Ausna. They are deeply sincere, curious, and cross-disciplinary. Philosophical and practical, grounded and idealistic. They come because they genuinely care about the thesis, and want it to become more real through shared creation.
Every participant is a co-creator. The initiator proposes the thesis and shares their story. However, the Issue's shape is never theirs alone to decide. What the thesis grows into, the co-creators decide together.
You bring your own direction: a personal experience, a piece of research, a work, an unfinished project, a question you keep returning to, a judgment taking shape through practice. You advance it by exchanging material, questions, drafts, and responses with the others.
Through this, how people come to know each other becomes concrete. How someone thinks, responds to complexity, turns experience into contribution, all revealed through co-creation.
In the end, every Issue produces a public artifact, something the world can see: an essay, research, a proposal, a visual work, a prototype, an interview, a set of dialogues, a living publication, or any form that genuinely advances the thesis.
When an Issue concludes, we bring the artifact into the public world and seek the resources, venues, collaborators, and opportunities that let it reach further.
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Issue 0 runs in the evenings and on weekends. It takes time beyond your daily work, spent on something we hope you find truly worth doing.
Brainstorm
We begin together, gathering around the thesis to exchange confusions, instincts, experiences, and questions. After that, each person explores independently, or create a team freely.
Co-Creation
Every evening, an online studio opens, exclusively for co-creators. Each person advances what they're making, while exchanging views, questions, and resources with the group. This phase isn't only about finishing work; it's also a period of presence, response, and mutual contribution.
Midpoint Gathering
At the midpoint, everyone gathers again. Each co-creator shares what they've done, what they've encountered, and where they're heading. This is the first time everyone sees, together, how the same thesis has grown into different shapes in different people.
Final Deliverable
At the end of the co-creation phase, each co-creator submits their final, tangible outcome: an essay, a piece of research, a proposal, a visual work, a prototype, a journal, an interview, a recorded conversation, or any form that genuinely advances the thesis.
Roundtable
All co-creators take part in a structured roundtable around one another's work. This conversation is recorded, edited, and becomes part of the final public artifact.
Public Presentation
Renjie Lu and the co-creators present the outcomes of Issue 0 to an invited audience. The presentation is recorded and preserved. This is the moment the thesis is carried into the public world.
Issue 0 runs two to four weeks. Its final output becomes Ausna's first public artifact: a living publication composed of the dialogue, thinking, and work of every co-creator.
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Lu Renjie | cohort Initiator
Over fourteen years, he has built the Shan Hai Jing Series — 809 sculptures, an eight-meter mythological map, 3,407 totem designs, 420 groups of redesigned ancient script, spanning ceramics, painting, and a worldbuilding system that extends into the metaverse. His work has entered the collections of Jackie Chan, James Cameron, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and others, and been broadcast nationally across China.
Allen Chen | founder of Ausna
Social computing researcher at UIUC CS Lab, founded Doelenia, a multi-discipline humanist & philosopher, artists, and musician.
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Issue 0 · Cohort A · Starting Jul 13, 2026