The UnSchool of Disruptive Design is an innovative global learning laboratory spearheaded by designer and sociologist Leyla Acarolgu. It is an experimental education platform for adults that celebrates alternative thinking. It consists of a number of programmes that encourage participation of people from diverse professional backgrounds, not just creative ones, to maximise capacity for positive social and environmental change at large.
While the UnSchool has a decidedly hands-on approach to its learning courses (as the actual implementation of design solutions form part of the UnSchool’s curriculum), its programmes also contain compelling theoretical groundwork about the human condition and how the reorientation of certain mindsets can lead to very real changes in society and the natural environment. The UnSchool takes a more collaborative approach to the sharing of knowledge, busting the conventional lecture-to-student relationship in favour of a more level plain.
In this video produced by the UnSchool, self-professed sustainability provocateur Acaroglu explains the driving factors that led her to create this unusual knowledge platform as informed by her own sense of problem-solving and the stagnation of traditional teaching styles. According to her, minimising our environmental impact is no longer enough to ensure a sustainable future for generations to come. She believes it is a cerebral matter, that we must address the mode of thought that leads to global problems before trying to solve them in the same way that they were created.
“We live in this incredibly beautiful complex world, but we spend a lot of our adult lives looking at things in this really one-dimensional level,” she says, “We don’t realise that we try to solve complex problems with the same thinking that led to the problems to begin with.”
For more information on the UnSchool of Disruptive Design’s various programmes, click here.
