Established in 2014, LLSCLS is a community-curated lecture series hosted at Dreamers Welcome. Over the course of 9 lectures per year, past lecturers invite 2 new guests to become lecturers on a topic outside of their core focus of study. The 2 lecturers invite 10 dinner guests each to join Link-Link Club as audience members. The lecturer’s chosen topic (which has ranged from a gallery curator lecturing about Chinese economy, to a dancer lecturing about dyslexia, to a designer lecturing about the 2008 housing bubble, to a piano technician lecturing about comic books) is presented in a 20-minute format. After the two lectures, lecturers and guests eat pizza, allowing the interactions of strangers to continue to extend past small talk. This setting provides an approachable space where the lecturers have the confidence to give a lecture answering an inconsequential prompt. Every lecturer has to answer a questionnaire comprised of questions posted by past lecturers and add a new question for future lecturers. A compilation of all the answered questionnaires is presented in a scroll format.

The audio of every lecture is recorded for posterity (not for release). From these recordings, audio supercuts, titled Connecting the Dots Supercuts, created about topics or themes that have been going across different lectures and are presented at a Year-End Review/ subjective analysis. This event features a presentation with data (age range, background) of lecturers, stills photos of that year’s lectures and audio recordings. Lecturers and attendees shared their experiences and nominate a future lecturer that night. 

The exclusive yet comfortable setting is key to the project. This series instigates in-person dialogue to explore the grey-zones where people’s interests and intuitions overlap. Designed to subvert the tradition of experts-as-lecturers, LLSCLS instead provides a framework for anyone to speak about an interest or hobby in a semi-formal format. The series further provides a format for a group of friends (lecturer and their guests) to have a meaningful share of knowledge/interest that expands beyond the standard trappings of talking about work and the weather. The structure of lecturer-invites-new-lecturers allows the project to grow and branch out, as the list of potential future lecturers grows with each new lecture.