Launching Now: The UnSchool Community App!

The UnSchool Community App is Now Ready For Download!

After months of hard work and some serious challenges overcome, we are overjoyed to announce that our beautiful new UnSchool Community App is ready for you to join! 

Yes, an app — you can go search for it right now in the Google Play or Apple stores to download and start connecting! The first 30 days are on us :)

If you prefer a desktop experience, go to https://community.unschools.co/ on your computer now. No phone needed; it has all the same features as the mobile version.

We are very proud of what the UnSchool Community App has to offer, so keep reading to learn all about what you can expect when you sign up — and feel free to DM us any questions once you get into the app itself. Cheers to community, connection, and collaboration!

What is the UnSchool Community App?

The UnSchool Community App is a dedicated social connection app designed to inspire and foster collaboration amongst our growing global community of change-makers.

Whether you're just getting started or you’re more advanced along your change-maker journey, grow among a supportive international community filled with professionals and emerging leaders who share a common mission for a more sustainable and positive planet. 

As a bonus, we’ve integrated our online learning school into the app, so you can access any course that you’re enrolled in directly on your device! 

Here’s what you can look forward to (beyond the daily dose of optimism and creative inspiration coming through push notifications):

• Challenges: Monthly themed content + guided activation challenges for everyone.

• Connections: A global community community of changemakers to help you continue upskilling, collaborating and staying motivated.

• Conversations: Pop-in livestream conversations with guests like Leyla Acaroglu, UnSchool team members, alumni, certified Educators and invited guests. 

• Collaborations: Join a challenge team to hone your creative change-making skills.

• Courses: Access all of your UnSchool enrolled courses right inside the app.

• Credentials: Take what you learned and apply for skills validation badges that are blockchain encrypted and easily shareable. 

• FREE Take Action course: Advanced skill-building content to discover the fundamental principles of the Disruptive Design Method. 

• FREE content: Download free tools on systems, sustainability and design. 20% of UnSchool content is always open access — but you get special access to new content via the app.

• FREE month: Sign up now for a monthly subscription and get 30 days free exploration and participation.

• FREE annual bonus: Pay for a year subscription and get two months free (12 months for the price of 10!).

What inspired the UnSchool Community App?

Aside from the world being much more mobile these days, we are always looking for new ways to activate our growing global community of creative change-makers.

We wanted to make a destination for positive and proactive conversations, collaborations and connections for all the passionate systems-thinking change-makers like you.

We built in private rooms as well, for alumni and those of you who are on certification tracks. Online learning is GREAT, but one thing we always hear is how people miss the engagement and connection with others. So we wanted to build a space for live humans to talk to live humans as they go through the coursework or just life.

Get access to all your enrolled UnSchool Online classes, the community engagement feed, and an activation hub for monthly challenges and content!

How much does it cost?

The first 30 days are free to test drive the app, meet all the other people who have joined, participate in the challenges and conversations, and access all your courses that you’ve enrolled in.

We charge a subscription fee to help us make more change possible, to cover the creation and management costs of our community features and to ensure we can continue to build our offerings and open access programs.

We give away 20% of our content for free, so having a fee for things we offer helps others who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford the cost to access these resources.

When you pay for anything at the UnSchool, a portion of that goes to supporting the scholarships we give away. We are entirely self-funded (and proud of it!) so it is our community that helps us to decouple education from economics.

If you are unable to afford the subscription, we offer a limited number of needs-based scholarships on a discretionary basis. You can apply online here:

ARE YOU A TRACKER OR ALUMNI?

All existing Certification trackers and enrolled Masterclass participants get free access throughout their enrollment. If you don’t see the Alumni or Tracker groups when you get the app, send us an email at programs@unschools.co and we’ll get it sorted out for you.

Here are 3 reasons to start your 30-day SUBSCRIPTION today: 

1. Exclusive monthly challenges: Articles, activities, prompts, challenges, downloads and links focused on a new critical skill and knowledge area each month. The Activation Hub is your one-stop-shop for bite-sized content to help you make positive change. 

2. Social Feeds and Community Groups: Connect with like-minded people to collaborate, share, support, connect, vibe and get more positive stuff done! Don’t get bogged down in the negative mainstream social media, find your community of people who care deeply about designing a sustainable future and take action in creative, contemporary ways.

3. UnSchool course access: Be free of your laptop! Use the same email as your UnSchool Online account to access all your enrolled courses — a great way to listen to course material while out and about. Bonus: all new app signups get enrolled in a free Monthly Activation challenge!

Activate yourself to be a force for positive change by bringing knowledge, connection and motivation into your daily routine. The community will help keep you moving forward, making positive social and environmental change no matter what the world throws at us. See you there!

8 Creative Change-Maker Skills You Learn at The UnSchool

We know people like you want to help change the world. What a relief it is to know that you're not alone! The UnSchool was created for people just like you, and you can get involved by joining our blossoming community of creative change-makers from around the world who all agree that we can design a better future.  

The UnSchool’s community is made up of creative rebels, problem solvers, and activated change-makers from all walks of life. They are deeply passionate about making positive change — a  crew of people wanting to get busy unf*cking the multitude of social and environmental problems around us. Pandemic or not. 

For the last six years, we have taught thousands of people how to make positive change. We know that it’s not one person’s responsibility to save the world, but that every single one of us can change it for the better.

The suite of practical tools we share through our online courses and workshops are perfectly tuned to help you take action. 

Systems mapping at an UnSchool workshop

Just wanting to be a part of change is not always enough to evoke action. We have to contend with our brain biases that thwart our efforts (Netflix and chill overload, anyone?), even among the most committed of us. 

Making impactful, tangible change takes a specific mindset and toolset that helps hack these brain biases. Offering an applied knowledge set that anyone can use, the tools that we share at The UnSchool help you unravel complex interconnected problems and design positively disruptive interventions that leverage change. 

When you take an UnSchool offering, you can expect transformative learning that enhances your reflective, critical, and systems thinking perspectives as powerful tools required to participate in changing the world.  

We draw upon an existing knowledge bank to transfer skills to you via our Masterclasses, Online Courses or live online Workshops.

Here’s an overview of the 8 key skills you’ll gain and why they’re so crucial for any creative change-maker’s toolkit:

1. Problem Framing

Here at The UnSchool, we love love love problems and all of the brain-stretching fun that comes along with understanding what makes them tick. We’ll teach you how to love them as well (and encourage you to sleep and eat your veggies to help that brain stretching!).

You’ll learn how to write problem statements and frame your change initiatives as creative quests so you can quickly get to the heart of what it is you’re seeking to change.

Great classes that will help you gain this right now are Make Change, Research Strategies and Project Activation and Amplification.  

2. Systems Thinking

A core component of the three pillars of our philosophy (systems, sustainability and design), is the power of systems thinking. It is unmatched in creative change-making and a fundamental part of any good practice.

Everything is interconnected, and in order to leverage creativity while making change — actually, in order to do just about anything — one needs to know how to see, identify, interact with and think in systems. 

Take our very popular Systems Thinking course or get started with our Introduction to Systems Mapping. More advanced players can take our Systems Intervention course. 

3. Systems Mapping

When it comes to making change, knowledge without application isn’t very useful. So while thinking in systems is a great start, applying a systems mindset to designing interventions is where the real magic lies.

To help you put your systems thinking knowledge to work, we’ll teach you how to map systems via various tools like cluster maps and interconnected circles maps (and later, how to design sustainable interventions based on the insight you glean from those maps!). 

Get started with Introduction to Systems Mapping, or read our e-books Design Systems Change or Circular Systems Design. 

4. Life Cycle Thinking 

Similar to systems thinking, you’ll uncover the secret lives of everyday things when you begin viewing them from a life cycle perspective.

We’ll show you how to easily map the production flow and material impact of anything created, as well as show you how to access life cycle data to give you the skills to do quick, paper-based life cycle explorations for comparing products and services. 

We cover this in detail in our Sustainability in Business 101 course and in our Introduction to Life Cycle Thinking course. 

5. Theory of Change

A Theory of Change is an approach to setting actions to get outcomes that you can map. You could say it is a description, or illustration, of the approach you would take to enact change, and it can be done both for an actual intervention or for an entire philosophy on how change happens. 

We will show you how to reverse engineer your change objective by using the theory of change methodology. This is an incredible way to not only lay the pathway for change but also develop a benchmark for measuring change initiatives in the future.

Jump into the wonderful world of making change with our Make Change course, or level up your change initiatives with our Project Activation and Application course. 

6. Circular Design

We are all consumers in the current linear economy, but as we transition to one that massively reduces waste and instead promotes a variety of reuse approaches, we will each become shareholders in the delivery and cycling of goods and services throughout the economy.

The Circular Economy requires a redesign of nearly everything, so we’ll equip you with all the circular design (and redesign) tools and strategies you need to be apart of this global transformation.

Get reading with our Circular Systems Design e-book, download our FREE open-source Circular Redesign Toolkit or take our Introduction to Circular Economy Class to advance your capacity in this important skill. 

7. Gamification Design

Gamification is the use of game mechanics in non-gaming environments, and it has become the hot tool for user experience design. It is a technique of dissecting and exploring the mechanics that motivate action in non-gaming environments — and it can truly be a ‘game changer’ when it comes to making creative change (say that 3x fast!)

You will learn all about the mechanics of gamification, the different ways you can apply it to effecting change and the fascinating world of human behavioral motivators.

We have a course in Gamification and Game Theory that covers everything you need to know! If you are already into gamification, then take our Cognitive Science and Bias course to learn more about the behavioral patterns around this. 

8. Activation Planning

Pulling it all together, your activation plan is the last step before you launch your creative change idea into the world. This helps you feel confident and prepared to do what you set out to do: change the world.

We show you the tactics and practical ways of turning an idea into action and ensuring that it has sustainable, long-lasting impact.

Our Project Activation and Amplification course is the perfect place for you if you want to get your change-making ideas out into the world. We also have a 30-day activation challenge that is perfect for you if you are keen to effect change and want to learn ALL THE TOOLS!

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Many of these tools can be found outlined in our FREE toolkits. You can access them suit of them here >

If you’re ready to make it happen, join us for our first live online Masterclass of 2021, The Disruptive Design Masterclass!

Taught over the course of 1 full month, you will cover one of these toolsets via 2x weekly live sessions with a cohort of like-minded creative change-makers.

Want to know what the experience is like? Check out Alumni Milosz’s experience here. 

What is Disruptive Design?

By Leyla Acaroglu

Disruption was asked to be banished in 2012, 2014, and 2015, yet it still is a hot, overused ‘buzzword.’ Just like many aspirational terms before it (like sustainability and innovation), popularity leads to overuse, dilution, confusion, and fatigue. Frankly, overuse sucks the meaning right out of a concept until it’s just a shell of an idea held together by ink on a page.

Disruption, like so many overused words, is intensely misunderstood. While conceptually the term means to create an interruption into something that is maintaining a status quo, colloquially it is much more about making loads of money from the newest, most ‘disruptive’ (read: newer) technology out there. It’s toppling old industries through new smart, young, and agile upstarts. In this context, it’s not about making change; it’s about winning customers, clicks, and clients.

To disrupt is to disturb or intervene. The term came to prominence in the late 90s when Clay Christensen, an MIT professor, spoke of it in relation to business activity in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. For Christensen, his term “disruptive innovation” is the very specific act of challenging a mainstream company by creating a new parallel product that activates previously un-activated elements of the economy; thus, it creates a shift toward the new offering, poaching consumers from the main player over to the newer innovation. It has nothing to do with coolness or edginess, or even social change or sustainability. Disruptive innovation, in this context, simply has to do with new economic activity that challenges the mainstream business establishment.

Christensen has written about how Uber, often referred to as a major disrupter, is indeed not a disruptive innovator. According to his theory, Uber misses the mark because it did not enter a low-end or new foothold market; instead, it launched in San Francisco, a place where taxi rides were already in high demand and its target audience was already accustomed to using taxis. Furthermore, Christensen points out that the term disruptive is being wrongly used to describe innovation that is simply improving upon a good product that already exists - something Uber did masterfully by offering convenience for hailing a cab and paying for it via a smart app.

But, for Christensen, they missed the mark on being disruptive because the initial consumer base did not reject it and wait for its quality to improve in order to drive down market prices; instead, those already using taxis happily thrust Uber to the top of the market. So yes, Uber is transforming the taxi industry, but, according to Christiansen’s framing of disruption, their business model does not follow the basic principles to qualify it as “disruptive.”

The Case for More Disruptive Design

So, where does disruptive design come into play? And can it really be differentiated from disruptive innovation? While the concepts have similarities on face value (such as shared a word that describes change), disruptive design is very different from the concept of disruptive innovation.

Here’s how I frame it:

Design is the act of creating something new — sometimes iterative, sometimes innovative, and in rare cases, revolutionary. Designing is an intentional act of creating a product, service, or system that embodies some degree of change. First and foremost, design has to achieve function (purely aesthetic creative productions are not, in my opinion, design; they are more so in the world of art, which is incredible and valuable and all of the adjectives to describe the power of art and yes there is always a need for more of it in the world). But art can exist without function whereas design can’t, so when we talk about Disruptive Design, we are talking about creating intentionally disruptive creative interventions that are functionally imbued with the objective of challenging the status quo and making positive change.

Design is about creating something that adds to or iterates on the existing, and disruption is about creating a disturbance with the intent of changing a system. When combined, the practice of disruptive design is to create intentional interventions into a pre-existing system with the specific objective to leverage a different outcome, and more importantly, an outcome that is likely to create positive social change.

When combined, the practice of disruptive design is to create intentional interventions into a pre-existing system with the specific objective to leverage a different outcome, and more importantly, an outcome that is likely to create positive social change.

The Disruptive Design Method (DDM) is about activating sustainability principles through creative practice. It employs a series of thinking and doing tools that anyone can implement in a formulated processes of mining, landscaping, and building to develop a three-dimensional perspective to exploring, understanding, and intervening in complex hyper-local to global problems.

Mining: Deep dive into the problem, develop research approaches, explore the elements within: PROBLEM LOVING STAGE.

Landscaping: Identify the main elements in the system and map how they interact, relate and connect: SYSTEMS MAPPING STAGE.

Building: Solutions emerge from the last two stages. Explore options, viability and possibility. Test, prototype, repeat: IDEATION & INTERVENTION STAGE.

I developed the Disruptive Design Method as a way to fill a gap between knowledge and action, to forge a community of practice that facilitates purpose-driven changemakers, to activate systems thinking, to consider sustainability sciences in what we produce and to enhance creative ideation techniques as platforms for actively participating in the world around us. Really, it’s a remedy for the perpetual frustration that many of us experience, as it provides a set of mental and practical tools to help redesign the world so that it works better for all of us.

We live in a hyper-negativity-fueled media landscape where it is increasingly difficult to escape the perception that everything is fucked. But if we all opt into this restrictive mental model, then we are opting into a self-perpetuating future. In fact, the future is not defined; we co-create it as we participate in the construction of what is relevant now. Our immediate actions actually define the future scenario that we will be in, both individually and as a collective whole (there is so much amazing nerdy stuff out there ATM on this from physicists; see here, here and here).

“The best way to predict the future is to design it” — R. Buckminster Fuller

What may be most surprising about Disruptive Design is that it is not limited to designers, engineers, techies, entrepreneurs, or any other profession that’s been unconsciously linked to the word “disrupt.” Anyone can practice the Disruptive Design Method:

Here are the general prerequisites:

• Give a shit about the future of this planet

• Have a burning desire to participate in designing solutions that address hyper-local to global issues that affect humanity and the sustainability of the life-support systems that sustain the planet

• Be open to sharing, exchange, and collaboration

• Be a pioneer who is willing to fail, discover, curiously explore, and change a core part of what they do in the world

• See problems as opportunities

REthinking linear consumption

Our entire economic structure is based on the idea of producers and consumers. Whilst we know it’s a little more complex than this dichotomic bi-structure, there are very specific differences in these two approaches to living in this world. Modern lifestyles are geared toward a massive shift in production to consumption. Consumption is the act of passively absorbing the products of society, whereas a producer is an agent that forms the artifacts and elements that make up the human world. All elements of an ecosystem designed by nature are both producers and consumers.

Humans are the only species that create closed ecosystems, where one is reliant on the dictatorship of the creator. I can imagine you are reading this on a product that is created as a closed ecosystem, designed to create an addictive need for the specific products of the creator.

How does this relate to being a disruptive changemaker? It’s easy; avoid being a passive consumer, activate your agency, and become an active producer. The hard part is that it requires a rewriting of the mental codes we have all become comfortable with and are attached to for convenience and efficiency alike.

Creativity has always been about challenging the status quo. The advent of the industrial revolution came along and really helped shift the role of creativity, industrializing its role in society. When the profession of industrial design was created, it was all about customizing the user experience to overcome the mundanity that mass production had facilitated. Also, companies now needed to find new ways of getting a competitive edge, and creatives started to be the hot commodity in facilitating this need (a trend we are also seeing again on the rise now with the Internet age). Inherently, though, design, in this context, was focused on adding to the aesthetic experiences of the material world and its rapid advancement; it wholeheartedly embraced issues of planned obsolescence and the advent of the throwaway culture (there are troves of old-school reading on this; here are a few great starting points- Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers, Gils Slade’s Made to Break and The Economist’s Planned Obsolescence).

Now we have experience design (in which many jobs are filled by traditionally trained industrial designers), and it’s really about cognitive experience design (Tristan Harris, who used to be a Design Ethicist at Google, writes about this in this article). The issue here is that the designed world is often created to serve the interests of corporations as producers, to activate the latent consumer desires. Creative minds are put to work on creating the financial and neurological dependence of the average human to be addicted to the momentary emotional benefits that consumption has on us. Just take the pure emotional joy that many of us experience the moment we get a new gadget — the bliss that a well-designed UX offers us — and compare it to the pain and frustration that we experience when something does not work according to our expectations. And then as quick as it sets in, it wears off, because — here’s where the money factor comes in — so much of what is produced is designed to break, to be undesirable as quickly as it was desired!

This is where the Disruptive Design Method differs from the rest. It means actively seeking out the production of goods, services, and expenses that challenge and change the status quo so that we have more significant contributions to the narratives of where we want to end up as a species, happening from all sides of the debate. And this means corporations must be willing to experiment and create things that go against the “business-as-usual” model of take, make, use, and dispose. This is where movements like the circular economy, regenerative business, and product-service-system models are so incredibly powerful at reimagining the economic activities that sustain many of our livelihoods, but also have significant costs to the wider social and environmental ecosystems.

Activate your Agency: Learn the Disruptive Design Methodology

The Disruptive Design Methodology is a three-part process of mining, landscaping, and building for problem solving that helps people develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works and provides a unique way of exploring, identifying, and creating tactical interventions that leverage systems change for positive social and environmental outcomes.

Because intervening in the status quo requires a critical and flexible thinking framework (along with a bit of rebellious flare), the Disruptive Design approach initiates change by teaching practitioners to love a problem arena, which essentially is any arena in which you wish to create positive change. Instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, the Disruptive Design method dives right into the sticky center of the issue and then looks at the ways in which complex, dynamically-evolving systems interact in order to find the opportunities for leveraging change through creative interventions.

Once you learn to be a problem lover, you use systems boundaries to define the spaces you wish to explore, and then find connection points perfect for a tactical intervention (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problem arena). 

Then, because you have all this new knowledge from mining and landscaping, you can rapidly develop divergent solutions and creative approaches for change that builds on your unique individual sphere of influence, which is the space we can all curate to affect change on the people or things around us. Any problem from community concerns to massive global crises can be explored and evolved through this method; because it’s a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on the problem. The core pillars of the approach are always systems, sustainability, and design.

Disruptive Design is a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools to activate positive change by mining through problems, employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through systems analysis, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact through a given micro or macro problem arena. It enables you to gain an empowered perspective of your role in the world and get the tools to take on a proactive approach to designing change in everyday local environments and socially-motivated practices.

The entire knowledge set equips you to be a more aware and intentional agent for change. You can dive into a comprehensive overview of the Disruptive Design Methodology in this online introductory class, or you can also download this FREE toolkit for creative facilitation using the Disruptive Design Method!

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Get Our New FREE Facilitation & Creative Development Toolkit

Positively disruptive communication can be tricky not just to create, but also to engage in. But, with pressing global issues, concerned changemakers need the know-how to navigate discourse and dialogue around things that matter the most. 

This new (totally free!) toolkit, a collaboration by Disrupt Design with support from OxFam Asia’s Lab, is designed to support the creative exploration and development of digital campaigns for activating positive change using the Disruptive Design Method (DDM). 

The 60+ page illustrated toolkit includes a step-by-step guide to facilitating engaging workshops and designing creative campaigns to activate change in the digital space.

Part 1 shares a workshop process through systems thinking and creative ideation using the DDM, and Part 2 provides a set of actions to support designing and developing creative and engaging digital campaigns.

Activating Change 

By running through the content of this toolkit, you will be supported in exploring and developing exciting new opportunities for creating effective engagement campaigns that move people into action. One of the key things in designing effective campaigns that activate change is understanding the issues you are seeking to address, knowing the system it exists within and developing unique and engaging ways of communicating the desired change. This toolkit is designed to help you facilitate getting from issues to ideas to action!

Part 1: Applying the DDM

Many of you are already familiar with the DDM’s approach to problem-solving, one which helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works and provides a unique way of exploring, identifying, and creating tactical interventions that leverage systems change for positive social and environmental outcomes. It incorporates research and problem exploration (MINING), systems thinking and modes of interventions (LANDSCAPING), and then ideation and creative development (BUILDING). 

In the context of designing positively disruptive communication, the DDM is effective because it initiates a framework for something that is very innate to us humans: creative problem solving! Many people think that they are not creative, but creativity (the ability to come up with new and unique ideas) is actually a very natural human instinct. People have been creating new and unique things forever, and each day, every one of us creates things to make our lives more effective and enjoyable. We cook, clean, write, draw, tell stories, play — these are all forms of creative expression. This toolkit helps apply the DDM in a way that feels natural and organic, as well as exciting and revelatory. 

Part 2: Creative Campaign Design

After running through the creative process of the DDM In Part 1 and getting a tangible idea that you want to develop into a creative campaign, you will need to prototype and design the final concept.  Prototyping is the technique of turning ideas into a tangible physical concept that you can share with others, get feedback on, and refine your idea into a viable solution. In this section of the toolkit, you will find a quick guide covering design approaches for digital campaign communication design. 

Design is critical to any campaign success, especially in the hyper-visual digital space. Well communicated ideas are what help change the world. The goal here is to design the right approach to engage your intended community with your ideas and provide the right motivation for taking action. Campaign design is about several key factors: tone and style, visuals, layout and language. 

It’s not just what you say; it’s also HOW you say it. 

We communicate in more ways than ever these days: verbally, through body language, social media, text, television, and also through colour, symbology, and the imagery that we choose.

It’s therefore critical to understand, respect and ethically leverage what our cultural understanding is of these subtle and not-so-subtle ways of communicating to our both own and the wider global community while minimizing unintended consequences and miscommunication.

There are now lots of useful tools to help create beautifully-designed digital communication, from social media posts to posters and videos. By following the simple steps laid out in the toolkit, anyone can come up with more beautiful and impactful campaign designs. After running through this campaign design flow, you will have stepped through the design process of exploring and deciding on the aspects of effective communication to your community — setting yourself up for success in conveying important messages in an effective, tangible way that creates positive change.

We hope you enjoy the toolkit and it helps you facilitate and activate more positive change in the world!

Why is this free?

We are committed to helping anyone, anywhere make positive change and give away a minimum of 20% of all our content for free. We have a range of free toolkits and courses you can find online here. We are only able to do this, thanks to the support of our customers and clients who pay for our classes and workshops.

UnSchool Birthday Celebrations and Our Latest Video!

WE ARE 6 YEARS OLD!

Hard to believe that the UnSchool has been around for six whole years! In this short time, we are so elated to have initiated programs all over the world, have supported and connected with thousands of creative changemakers from all walks of life and been at the forefront of positively disrupting the status quo to help design a sustainable and regenerative future for all!

In this week’s journal, we take a look at our programs and accomplishments, reflect on what we have collectively achieved and get excited about what positive mischief we will get up to next.

The first UnSchool Fellowship, in New York City in 2015!

The UnSchool started in New York with our very first Fellowship of 16 brave first-timers who came with us on an experiential learning adventure in the energetic city. Since then, there have been 10 incredible Fellowships, dozens of Masterclasses and workshops both in-person and online, around the world and at the CO Project Farm. We developed and grew our online learning lab, as well as created tons of resources and tools, many for free, to support creative changemakers around the world.

Every few weeks, we feature our incredible alumni in the journal, highlighting the inspiring and adventurous projects they are working on, exploring how the UnSchool has helped them move their initiatives and career forward. We don’t measure our success on activating change based on vanity metrics like social shares or likes, but instead focus on the change that our alumni are making out in the world, taking action and participating in their communities at large. We see conversations changing and communities taking action and feel proud to be a part of this global shift toward sustainability and systems change.

Being a nomadic school means we have been invited to many beautiful and inspiring places around the world, with Fellowships in New York, Mexico City, Melbourne, São Paulo, Berlin, Christchurch, San Francisco, Mumbai, Cape Town and most recently, Kuching! We have videos of all our Fellowships on the website, and we are so happy to release the newest one here!

Explore the UnSchool's Disruptive Design method and approach to experiential education through a mini doco of our 2019 fellowship in Kuching, Malasia with a ...

Throughout the years, we have had participants join us from all around the world, with a strong equity access policy of a minimum of 20% access and free content from our own projects and the ones we are commissioned to do.

So far, we have given away over 250k USD in scholarships to people in over 35 countries around the world. We have an open scholarship form where you can apply anytime, so if you want to join us but need some support, let us know! We also have an extensive free resources section you can access here.

With such a diverse alumni group, we are always looking to expand our language access, and are happy to be able to offer the Change Makers Lab Cards in bilingual Thai and English, the Design Play Cards in Spanish and English, and the Circular Classroom in Swedish, Finnish and English. It’s on our list of things to do to keep adding more translations!

WHAT’S NEXT AT THE UNSCHOOL

Like everyone, we have been rapidly adapting and changing to the post-Covid world. We are every day more grateful that we launched our online learning platform several years ago, with around 60 classes, certifications, games, toolkits, handbooks and other resources for people like you, looking to make change and gain the tools to do so.

We’ve been busy building new offerings that include a very exciting suite of Sustainability in Business programs, both live online (join us in October!) and self-paced (coming soon!!), along with a youth program (ages 12+).

We also somehow found the time to release a cookbook of all your favourite (and more!) UnSchool plant-based meals.

And… we are releasing an UnSchool App!

In other exciting new ventures, we are building an app! We have listened and heard from so many of our alumni about the desire to be able to more easily connect with other UnSchoolers (although you do seem to pop up with collaborations quite often!) and we finally have some time to make it happen.

Watch out in the near future as we beta test an app designed to connect you to each other in a non-social media way, where we can have our own space to share, take on challenges, find each other, and connect in new and exciting ways. We’ve never designed an app before, so it will be a fun and rapidly changing experiment in which we have a great group of beta volunteers to test out and help us refine to be the best experience we can make.

We are also brainstorming ways to stay connected in the time of reduced travel, so watch out for new launches, workshops, collaborations and other ways of continuing the UnSchool adventure. Stay tuned for more info!

OUR BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO YOU!

In celebration of our birthday, we are having a 48-hour flash sale on all things UnSchool!* Use the code BIRTHDAY50 for the next 48 hours to get all things UnSchool half off and celebrate another year of making change with us!

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UnSchool Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint

To celebrate our newest online learning challenge, the Youth Activation 4 Week Sustainability and Make Change Sprint, we are sharing some highlights of the content with you in this week’s UnSchool Journal.

Designed for 12-18 year-olds wanting to gain the tools for making positive change in the world around them, the content is all about agency activation, systems thinking, sustainability sciences, cognitive science and ideation. The program is jam-packed with daily activities and brain expanding content perfect for any young changemaker.

Designed as a 4-week sprint, the format has daily content with quizzes at the end of each week to unlock the following week’s content.

Who is the program for?

This program is designed for young people interested in activating themselves to become leaders for social and environmental change. 

We believe young people are critical to designing a positive future, and we also know that much of the mainstream education system doesn't give us tools to dissect the complex systems around us all and then activate our agency in order to effect change. 

Everyone has the capacity to make a positive impact, and we are committed to helping people all over the world uncover and activate their capacity to help design a future that works better than today. 

You will get a lot out of this program if you are: 

• between the ages of 12 and 18 

• have a deep desire to be a positive force on the world around you 

• get frustrated by inaction and want to gain the tools to create change 

• want to understand how the world and the human mind works 

• love to read, learn and think differently (or want to be challenged to develop these skills!)

Parents, if you are keen to support your young changemaker, then this program is for you, too. There are lots of great learning experiences that will support you and your young person to develop tools for effecting positive change. We have made this content easy to digest, without taking away from the complexity of the world. If anything, this toolkit will help anyone discover how to love and appreciate the complex world we live in and to design creative ways of helping make it a better place. 

Overview of the Program

Week 1: Activating Your Agency and Making Change 

Here we explore how you, yes you, can find the power and tools to activate your agency, expand your sphere of influence, develop reflective and critical thinking skills, expand your mindset and be a positive force on the world around you! 

Week 2: Sustainability and Systems Thinking 

From unsustainability to the sustainable development goals, the circular economy and the tools for exploring complex systems in the world around us, this week we will dive deep into the issues and the opportunities for exploring and changing them!

Week 3: Exploring the Human Experience 

Humans can be very weird, which can make it hard to understand, empathize and effect change. So in this week's content, we cover how the human brain works, cognitive biases, social norms and the odd things that affect how we each engage with and ultimately impact the world around us. 

Week 4: Activating Change

Here we explore all the creative ways you can develop projects and initiatives that support positive impacts on the world around you! 

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A Sneak Peek at the Content

Week 1: AGENCY

Let's look at how to activate agency for ourselves and in others by working on identifying and expanding your sphere of influence. The first part of the Design Systems Change Handbook goes into this in great detail, and here is the summary version. 

Agency is the capacity of an individual to take action in a particular environment. For most of our lives, we are taught that we don't have impacts on the world around us. An agentized individual, however, is aware of their influence and the dynamic relationship they have with the world. 

Every action we take or don't take has an impact: the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe - it all has an impactful relationship with the world.

Your agency is about your capacity to act independently and make free choices. These choices are affected by your worldview and the way you see yourself, formed through your experiences with the world, society in general and the things you chose to learn. 

Social structures and circumstances have a huge impact on one's agency, and the life you are born into can increase or decrease your “given” agency. Many of these social structures and circumstances are out of our control, yet they have a huge impact on our agency. The most critical thing is how you interpret your experiences and what they do to your sense of self. Thankfully, we are also seeing seismic shifts in access to the resources that support individual agency development.

Design science pioneer Buckminster Fuller said, ”Call me trimtab,” (it’s even engraved on his tombstone) because he, like many other changemakers, identified that the smallest part of the system can make the biggest change. A trimtab is a tiny part inside the rudder at the back of a large ship. When the ship’s steering wheel is moved, the tiny trimtab shifts in direction and (re)directs the whole trajectory of the ship. Often, the smallest part of the system can move the biggest parts.

This analogy is important to consider when thinking about your personal sphere of influence and the agency that you have to make change in the world around you. Many people fall into the trap of deflecting responsibility to others or blaming the large obvious parts of the system, deferring change to elements that they have little control over. But it’s often the small inconspicuous parts that have the most power and influence over the system dynamics to affect change. Our job is to identify them and unlock their potential. 

Integrity (especially as we deploy what agency we have and develop) is the backbone of our sense of self. It is about having a moral stand that you can refer to and being “whole” or complete when you come to making decisions. As author C.S. Lewis says, integrity is "doing the right thing, even when no one is looking.”  

Expanding Your Personal Agency 

Developing agency goes hand in hand with developing a firm adherence to a set of values, honesty to yourself and the world around you. Fundamentally, it’s a code of conduct or moral compass that you use to set up your practice and govern your decisions as you grow your sphere of influence in the world. 

Individuals who have a strong sense of personal agency believe events are a result of the actions they take, and they praise or blame themselves and their own abilities. Those who see agency external to themselves will praise or blame external factors. For example, someone with a strong sense of personal agency will credit their study habits for passing a test, whereas someone else may attribute their success to the teacher or the exam. Likewise, if they don’t do well, the person with the stronger sense of personal agency will blame themselves rather than the teacher or exam (Carlson, 2007).  

reference: Carlson, N.R., Buskist, W., Heth, C.D. and Schmaltz, R., 2007. Psychology: the science of behaviour-4th Canadian ed.

Week 2: WHAT IS SYSTEMS THINKING?

Have you ever thought about how you think? Albert Einstein famously said, “We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.” Truth-bomb, right? It just makes sense that when we look at solving a problem, we should employ a different level of thinking to avoid the issues that created the problem in the first place!

But what is that level of thinking... and how do you do it? We believe that Systems Thinking is the answer. Systems Thinking is a way of seeing the world as a series of interconnected and interdependent systems rather than lots of independent parts.

But before we go deeper into what systems thinking is, let’s talk about what it isn’t.

What systems are NOT

The main way we are taught to think is linear and often reductionist. We learn to break the world down into manageable chunks and see issues in isolation of their systemic roots. This dominant way of approaching the world is a product of industrialized educational norms – in one way or another, we have learned, through our 15 to 20+ years of mainstream education, and/or through socialization, that the most effective way to solve a problem is to treat the symptoms, not the causes.

Yet, when we look at the world through a systems lens, we see everything is interconnected. Problems are connected to many other elements within dynamic systems. If we just treat one symptom, the flow on effects lead to burden shifting and often unintended consequences.

Not only does systems thinking oppose the mainstream reductionist view; it replaces it with expansionism, the view that everything is part of a larger whole and that the connections between all elements are critical.

Systems are essentially networks made up of nodes or agents that are linked in varied and diverse ways. By using systems thinking, we identify and understand these relationships as part of the exploration of the larger systems at play. Everything is interconnected, every system is made up of many subsystems, and is itself a part of larger systems. Just as we are made up of atoms with molecules and quantum particles, problems are made up of problems within problems!

Every system is like a Matryoshka doll, made up of smaller and smaller parts within a larger whole. Seeing things in this way helps to create a more flexible view of the world and the way it works, and it illuminates opportunities for addressing some of its existing and evolving problem arenas.

The three key systems at play

Although the world is made up of endless large and small interconnected systems, there are three key systems that should be considered: social systems, industrial systems, and ecosystems. These three major systems keep the economy churning along, the world functioning for us humans, and our society operating in order (sort of, anyway!).

Social systems are the intangible rules and structures, created by humans, that create and maintain societal norms, rituals, and behaviors. Industrial systems refers to all of the manufactured material world, created to facilitate human needs (and all of which requires natural resources to be extracted and transformed into stuff). And the last big system, which is arguably the most important one, is the ecosystem. It provides all the natural services (such as clean air, food, fresh water, minerals, and natural resources) needed for the other two systems to exist.

Ultimately, approaching life from a systems perspective is about tackling big, messy real-world problems rather than isolating cause and effect down to a single point. In the latter case, “solutions” are often just band-aids (that may cause unintended consequences) as opposed to real and holistic systemic solutions.

Looking for the links and relationships within the bigger picture helps identify the systemic causes and lends itself to innovative, more holistic ideas and solutions.

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Participants can take the course at their own pace as well as run through it as the 4-week sprint. They get access for six months and can download lots of different activity sheets + The Design Systems Change handbook as well.

Week 65: International Youth Day | Tools for Supporting Young Change Makers

12th August is the day the UN celebrates International Youth Day this year, and what a year to shine a spotlight on all the incredible action young people around the world are taking. This year’s theme is Youth Engagement for Global Action, and over the last year, we have seen so many amazing activations from young people, like the Fridays for Future school strikes led by the incredibly inspiring Greta Thurnberg, as well as the landmark court case Juliana v. United States, which asserted that the impacts of climate change were violating Americans’ federal rights.

So in this week’s journal, we celebrate the highlights of the last 12 months of youth action, and in celebration, we developed a youth activation kit that is on sale for half price for the rest of August!

Friday School Strikes

#FridaysForFuture started in August 2018, by then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, when she and other young activists sat every school day for three weeks in front of the Swedish parliament protesting the lack of action on the global climate crisis. The now famous youth leader Greta posted what and why she was doing this on social media, and it soon become a viral phenomenon that has grown into a global youth movement.

By mid-2019, young people were striking on Fridays in more than 2,000 towns and cities in over 100 different countries with millions of students joining in. This year, September 25th will be a national day of action whereby hundreds of thousands of young people around the world will strike from school, demanding leaders take action on climate change (with Covid-19 precautions in place).

YOUNG PEOPLE SUE the US Government OVER CLIMATE CHANGE

Since 2015, a group of young Americans fought an inspiring battle against the US government, claiming that their constitutional rights were being neglected if the government did not take action on climate change. Sadly, in January this year, a U.S. federal appeals court threw the case out, causing a major setback to efforts to spur the U.S. government to address the issue.

The pioneering law suit was brought against the government by a group of 12-18 year olds, including Aji Piper, Levi Draheim, Journey Zephier, Jayden Foytlin, Miko Vergun, and Nathan Baring among a total of 21 plaintiffs, all whom were passionate about the planet and not willing to sit by and watch their government continue to ignore the science on climate change.

Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz, who presided over the case, said the following when providing his opinion on the ruling, saying that the young people “have made a compelling case that action is needed… Reluctantly, we conclude that such relief is beyond our constitutional power. Rather, the plaintiffs’ impressive case for redress must be presented to the political branches of government.”

All is not lost as this action has clearly inspired others. After the devastating fires that ravaged Australia in early 2020, a 23-year-old Australian student brought a class-action case against government over climate change. More and more young people are demanding action from their governments and taking action themselves to secure their future against catastrophic environmental issues.

Youth-led Action Networks

There are countless youth-led climate and environmental action networks, educational organisations, not-for-profits and campaigns set up all over the world. Here is a list of just some of the initiatives set up and run by young people:

Alliance for Climate Education

One Up Action

Zero Hour Movement

Youth Climate Leaders

UK Student Climate Network

Sunrise Movement

Indian Youth Climate Network

Future Coalition

Hip Hop Caucas

Youth for Nature

Youth Leaders

Here are some of the youth leaders and their twitter handles all using their voices to forge a pathway towards a sustainable future for all of us:

Nadia Nazar, 17 from USA @nadiabaltimore

Holly Gillibrand, 13 from Scotland @HollyWildChild

Vic Barrett from the USA @vict_barrett

Isra Hirsi, 16 from the USA @israhirsi 

Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, 19 from the USA @xiuhtezcatl

Jerome Foster II, 16 from the USA @jeromefosterii

Luisa Neubauer, 23 from Germany @Luisamneubauer

John Paul Jose, 22 from India @johnpauljos

David Wicker, 14 from Italy @davidwicker_hf

Lilly Platt, 9 from the Netherlands @lillyspickup

Leah Namugerwa, 14 from Uganda @NamugerwaLeah

Saoi O’Connor, 16 from Ireland @saoi4climate

Timoci Naulusala, 12 from Fiji #timoci

Shalvi Shakshi, 10, from Fiji

Nakabuye Hilda from Uganda @NakabuyeHildaF

India Logan-Riley from Aotearoa / New Zealand @IndiMiro

Brianna Fruean, 20 from Samoa @Brianna_Fruean

Ridhima Pandey, 12 from India @ridhimapandey7

Marinel Ubaldo from The Philippines @YnelUbaldo

Winnie Asiti from Kenya @Asiti

Ayakha Melithafa, 17 from South Africa @ayakhamelithafa

Xiye Bastida, 17 from Mexico @xiyebastida

Autumn Peltier. 16 from Wiikwemkoong First Nation @StephaniePelti3

Amariyanna Copeny, 13 from the USA @LittleMissFlint

Take Action: our 4-Week Youth Activation Challenge

We have designed a 4-week learning challenge for any young person who wants to take action. With loads of UnSchool content from systems thinking to agency development and creativity, we have packed this program full of exciting and motivating content perfect to get any young mind activated and engaged.

To celebrate International Youth Day, the Program is half price for the rest of this month. Just use the code IYD2020 when signing up

Sign up here >

8 Ways to Make Online Education Engaging and Interactive

By Leyla Acaroglu

Since we are all now suddenly spending a significant amount of time in online learning environments and digital meetings, and I have been running programs online for several years pre-pandemic, I have been reflecting on what does and does not make online learning work.

Here I have compiled a list of things that I think help make digital learning experiences more effective, as well as things to avoid if you want your participants to be more engaged and motivated through the somewhat more complex 2D world of online learning —  be it in a workshop or even just an online meeting. 

I usually run live online one-month intensive training programs that mirror the core content we teach at any of the UnSchool in-person programs. We started offering these types of intensive online programs a few years back after it was obvious that for some people, getting to a physical location was challenging especially with family responsibilities etc.

Given that we are very committed to equitable access, we started offering a one-month, live, small-group program on the Disruptive Design Method, Systems Change and the Circular Economy and I was fascinated to see how effective these could still be for effective learning and creative change outcomes. 

Since the Covid crises, like many others, we had to suspend all our in-person programs and convert to online. Each time I have now run one of these intensive masterclasses online, the group really amazes me, and I am just as inspired and educated as they are after the program is complete! 

8 ways to stay engaged

Here are eight of the things I have discovered help make online education more effective: 

1. Always get people to introduce themselves in a way that helps the rest of the group be excited about working with them. At the start I give people 2-5 minutes to share who they are and why they are taking the program, along with something weird or wonderful about themselves — the latter always helps break things up and give us a giggle. Laughing is so important for human bonding, and it helps to ease any tensions some participants might have at the start. 

2. Ensure everyone keeps their video on so that everyone can see that everyone else is engaged. Of course, offer people the opportunity to switch it off if they have to pop out, but if you are in a one-hour session, then most people should be visible to help get the benefits of social visual interaction, like mirror neurons. 

3. Break people up into groups and get them talking. If you use Zoom (which we have for years), you can pop people into breakout rooms. It's an amazing feature, as it sends your participants into however many rooms you want for a smaller conversation. So say you can have a group of 10; you can put them in 5 rooms to have one-on-one time or in 3 rooms to have a bit more of a group discussion. You can’t see them unless you pop into a room, and you can call them back at any time to the main room. This helps people process new information, connect with their peers and ensure that they all can participate.

4. Get people doing things. I always pick someone and ask them for an example or to respond to a question, or I get them to write a list of reflections for 2 minutes, or break out into a room and discuss the activity they just did. I also give homework tasks too, then at the start of each session, two or three people share their actions and reflections on the homework task. Interactivity, online or off, is key to cognitive engagement and seeing how others respond to tasks is a very effective peer learning tool. 

5. Keep on time, as it helps respect all people in the group. Especially in a digital environment, people often have to leave right at the end time, and it is always awkward if some pop out before you have finished. So, I work really hard to keep on exactly the time we agreed, and if I have to go over, I make a quick offer for people to pop out if they need and then watch the recorded video later. But I think it's super important to respect the group dynamics by ensuring everyone can be there from start to finish together and say a nice goodbye before rushing off to whatever they have on next! 

6. Use time well. I always plan out my session in chunks of time and make sure I break up any direct instruction so that there is some interactivity. Maybe at the start, middle or end during a lecture session, I will get the participants time to respond or go to a breakout room and do something. In a workshop session, I design several activities around the core learning goals for that session to do alongside the presentation. I often use time restrictions to ensure that when a breakout room happens, they know that they have to be efficient to get the outcomes and then report back when the group reconvenes. 

7. Be understanding. Online learning can be tough for some, as there may be distractions around them or on their computer with seeing messages or emails come in. I understand that kids might start crying or the postman arrives, so let people know that you get it so that if these types of things happen, they don't feel awkward when they have to respond to them. The goal should be that these humans connected via the internet beamed into their homes are supporting each other, gaining the knowledge and experiences that they need from both the instructor and one another and that there is an acceptance that this is not the same experience as being in a room together with the outside world disconnected from our inside learning experience. 

8. Tell stories. This is a good engagement for any type of learning, and the more narrative base information you give, the more likely people are to retain the information that you are sharing. 

3 Things to Avoid

Here are three of the things that I feel reduce the potential for effective digital learning: 

1. Don’t assume that people will be engaged just because they are online; especially now, our attention is often split between many different things. The responsibility of the instructor is to design experiences that are engaging and that motivate participation. Just because someone is in your Zoom room doesn't mean that their mind is present with you, so find ways of ensuring that they are present. I like to see my role as a preforming of exciting learning experiences.

2. Don't get annoyed at people for being late or having not completed a task you asked of them. Online learning is very different from in-person learning when it comes to social pressure, and it can take a bit of time for people to find the motivation to do the work independently instead of in a group dynamic. So, be a bit empathetic to this and give people the opportunity to still contribute, perhaps by emailing it to you later that week for feedback. 

3. It may be that you lose a few people. Given that there are so many different types of learning systems, it's inevitable that one or two people in your group may find online learning just doesn't work for them. We always check on people if they don't show up to a session and try and find out what we can do to help them with their learning journey.  

To be fair, I teach adults and so these ideas apply to adult learning. I think kids and teenagers would have an entirely different set of success features that educators need to bring into their repertoire. I know from my own experience of going from mainly teaching in rooms with humans that the transition can be a bit awkward at first, but for me, the joy in teaching this way is in being able to connect with people all over the world and to have them learn from each other.

When designed well, online learning can have just as profound of an impact as face-to-face programs, ensuring that people have the space to engage and connect with each other and that you, as the instructor, are tracking your content to the learning needs of your group. 

This year, I have already run two month-long programs, and we have a third one coming up this September. I have been so inspired and energized by the outcomes that I am really committed to continuing to find ways of ensuring more people can successfully learn this way.

I don't think digital should replace in-person learning and engagement, as there is just so much cognitive benefit from being with other like-minded humans while trying to solve and uncover complex things. But for now, this is a great way to ride out lockdowns and uncertainty with a group of other humans who care about the same things as you and who are self-selecting into a digital space dedicated to learning how to make positive change. 

If you are interested in joining my next program, the September Circular Systems Design Masterclass, there are still a few places left. Apply here >

Free Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Toolkits

By Leyla Acaroglu

Over the years, my team and I have created a range of free, open-access toolkits to support change-makers in adopting the skills needed to help transform the global economy into a circular and sustainable one by design. 

Here I have assembled some of my favorite ones and a list of what we have created for anyone wanting to get started on activating change for free!

Through my design agency, Disrupt Design, my small team and I take commissions to make tools and self-initiate our own designs to help make change, wherever we can we get our clients and collaborators to allow for 20–100% of the content to be free and open access. We ourselves are committed to having a minimum 20% of our content open-source and free for all. 

Many of these toolkits would not have been made possible without the financial support of forward-thinking companies and organizations who see the value in creating beautiful and accessible content. So thanks! And if you are one of them, reach out to see what great things we can create together! 

The Circular Classroom 

We collaborated with the Walki Group, Co-Founders and the Finnish Education System to develop engaging and practical in-class resources on the circular economy, sustainability and creativity.

The Circular Classroom is a free, trilingual (English, Finnish + Swedish) educational resource for students and teachers alike. It is designed to integrate circular thinking into high school classrooms, all packaged up in a fun, beautiful format of video and workbooks.

The intention behind the project is to support young people in recognizing the exciting opportunity that redesigning products, services and systems have for the future, for exploring how their engagement with the world today impacts the future, and for supporting their decisions around future professions.

This commissioned project is designed to activate the circular economy in Scandinavia. The 3-part circular education program for high school students is available for free online in English, Finnish and Swedish. It is designed to be integrated into the Finnish high school curriculum, and is applicable globally.

The interactive video series and workbook toolkits includes an Educators’ ‘How To’ manual, as through our discovery workshops, we learned that students were very interested in this information, but the teachers felt they didn’t have the knowledge base to deliver it. This program is designed for co-learning between students and educators and includes 15 interactive educational activities.

www.circularclassroom.com

Circular Redesign Workshop Toolkit 

The Circular Economy Workshop Redesign Toolkit was inspired by years of running workshops with companies and organizations that want to embrace sustainable design, life cycle thinking and the circular economy.

We developed this over time when needing our own workshop facilitation tools, and then decided to put it together with instructions and make it open source so others can facilitate their own! 

Download the full toolkit here >

The Anatomy of Action 

A collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program, this project’s ambitious goal was to make sustainable living irresistible. To do this, we identified academically-validated lifestyle actions that will make a measurable change when amplified across communities. 

A year-long research study we conducted resulted in 5 key areas of impact and recommendations, which we turned into a momentum-building mixed media campaign called the Anatomy of Action.

This open-source project includes three videos, a downloadable toolkit to custom adapt to the local context, 350+ social shareable hand-drawn graphics, a 150-page data validation report, and a custom website. Within 15 days of the launch (still ongoing), there were 19k views, 3,500 toolkit downloads and 100+ countries who engaged, translating the graphics and data into multiple languages.

anatomyofaction.org

Post Disposable Activation Kit 

Your everyday actions can help to seed a movement that will dramatically and quickly reduce the massive environmental and social burdens that disposability has led us to, and help activate a global shift to a future that has positive outcomes for the entire planet. 

This requires all of us to embrace #POSTDISPOSABLE change! We have created a set of free tools to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future! Become a citizen designer and help activate positive change now. Available in Spanish, Hindi & English. 

Check out the toolkit here > 

Superpower Activation Kit 

When I was named Champion of the Earth by the UN in 2016, we were inspired to create a toolkit of the everyday actions we can all take to activate our agency for a sustainable and just planet. That's how the Superpower Activation Kit was born! 

We put together this toolkit of everyday superpowers so every active citizen of the world who wants to participate with more purpose in the construction of the systems around them can do so. The 12 powers are based on a wealth of scientific data in our Disruptive Design Method, and the toolkit provides practical advice on how to activate them.

Download the toolkit here > 

Change Makers Lab Card Game 

As part of our 20% open source content policy, we have designed a fun hands-on toolkit that shares a series of activities designed for the Change Makers Lab created for SEAC Thailand. 

In this pack you get a full card game pack in Thai and English as a series of over 21 games to play with them focused on sustainability, systems thinking, active citizenship and making change.

Download the toolkit here >

Disruptive Design Workshop Facilitation Kit 

Expanding upon our skillset in experiential education and transformative change, we created this 65-page digital toolkit for Oxfam Asia. The guide was designed after a two-day Disrupt Design Activating Equity and Digital Activism workshop in Bangkok with Oxfam, along with 40 invited creative and media partners.

The goal was to create a step by step guide they could use within Oxfam to run workshops that help them design more effective campaigns to move people from knowledge to action. Chapters cover everything from ethical research to stakeholder engagement, systems mapping and creative communication decisions.

Download the toolkit here >

QUICK LINKS TO CONTENT

Circular Classroom (Finnish collab)
Anatomy of Action (UN collab)
UnSchool Open Source Kits & Classes
Disrupt Design Medium
UnSchool Journal
Fellowship Journals

Intro to the Disruptive Design Method
The ChangeMakers Lab Gard Game Kit
The Circular Classroom
The Post Disposable Activation Kit
Circular Economy ReDesign Workshop Kit
Superpower Activation Kit

A Quick Guide to Sustainable Design Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

Sustainable design is the approach to creating products and services that have considered the environmental, social, and economic impacts from the initial phase through to the end of life. EcoDesign is a core tool in the matrix of approaches that enables the Circular Economy.

There is a well-quoted statistic that says around 80% of the ecological impacts of a product are locked in at the design phase. If you look at the full life cycle of a product and the potential impacts it may have, be it in the manufacturing or at the end of life stage, the impacts are inadvertently decided and thus embedded in the product by the designers, at the design decision-making stage.

This makes some uncomfortable, but design and product development teams are responsible for the decisions that they make when contemplating, prototyping, and ultimately producing a product into existence. And thus, they are implicated in the environmental and social impacts that their creations have on the world. The design stage is a perfect and necessary opportunity to find unique and creative ways to get sustainable and circular goods and services out into the economy to replace the polluting and disposable ones that flood the market today. The challenge is which designers will pick up the call to action and start to change the status quo of an industry addicted to mass-produced, fast-moving, disposable goods?

For those that are ready to make positive change and be apart of the transition to a circular and sustainable economy by design, the good news is there is a well-established range of tools and techniques that a designer or product development decision-maker can employ to ensure that a created product is meeting its functional and market needs in ways that dramatically reduce negative impacts on people and the planet. These are known as ecodesign or sustainable design strategies, and whilst they have been around for a while, the demand for such considerations is even more prominent as the movement toward a sustainable, circular economy increases.

Sustainability, at its core, is simply about making sure that what we use and how we use it today, doesn’t have negative impacts on current and future generations' ability to live prosperously on this planet. Its also about ensuring we are meeting our needs in socially just, environmentally positive and economically viable ways, so its very much a design challenge. Consumption is a major driver of unsustainability, and all consumer goods are designed in some way.

When sustainability is applied to design, it enlightens us to the impacts that the product will have across its full life cycle, enabling the creator to ensure that all efforts have been made to produce a product that fits within the system it will exist within in a sustainable way, that it offers a higher value than what was lost in its making, and that it does not intentionally break or be designed to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Provisions should have been made so that there are options for how to maximize its value across its full life cycle and keep materiality in a value flow. This is otherwise known now as the circular economy and the practice of enabling this is circular systems design.

Long before there was a Twitter hashtag devoted to all things sustainability, sustainable design pioneers like Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek were figuring out how to reduce the impact of produced goods and services through design. As the sustainability concept has evolved, so has the framework for the thinking and doing tools that we now can routinely integrate into our practices to help understand and design out impacts and design in higher value. I see sustainable design as one of the tools that we each need to employ in order to make things better, its the practical side of considering sustainability, connected to considerations around life cycle thinking, systems thinking, circular thinking and regenerative design. By understanding these approaches, a toolbox for change can be created by any practitioner to advance their ability to create incredible things that offer back more than they take. This should be the goal of any creative development.

The ecodesign strategy set for sustainable design includes techniques like Design for Disassembly, Design for Longevity, Design for Reusability, Design for Dematerialization, and Design for Modularity, among many other approaches that we will run through in this quick guide. Basically, the ecodesign strategy toolset helps us think through the way something will exist and how to design for value increases whilst also maintaining functionality, aesthetics, and practicality of products, systems, and services. It’s especially effective when applying materiality to any of the creative interventions you are pursuing in your changemaking practice, be it a designer or not. We have a free toolkit for redesigning products to be circular that also details all of these strategies, and more.

For decades, much progressive experimentation and exploration of ecodesign, cleaner production, industrial ecology, product stewardship, life cycle thinking, and sustainable production and consumption has occurred, which all led up to the current framing of a new approach to humans meeting their needs in ways that don’t destroy the systems needed to sustain us. Right now the framing is around creating a sustainable, regenerative, and circular economy, whereby the things we create to meet our needs are designed to fit with the systems of the planet and maintain materials in benign or beneficial flows within the economy, which requires businesses to change the way they deliver value and consumers to adjust their expectations around hyper-consumerism. Central to this success is the design of goods and services and that's where these strategies and designers' creativity fit in.

There have been thousands of academic articles and business case studies on a multitude of different approaches to sustainable and ethical business practices, demonstrating the strong and clear need for systems-level change. Contributions from biomimicry, cradle to cradle, product service systems (PSS) models, eco-design strategies, life cycle assessment, eco-efficiency and the waste hierarchy all fit together to support this approach to sustainable design.

The Circular Economy

Within the last 20 or so years, we have really started to feel the negative impacts of what's called the linear economy, where raw materials are extracted from nature, turned into usable goods, purchased and then quickly discarded usually due to poor design choices, inferior materials or trend changes (or the more insidious practice of planned obsolescence). Recently, there has been a great framing around the shift from linear to circular systems called The Circular Economy Framework, which combines a range of pre-existing theories and approaches. Moving to a circular economy (which embraces closed-loop and sustainable production systems) means that the end of life of products is considered at the start, and the entire life cycle impacts are designed to offer new opportunities, not wasteful outcomes.

Our interpretation of the value flows within the circular economy from the Circular Systems Design handbook.

You may be wondering — especially if you aren’t a designer — how can we integrate this into a creative practice to make a positive change? Well, here’s the thing, the approaches to understanding and reducing the impacts of material processes are really important to reduce the use of global materials and the ecological impacts of our production and consumption choices. This is what the circular economy movement is seeking to achieve: a transformation in the way we meet our material needs.

On top of that, these approaches are very empowering for non-material decisions — you start to see the ways in which the world works and can apply this thinking to different problem sets. Sustainable design and production techniques allow for reducing the material impact by maximizing systems in service design — thus, providing sustainability during both production and consumption.

From our free educational project, The Circular Classroom. Find out more here

EcoDesign Strategies

These sustainable design strategies are best known as starting off with Victor Papanek in the 1970’s and have been contributed to over the years by many different people and approaches. This curated life of ‘design for x’ strategies takes into consideration the circular economy and how they relate to closing the loop and dramatically changing economic models.

In this list I have curated, I have also included a few “negative” design approaches at the end to remind you what not to do, and how easy it is to accidentally do the wrong thing right, rather than the right thing a little bit wrong.

In order to achieve circular and sustainable design, some, or many, of these design considerations need to be employed in combination throughout the design process in order to ensure that the outcome is not just a reinterpretation of the status quo, but something that actually challenges and changes the way we meet our needs.

These approaches are lenses you apply to the creative process in order to challenge and allow for the emergence of new ways to deliver functionality and value within the economy. There are also separate considerations of the circularization process outlined in the next section.

Product Service Systems (PSS) Models

One of the main ideas of the circular economy is moving from single-use products to products that fit within a beautifully designed and integrated closed-loop system which is enabled through this approach. Think of alternatives to purchasable products such as leasable items that exist as part of a company-owned system or services that enable reuse. Leasing a product out — rather than selling it directly — allows the company to manage the product across its entire life cycle, so it can be designed to easily fit back into a pre-designed recycling or re-manufacturer system, all whilst reducing waste.

By transitioning away from single end-consumer product design to these PSS models, the relationship shifts and the responsibility for the packaging and product itself is shared between the producer and the consumer. This incentivizes each agent to maintain the value of the product and to design it so that it’s long-lasting and durable. PSS requires the conceptualization of meeting functional needs within a closed system that the producer manages in order to minimize waste and maximize value gains after each cycling of the product. Many of the circular economy business models are either based on this concept or create services that enable the ownership of the product to be maintained by the company and leased to the customer. But it’s critical that this is done within a strong ethical framework and not used to manipulate or coerce people, as this could also easily be the outcome of a more explorative version of this design approach.

Product Stewardship

In a traditional linear system, producers of goods are not required to take responsibility of their products or packaging once they have sold the product into the market. Some companies offer limited warranties to guarantee a certain term of service, but many producers avoid being involved in the full life of what they create. This means that there are limited incentives for them to design products with closed-loop end of life options. In a circular economy, producers actively take responsibility for the full life of the things they create starting from the business model through to the design and end of life management of their products.

Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility are two strong initiatives that encourage companies to be more involved in the full life of what they produce in the world. There are several ways that this can occur; in a voluntary scenario, companies work to circularize their business models (such as a PSS model) or governments issue policies that require companies to take back, recapture, recycle or re-manufacture their products at the end of their usable life. For example, the European Union has many product stewardship policies in place to incentivize better product design and full life management such as the Ecodesign directive, WEEE, Product Stewardship and now the circular economy directives.

The key here is that the design of both the products and the business case is created to have full life-cycle responsibility and is managed as an integrated approach to product service delivery so that the product doesn't get lost from the value system. Partnerships between organizations can enable a rapid introduction of product stewardship, such as a bottling company leasing the service of beverage containers to the drinks company. One key element of this is a take-back program, whereby the producing company offers to take back and reconfigure, repair, remanufacture or recycling the products they produced. This incentivizes them to design them to be easily fixed, upgraded or pulled apart for high-value material recycling.

Dematerialization

Reducing the overall size, weight and number of materials incorporated into a design is a simple way of keeping down the environmental impact. As a general rule, more materials result in greater impacts, so it’s important to use fewer types of materials and reduce the overall weight of the ones that you do use without compromising on the quality of the product.

You don’t want to dematerialize to the point where the life of the product is reduced or the value is perceived as being less; you want to find the balance between functional service delivery, longevity, value and optimal material use.

Modularity

Products that can be reconfigured in different ways to adapt to different spaces and uses have an increased ability to function well. Modularity can increase resale value and offer multiple options in one material form. Just like you can build anything with little Lego blocks, modularity as a sustainable design approach implicates the end owner in the design so they can reconfigure the product to fit their changing life needs.

As a design approach for non-physical outcomes, modularity enables creatives to consider how the things they create can be used in different configurations. This is all about making this adaptable to different scenarios and thus increase value over time. It’s important to ensure designs are durable enough to withstand being taken apart and reconfigured, as well as making it easy to do and the style timeless so it increases its duration of use. Modularity should also increase recycling and repairability by offering replacement parts and a service model.

Longevity

Longevity is about creating products that are aesthetically timeless, highly durable and will retain their value over time so people can resell them or pass them on. Products that last longer aren’t replaced as frequently and can be repaired or upgraded during their life as long as their style and functionality have durability as well.

Ensure that the materials you select enable a long life, and be sure to consider multiple use case scenarios such as repair options and resale encouragement.

Disassembly

Design for disassembly requires a product to be designed so that it can be very easily taken apart for recycling at the end of its life. How it is put together, the types of materials that are used and the connection methods all need to be designed to increase the speed and ease of taking it apart for repair, remanufacturing and recycling. Often the case with technology, the norm is to design products that lock the end owner out, discouraging any form of repairability during the use phase while also reducing the likelihood of recapturing the materials at the end of life.

This design strategy is particularly relevant to technology, requiring the design of the sub and primary components to be just as easily disassembled as it is to manufacture them. For maximum recapture, we need to reduce the number of different types of materials, the connection mechanisms, and the ease of extraction. This is a super critical strategy for monitoring technical materials inflow to reduce negative impacts at end of life.

Recyclability

Making a recyclable product goes beyond simply selecting a material that can be so. You have to consider the recyclability of all the materials, the way they are put together and the use case, along with the ease of recycling at end of life. Relying on something being “technically recyclable” as a sustainable design solution to your product is just lazy and often does not result in environmental benefits, as recycling is very much broken. So, you need to ensure that it is being designed to maximize the likelihood that it will be recaptured and recycled in the system it will exist within.

Assembly methods will impact how easily disassembled for recycling products will be. Also, make sure that there are systems in place so that the product can actually be recycled in the location it will end up! For it to be circular, the product has to fit within a closed-loop system, and recycling often is the least beneficial outcome since we lose materials and increase waste through this system.

Connected to disassembly is the ability to easily and cost-effectively recapture the material at end of life. Just making something recyclable does not guarantee that it will be recycled, as it’s often costly and time-consuming. Additionally, many technology items are shredded to get the valuable parts (like gold) instead of getting all the different parts back. What is crucial about this strategy is that it must be used in a system that has the appropriate and functioning recycling market, or a take-back and recapture system must be in place, as well as design features that maximize the behavioral outcomes of the end owners so that the product is actually reacquired and recycled. The Scandinavian bottle recycling system is a perfect example of this. Drink bottles are made of thick and durable materials that can be washed and re-manufactured, and the system is set up with an easy-to-use deposit program and financial incentive to maintain a high level of recapture.

Repairability

Repair is a fundamental aspect of the circular economy. Things wear out, break, get damaged, and need to be designed to allow for easy repair, upgrading, and fixability. Along with the extra parts and instructions on how to do this, we need systems that support, rather than discourage, repair in society. For example, many Apple products are intentionally designed to be difficult to repair, with patented screws and legal implications for opening products up.

Sweden recently opened the world’s first department store dedicated to repair, but any product producer can put mechanisms into place for ease of repair so that the owner has more autonomy over the product and will be encouraged to do so. The Fair Phone is a great example of this.

Reusability

Repair allows the end owner to maintain its value over time, or sell it more easily to then increase its lifespan. But there is also the option of designing so that the product can be reused in a different way from its intended original purpose, without much extra material or energy inputs. An example of this is a condiment jar designed to be used as a water glass.

There are many ways a product can serve a second or even third life after its core original purpose. This approach is useful when you have limited options for designing out disposability.

Re-manufacture

For this strategy, the producer takes into consideration how the parts or entire product can be re-manufactured into new usable goods in a closed-loop system; it’s critical to the technology sector but fits perfectly for many products.

Re-manufacturing is when a product is not completely disassembled and recycled or reused, but instead, some parts are designed to be reused and other parts recycled, depending on what wears out and what maintains its usefulness over time.

Efficiency

During the use phase, many products require constant inputs, such as energy, in the form of charging or water in the form of washing. When a product requires lifetime inputs, it’s called an “active product”, meaning it is constantly tapping into other active systems in order to achieve its function. That’s when design for efficiency comes in, designing to dramatically reduce the input requirements of the product during its use phase.

This will increase the environmental performance and also reduce wear of the product, increasing lifetime use. This approach can also be taken as an overarching one — design to maximize the efficiency of materials, processes, and human labor. As a general rule, “Weight equals impact,” and the more efficient you can be with materials, the lower the overall impact per product unit (this rule has many exceptions, as it is always related to what the alternatives are).

Influence

Things we use influence our lives. This is why social media applications are designed to act like slot machines with continuous scroll, and why airport security lines make you feel like a farm animal. The things we design in turn design us, and thus there is a huge scope for creating products, services, and systems that influence society in more positive ways.

There is still a lot of resistance to sustainability, often because it seems confusing. So, imagine how you can design things that give people an alternative experience to this mainstream perspective. Designing in positive feedback loops to the owner helps change behaviors, just as designing in less options to limit confusion can help direct the more preferable use.

Equity

Accidentally or intentionally, many goods are designed to reinforce stereotypes. Pink toys for girls, dainty watches for women, and chunky glasses for men are a few examples. Reinforcing stereotypes subtly maintains negative and inequitable status quos in society. There are entire labs dedicated to first researching an established trend, and then designing to reinforce it. Design for equity requires the reflection and disruption of the mainstream references that reinforce inequitable access to resources, be it based on gender or outdated stereotypes.

Oppression and inequality exist everywhere, from toilet seat designs to office buildings. Considering the potential impact of your designs on all sorts of humans is critical to creating things that are ethical and equitable. This also applies to the supply chain, ensuring that people along the full chain of materials and manufacturing are valued, paid fairly and respected.

Systems Change

Perhaps the most important of the design strategy tools is the ability to design interventions that actively shift the status quo of an unsustainable or inequitable system. The world is made up of systems, and everything we do will have an impact in some way of the systems around us. So instead of seeing your product as an individual unit, see it as an animated agent in a system, interacting with other agents and thus having impacts.

All systems are dynamic, constantly changing and interconnected. Materials come from nature, and everything we produce will have to return in some way. So, designing from a systems perspective with the objective of intervening will allow for more positively disruptive outcomes to the status quo (see my handbook on the Disruptive Design Method for more on this approach).

Other things to consider

• Where is the energy being sourced? Shift from fossil to renewables.

• What are the hidden impacts embedded within the supply chain? Remove embodied fossil fuel energy.

• How can you recover and put to good use all wasted resources across the supply chain? Look for industrial symbiosis or by-product reuse opportunities.

• How can you design in life extension on your products? Design repair and rescue options as a service for your products.

• Are there ways of partnering to create industrial symbiosis where your product’s by-products are used as raw materials for another process? Reduce waste to landfill by encouraging secondary industries to use industrial by-products.

• How can you design your product to be a service instead? Embrace full product stewardship.

• Do you need to produce a product to deliver the functional need? Look for alternative business models to deliver your customer’s functional desires.

• What is the energy mix in the manufacturing and use phase? The types of energy used will increase or decrease environmental impacts.

• Does a product need to exist or can we deliver value and function in a different format?

The UnSustainable Design Approaches!

There are many insidious techniques used by designers to manipulate and coerce consumers into behaviors and practices that are unsustainable and inequitable. Here are three types you should avoid! There are also many accidental actions that may have good intentions that result in greenwashing, so be careful not to invest more in marketing green credentials than in R&D to ensure your product truly is what you claim it to be.

Design for Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is one of the critically negative ramifications of the GDP-fueled hyper-consumer economy. This is where things are designed to intentionally break, or the customer is locked out through designs that limit repair or software upgrades that slow down processes. This approach tries to constantly turn a profit by manipulating a usable good so its functionality is restricted or reduced and the customer is forced to constantly purchase new goods. It’s in everything from toothbrushes to technology. The habit has led to massive growth, but at the expense of durability and sustainability. How it is used as a positive strategy is when it is part of a well-designed closed-loop system that enables the product to naturally “die” at the right time so it can be reintegrated into the system it is designed within.

Design for Disposability

Designing for things to break is due to the cultural normalization of disposability as a result of increased use of disposability in the design of everyday goods. From coffee cups to technological items, it is a race to the bottom of our economy, where many reusable things have become hyper-disposable. Single-use items plague our oceans with plastic waste and increase the end cost for small businesses and everyday people, as the more addictive the cycle of disposability is, the more costly it becomes to deliver basic service offerings. I have written extensively about this; read more here.

Dark Patterning

A term coined by designer Harry Brignull, the idea of dark patterns are intentional tricks used by designers to manipulate and lure customers into taking actions they don’t necessarily make the choice to do or may otherwise not agree to. Dark patterning includes often exploiting cognitive weaknesses and biases to get people to do things like purchasing extra items they did not need when checking out online, or creating a sense of urgency to increase purchasing — leveraging single-click buy now for impulse buys, using particular colors to evoke emotions and sharing outright misleading information to increase purchases. This website has many great examples.

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LOOKING FOR MORE?

Much of this content is from my handbook on Circular Systems Design, and over at the UnSchool Online, I have a short course on sustainable design strategies and a more extensive one on sustainable design and production. You may also like to find out about the Disruptive Design Method that I created to support deeper design decisions that works to help solve complex problems. I also created the Design Play Cards which include all the eco-design strategies and fun challenges to solve.

Racial Equity Tools and Resources

Racism the world over is a designed system of oppression. The system we live within, the one that allows for humans of certain skin colors, religious identities or sexual orientations to be oppressed to the point of literal and figurative suffocation is by design.

The system is not ‘broken’ per se; it was designed to serve a purpose and it is achieving that end goal, that being an economic and cultural system based on exploitation and extraction that enables some to get rich and live particular lifestyles at the expense of others.

This is one of the fundamental issues with power: once you have it - given by birth or earned through merit - you will fight pretty hard to keep it, as the cognitive impact is one of being entitled to the privileges that having that power enables you to hold.

One of the first steps to change is understanding the origins of the problem, the role we play within it, and then activating your unique agency to help overcome it. Complacency reinforces the system of oppression, so we all must find our way of contributing to the needed systems-level change.

There are many resources out there for both knowledge, action and skill development. We offer a starter selection here; however, it by no means complete (and mostly offers North American resources in English), and it is up to each of us to continue to be curious, self-educate and take actions to support a greater understanding of our shared global history of inequity and oppression to support moving towards the critical systems change.

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TOOLKITS

RACIAL EQUITY TOOLS
This racial equity tool set provides powerful and important content to educate yourself and those around you about the structural and systemic racism that permeates all aspects of our societies.

NEW ERA OF PUBLIC SAFETY TOOLKIT
The result of a task force set up by President Obama after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, this toolkit focuses on specific policy change and actions for a more fair and safe policing.

GARE RACIAL EQUITY TOOLKIT
This toolkit is intended for staff who work in government, elected officials, and community groups who work with the government. There are many city specific toolkits out there, which you can search for online to see specific kits to your region.

CAMPAIGN ZERO TRACKER
Use this tool to track legislation by US state, find representatives to email, research data and reports, also provides downloadable graphics to share and amplify specific actions.

EUROPEAN COALITION FOR CITIES AGAINST RACISM
This series of toolkits is available in 6 languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian and Swedish.

NAPPY & HUMAAANS
If you are creating a campaign, you need images. Find free high res stock photos of Black and Brown people at Nappy and customizable open source illustrations of humans at Humaaans. If you’re looking for a 3D model, check out this Characters of Color series for games and film.

RACE FORWARD KITS
Race Forward focuses on impact and systems change, and it offers many free toolkits from impact assessments, to restaurant workers, as well as online training with sliding scale prices.

COLOR OF CHANGE CAMPAIGN KIT
This is a resource of ongoing campaigns, and how-to resource for creating your own, curated by colorofchange.org.

BRAVE ABOUT RACE
Here is a series of action guides for parents in raising racially literate kids.

MANDATORY SENTENCING TOOLKITS
These are tools to support and take action on reforming the justice system (watch the 13th on Netflix for more on why this is critical).

ORGANIZATIONAL RACE EQUITY TOOLKIT
This is a toolkit to build robust non-performative policies and processes for equity in organizations and corporations from JustLead Washington. Samples of org mission statements are here from Durham County, and if those seem too diplomatic, check out Ben & Jerry’s.

ASIAN AMERICAN RACIAL JUSTICE TOOLKIT
Series of x15 small group training workshops with step by step plans.

NATIVE LAND
Native Land is an interactive map and accompanying educator’s guide on tracing the roots of colonialism, First Nations and Indigenous land acknowledgment, treaties and territories across the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and continually adding more.

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RESOURCES

10 STEPS TO NON-OPTICAL ALLYSHIP
Created by Mireille Cassandra Harper as a starter kit to go beyond posting and likes.

SUMMER SKOOL
@ckyourprivilege is offering a 12 week summer school via Instagram live with sessions every day at 1pm pst, archived on IGTV.

BLACK LIVES MATTER CARRD
Carrd is a simple one-page site that many people are using to group information together in easily clickable format. There are many out there; this one includes maps of the protests, resources for protestors and petitions and is a good starting point.

BLACK LIVES MATTER CARRD CANADA
Canada shares the longest undefended border in the world with the United States, and along with it, systemic inequities and a shared history of colonization and oppression. Here are some resources that are specific to the Canadian context, including some mental health links.

75 THINGS WHITE PEOPLE CAN DO FOR RACIAL JUSTICE
Organizations to donate to, actions to take, things to read — there is something for everyone on this long list.

DIVEST
Climate change disproportionately and negatively affects POC communities around the world. Divest from institutions that uphold the fossil fuel industry, and use this financial institution report as a start to see where your bank stands, let them know where you stand, and swap where you keep your money.

MENTAL HEALTH AND WELLNESS RESOURCES FOR STUDENTS OF COLOR
Since “recent research has found major disparities in mental health treatment for students across races and ethnic backgrounds,” this resource guide provides a directory of mental health resources for students of color.

LOVELAND THERAPY FUND
Mental health resources for Black women and girls across the United States, with financial assistance available supported through Rachel Cargle’s Loveland partnerships. Apply for mental health support, or donate to the foundation. Also check out this mental health context doc and resource list from Sunshine Health, this guide on traumatization from watching films, and this list of mental health resources.

RACHEL CARGLE'S LIST
From a 30 day free email course, to articles to read, books, templates, Rachel Cargle’s extensive list of resources offers comprehensive and varied ways to upskill and act from template letters to employers and academic institutions, lectures, mental health resources and her Tedx Talk.

INTERACTION INSTITUTE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
Group and organizational training and workshops for social change within organizations, as well as facilitation training.

HOW TO TALK TO YOUR FAMILY ABOUT RACISM
Written by Rachel Cargle, common questions that may come up around the dinner table and how to respond and facilitate conversation.

BLACK TO THE FUTURE
The Black Futures Lab focuses on public policy and voting rights and is taking applications for their leadership training fellowship in progressive race-forward policy governance.

BAIL FUNDS & PETITIONS
One of the many masterlists of bail relief funds, petitions, and other resources for supporting community efforts. On the same topic, divest from companies that profit off prison labour.

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UNSCHOOLERS WITH EQUITY RELATED INITIATIVES

IF YOU ARE NOT ON THIS LIST AND HAVE A PROJECT YOU WANT TO SHARE, GET IN TOUCH AND LET US KNOW!

SAFE JOHNSON CITY, TN
UnSchool editor, Jamie Ferrell, has organized a campaign to create SAFE (Supporting Acceptance For Everyone) local business resources in her own community.

VANESSA FALOYE
Vanessa is a social justice educator who joined us as a facilitator on on our Cape Town Fellowship and Portugal Educator training. She offers group and organizational training for anti-oppression educational programs.

THE SCHOOL OF PRESSURE
Wisaal Abrahams joined us a facilitator on our Cape Town Fellowship where she lives, and she offers educational workshops on dismantling systems of oppression to academic institutions, corporations and groups.

ROOT CAUSE RESEARCH CENTER
San Fran Fellowship alumni Jessica Bellamy is an information designer and community organizer at this participatory and community based research organization addressing systemic oppression.

CODE TENDERLOIN
Founded by the “Mayor of the Tenderloin” district of San Fran, Del Seymour leads tours around the area and provides free programs for job readiness and coding in the Bay area. Del lead us through the Tenderloin on our San Fran Fellowship.

CREATIVE REACTION LAB
Workshops and programs for youth and educators for racial equity and civic leadership design, founded by Antionette Carroll. Antionette joined us as a mentor during the San Fran UnSchool Fellowship.

ELIMIN8HATE
San Fran Fellowship alumni Ellen Moon’s project for reporting and acting on incidents of anti-Asian racism, hate and violence, mental health resources and community created PSA videos.

QUIRKY30
An NFP school in Cape Town tackling the up to 70% youth unemployment rate by teaching coding for the 4th industrial revolution. Founder Sihle Tshabalala joined us as a mentor during the Cape Town Fellowship.

HEAL THE HOOD
Founder Emile YX equips youth through hip hop culture, dance and entrepreneurship to gain the skills to navigate social systems. Emile joined us as a mentor during the Cape Town Fellowship.

MOKENA MAKEKA
Mokena is an architect (among other things) who designs building to effect social change, from police stations to conventions centers, and joined us an a mentor during Cape Town on the Fellowship.

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WATCH

Some of the movies and docs are available on subscription services, but if you have chosen to divest from them, or those services are not available in your region, PBS and the Criterion Collection have titles for free, as do libraries, some of which are also available for online streaming like at the New York Public Library. Some of the big movie companies are also making racial equity movies free to watch this month.

MOVIES & DOCS

• American Son (2019)

• See You Yesterday (2019)

• When They See Us (2019)

• Just Mercy (2019)

• The Hate You Give (2018)

• If Beale St Could Talk (2018)

• King in the Wilderness (2018)

• Dear White People (2017)

• Whose Streets? (2017)

• 13th (2016)

• I Am Not Your Negro (2016)

• Selma (2014)

• 16 Shots (2014)

• The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011)

• Malcolm X (1992)

• Mississippi Masala (1991)

• Do The Right Thing (1989)

ONLINE VIDEOS & TALKS

• Neil deGrasse Tyson on Being Black

• LeVar Burton on Being Pulled Over

• LeVar Burton: This is My Story Video Series on Being Black in America

• Racism - what will it take to end it? | Cynthia Silva Parker | TEDxSarasota (Systems of Racism)

• The Sky Didn't Fall: How I Learned to Call Out Racism | Susan Naimark | TEDxJamaicaPlain

• Implicit Bias - how it effects us and how we push through | Melanie Funchess | TEDxFlourCity

• Designing for a more equitable world | Antionette Carroll

• Justice by Design | Antionette Carroll | TEDxHerndon

• My Transformational Journey | Del Seymour | TEDxMoreauCatholicHS

• NPR: So many great podcasts including Code Switch, Invisibilia, and Hidden Brain

• Today Explained: a quick 20min overview updated every day from Vox to explain what just happened, and what does it mean

• Revisionist History (Malcolm Gladwell) Podcast on Black education for Black children and why this is critical

• Resmaa Menakem (therapist and trauma specialist) on the physical impacts of intergenerational trauma

• TEDTalk's playlist about racism in the United States

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READ

A quick internet search will find many lists of books to read. Bookshop will find and connect you to local independent bookstores so you can divest your retail dollars from Amazon (read about why VP Tim Bray quit over the '“vein of toxicity” that led to leaving his $1million/yr job).

• How To Be An Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)

• The New Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of Colorblindness (Michelle Alexander)

• This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Cherrie Moraga)

• White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (Robin DiAngelo, Ph.D.)

• I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (Austin Channing Brown)

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (Richard Rothstein)

• 'White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide' (Carol Anderson, Ph.D.)

• Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America (Jennifer Harvey, Ph.D.)

• More titles at DiverseBooks.org, along with links to black owned bookstores, articles, and further resources.

• A curated list from editor and writer Dianca London Potts

• A curated list from Rachel Cargle

• A curated list for kids from the NYT by age bracket from 0-12. There are many other lists of books for kids, which you can search online for.

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FOLLOW

A handful of hashtags and accounts to follow, learn, listen, amplify and expand. There are thousands of industry and city/country specific accounts and tags to discover, from writers, designers, educators, outdoor recreation, sports, health, etc, etc.

#blacklivesmatter
#diversifyyourfeed
#melanated
#amplifymelanatedvoices
#amplifymelanatedvoiceschallenge
#saytheirnames
#blackvoices
#blackleaders

Some examples of hashtag impact here, here and here, along with a short article on the pros and cons (TLDR: good start, but don’t stop there).

@blacklivesmatter
@rachelcargle
@laylafsaad
@yourrightscamp
@ibramxk
@aclu_nationwide
@goodgoodgood
@ethelsclub
@crxlab
@speakoutspeakers
@blackfutureslab
@naacp_ldf

25 more accounts to check out

#StayPositive: Social Distancing is Doing Some Good for the Planet!

How’s everyone holding up out there? No doubt with less physical things to do, and all that time saved from not being able to travel anywhere (not even to work!), you’ve likely seen the reports coming out about how social distancing is impacting the world in some surprisingly positive ways. From satellite images showing pollution drops over China and Italy, to clearer water running through the Venice Canal (and dolphins swimming through, albeit wishful thinking), it’s easy to see that limiting our non-essential activities, adopting work-from-home habits, and staying home more is giving our shared home, planet Earth, a much-needed breather as well.

So much so that in this article about plummeting emission and air pollution rates, scientists say that this year “by May, when CO2 emissions are at their peak thanks to the decomposition of leaves, the levels recorded might be the lowest since the financial crisis over a decade ago.” To be honest, we were also just fascinated by the contribution that decaying leaves have to CO2 emissions!

Additionally, NASA has released images showing the significant drop in air pollution above countries that have quarantines from COVID-19. 

Photo credit: NASA

Rebound effects

All of this has comes, though, with a secondary warning. When we do resume normal activities and people start to venture back out all over the world en mass, the carbon emissions and pollution levels could rise back up rapidly. This is not just because of the increase in transportation, but also because of a compensating attempt to ramp-up production and the desire to get back to “normal”, along with stimulus spending intended to jump-start the economy (which, as a reminder, is measured in GDP, a systems failure, because it doesn’t account for any impacts against Earth’s natural resources!). In fact, following the closure of many Chinese factories, and the recent reopening, air pollution levels are already on the rise again in China. This also matters a lot right now, as some scientists have said that air pollution could be one of the triggers for making the coronavirus worse.

Transport options matter when it comes to climate change

So, what if we start making the case now for actually continuing some of these social distancing practices that we expeditiously adopted during the past month? No, we’re not suggesting continuing on with full lock-down; freedom is vital — but what about changing the way we commute to work or run our businesses?

Individual Actions

There is an enormous opportunity for companies to widely adopt more work-from-home or flexible travel policies following this pandemic — and for individuals to advocate for it too. Take the fact that for most Americans, their transport biggest emissions impact is in their daily drive to work. Even if companies don’t go totally remote, it could make a substantial difference to implement more remote work policies and cut down on flights for meetings, conferences, trainings, etc. 

Pulling out some of the actions we’re all learning to adjust to right now may offer us some great new sustainable lifestyle and workplace options after we get through this chaos. 

Perhaps one of the most powerful amplification points here is in the illumination that yes, individual actions do collectively make a difference. If it’s every person overbuying loo roll, or baby carrots for that matter, everything we each do attributes to a bigger system wide impact. To be clear, this isn’t a scapegoat attempt to place the responsibility of creating a sustainable future solely on individuals (Leyla writes about this really well in her new handbook Design Systems Change), but more so encouragement to believe in the power of individual agency as it pertains to everyday actions. Even though it may seem that we currently have no control over the outcomes in relation to this pandemic, a quick mindset shift can showcase exactly how much control we do have over environmental impacts through the actions we do or do not take on a daily basis. This was the basis for our collaboration with the UNEP, the Anatomy of Action, in which we assessed the power lifestyle swaps across food, stuff, movement, money, and fun — all of which are being significantly disrupted by the current coronavirus outbreak.

Rethinking habits

In recent weeks and even days, you’ve likely had to rethink your daily eating habits as restaurants have shut down and many panicked shoppers cleared shelves of food. You have had to change the way you communicate with loved ones and colleagues. We’ve seen people rethink how to have fun and be social, how to care for others, with an uptick in spending time on personal hobbies and engaging in funny, creative video chats, dance parties, remote happy hours, yoga classes, and endless live streams on Instagram. Every area of our lives has experienced significant, rapid change — and we’re figuring out how to deal with that day by day. Imagine if we could do this for dealing with another existential threat — climate change! Or take this time to figure out the positive benefits that a slower world has on the systems that sustain us.

Discover more at online.unschools.co

So maybe, we can also take this rare pause from our usual busy hustle to take a long hard look at how out of alignment our current habits and global systems have been with the Earth’s systems that sustain us all. Instead of reacting to the next *insert catastrophic event here*, we can take a proactive approach to making the future work better for us all through shifts in our everyday habits.

One of the big things we always talk about at the UnSchool is that there is no failure — only opportunities to gain new knowledge that informs our actions for the future. That new knowledge is here, and it’s offering us the right set of circumstances to amplify our collective superpowers through the unstoppable force of individuals activating their agency.

What habits can you commit to continuing to help build a sustainable, regenerative future,  once “normal” life resumes?

Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla Acaroglu

Have you read any of our handbooks on making change? Leyla has written one each year since she started the UnSchool in 2014. The series titles include Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.

The new handbook will be released on March 16, 2020 and includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. 

The new Design Systems Change Handbook is out in March!

In the next few journal articles, we will share excerpts from the upcoming handbook from each of the three main sections (Design, Systems and Change), along with an extensive introduction to Taking Action.

This week, we dive into the introductory section on how to activate your agency by sharing with you one of our favorite parts. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can pre-order it now, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched on March 16th! 

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Expert from, Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

Introduction 

Design is a powerful social influencer that shapes and scripts our experience of the world; we now live in a time where each and every day we interact with a world entirely designed by humans, for humans. Scientists now argue that we have entered into a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. One of the main drivers of this shift to a world where humans influence every other living thing on the planet is design — the design of technology, of consumer goods, of scientific discoveries, of our lives. Design is everywhere.  

The broader concept of design encompasses our planning and intent to dictate and control the way the world works. Humans have been doing this now for eons, but before the Industrial Revolution, where we unlocked the power of fossil fuels, change was confined to the slower changes that nature does organically. 

For example, the plants we eat today were adapted each generation by farmers selecting the best-performing ones and changing the way they bear fruit for us; these changes were painstakingly slow. But now we have accelerated the rate of change thanks to technological development, and in doing so, we have greatly accelerated the changes to the systems that sustain life on Earth. We have designed a world exclusively for human needs, and unless we design it better so that we work within the systems that nature provides all that we need to live, then we will end up designing ourselves out of here! 

Just as it can accidentally make a mess, design can also be a catalyst for positive and significant change. This is because, at its core, design is about creative problem solving and forming something new that works better than the past version. 

Currently, so much of what is created is done so without the understanding of the impacts or the intent to create outcomes that are mutually positive for us and the planet. As a result, we end up living with impacts in which the externalities are ignored and the consequences are often unintended, but nonetheless momentous. So much of what we do in the economy is not accounted for in any way. These are known as externalities, and we often have no idea of how things like pollution are embedded in anything, like a pair of socks or what social costs were paid by the farmers who helped get us our morning coffee. Giant problematic systems like waste and pollution are the products of poorly-designed human systems. 

There is no waste in nature; instead, the waste product from one system is the food and fuel for another. Everything is interconnected and optimized to thrive. 

It’s obvious to most that we live in a complex and chaotic world with constant technological and social changes. Humans have done an incredible job at creating an array of design and technology solutions to work around the chaos, make our lives more comfortable, increase convenience and ease of living and prolong our lives. Yet many of these designed solutions come with entangled, complicated consequences, most of which are invisible to the human mind. 

We consume things ignorant of the impacts their creation causes and are selectively blind to the impacts their subsequent waste will create. Design helps to sell us things that reinforce many of the problems that currently exist. We have created a linear production system with cheap efficient manufacturing where waste is a normal part of our lives now. This is what we need to redesign —  the way we meet our needs so that we get beautiful, elegant solutions that are regenerative rather than destructive. We need to design out waste as we know it.  

Collectively, we also rely on a linear thought process that fits within a linear world. This system of simplification allows for exploitation as the fundamental components of a successful economy. This is increasingly creating alarming and catastrophic outcomes, allowing us to see how we have designed ourselves into the current status quo, and thus providing a pathway for us to design ourselves out. Design can transcend linear function and provide an interwoven systems approach fundamental to inspiring and enacting change.  

Paradoxical to the environmental crises at hand, we live in one of the safest times in all of human history. By many metrics, we are better off as a species now than any generation before us, due to food security, global diplomacy, advances in medicine, mass agriculture and efforts to alleviate poverty. 

Yet despite this incredible progress, it comes at a significant cost to the future, as many people now maintain a stressed-out, negative perspective of the world, much of which the media reinforces that society and the planet as a whole are destined for a bleak future. Indeed, our fears will become a reflection of what we do today unless we all work to design a different trajectory. 

Ask yourself —  if not you, then who? 

The future is undefined; it is made up of all our actions today. 

And, yes, there are many complex problems at play in the world around us. And, yes, all of these complex problems need creative solutions from skilled people. And, yes, you are one of these people. 

Why is it that some will take action, contribute to activating change, question the status quo, be willing to be different and rebel against the things that they know to be wrong, and others will not? Why do some humans passively accept what is and blame others for the things they don’t like? 

There are many possible answers to these rhetorical questions. One is the cycle of inaction, whereby apathy leads to inaction. But courage, convocation, compassion, curiosity and sheer tenacity are some skills that we can all foster to overcome the apathy and activate our agency to participate in creating a future that overcomes the challenges of the past and ensure that the solutions we put in place today are not the problems of tomorrow. 

The Cycle of Inaction

From the climate catastrophe to homelessness, the plastic waste crisis, the opioid epidemic, the Sixth Great Extinction, deforestation, childhood obesity, and the Anthropocene, there are many significant challenges awaiting creative minds to contribute to changing them. We can live in a post-disposable world if we design out waste; we can break the cycle of addiction by creating social systems that enable support. Plastic can play a part in our lives and not pollute the planetary systems if we design higher value products and create closed-loop systems to capture them. These are endless systems change solutions just waiting to be uncovered and emerge new ideas. 

The reality and the magnitude of the problems at play can be overwhelming, especially to a mind unequipped with the tools for understanding the systems that create and sustain the problems to begin with. We live in a time of great technological change, where we can get information instantaneously and where that information can be tailored to us very specifically, playing on our fears, convincing us to consume, making it hard to escape the problem cycle. 

With all of these issues prominently on display through social and traditional media, it’s easy to get sucked into a negativity bias that disables our ability to act. We know that negative news sells and that pessimistic viewpoints drum up sensational headlines that get heartbeats pounding, fear flowing and people feeling paralyzed. 

With our emotional state being constantly milked day-in-day-out,  it’s no wonder human perception can quickly become filled with negativity, pessimism and inaction. 

This state of mind can easily reinforce apathy into inaction, which, in turn, reinforces the problems at play, as when people opt to not take part in changing the systems — this just enables the status quo to persist. We need to find ways of busting through the feedback loop of inaction! 

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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Design section, so stay tuned!

This is really juicy brain food!

Summer at the UnSchool! 2020 Programs FOR Creative Changemaking

We are excited to announce the face-to-face, capacity-building workshops and programs that we will be running in 2020!

We have four great programs planned for a European summer, with each program located at our beautiful Brain Spa campus in sunny Portugal. But for our flagship Fellowship program, we are heading out to Bolivia in late 2020!

All of our 2020 programs are open for applications now. We review applications as they come in and send out offers on a rolling basis until each program is full (except the Fellowship, which we will start reviewing and sending offers to in April).

Our programs are always small groups — the farm-based programs usually average between 6-10 changemakers, while the Fellowship has 18-20. So, if you are keen to join us this year, then do get your application in as soon as you can!  

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Circular Economy Bootcamp

We are kicking off the summer with a 3-day bootcamp on the Circular Economy, hosted June 11-14 on the CO Project Farm. This is perfect for anyone wanting to really gain the knowledge and technical skills to advance aspects of the circular economy, like policy, product design and business structures.

Apply here >

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Disruptive Design + Activating Change Masterclass

On July 20-22 at the CO Project Farm, we will host our Disruptive Design and Activating Change Masterclass. This program dives into the full Disruptive Design Method and provides the tools and agency needed for activating positive change by design.

Apply here >

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Educator Training

From August 17-21, Leyla will host our yearly intensive Educator Training program on the CO Project Farm. Perfect for people who are currently tracking to Educator Certification (or wanting to start!), this program shares all the insights and approaches we use at the UnSchool to share systems, sustainability and design methods for activated changemaking.

Apply here >

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Circular Systems Design

Head out to the CO Project Farm from September 1-4 to activate your career as a systems designer for the circular future! This 3-day advanced training on circular systems design focuses on life cycle thinking, circular design decisions, and repair as core design strategies for achieving the circular economy.

Apply here >

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Transformation is key

Our workshops and programs offer transformative experiences, advanced practical tools and a community of incredible like-minded humans to vibe off of — here are some of the things that people who have attended our programs say about the experience: 

New short classes on Systems Mapping, Life Cycle Thinking and Sustainable Design!

This week we have launched three new short classes over at UnSchool Online! Each focuses on one of the key activities we teach at the UnSchool: systems mapping, life cycle thinking and sustainable design.

Each class is designed to be taken in around 30 minutes and includes a mix of videos from Leyla and written content, along with activities designed to help you apply the new knowledge. These differ from our full DDM core content classes, which are much more detailed with the theory and knowledge that enables our unique approach to designing positive change.  

These short classes offer introductions to the practical skills and tools you can apply to enact these changes and are designed for busy creative changemakers like you, who want to get a quick overview of how to start making change right away.

We designed this format to rapidly transfer knowledge to those who aspire to activate their agency but feel they need more tools to do so. These courses are $25 and will help you dive into the details of a practical skill via a 30-minute introduction to a key sustainability theme that will get your brain calibrated toward thinking in systems, sustainability and design!

Introduction to Systems Mapping 

Systems thinking is a core part of seeing the full picture when working as a creative changemaker, and systems mapping is the application of this way of seeing the world so that intervention points can be found and built upon for positive change solutions. This course will help you discover how to create quick and complex analog systems maps, as content includes activities to create three different systems maps, introduction to systems thinking and the techniques for doing more advanced maps. You will learn how to see relationships and communicate complex systems. We also touch on digital mapping tools to further support your independent learning.

Introduction to Life Cycle Thinking

In this short introductory course, uncover what life cycle assessment (LCA) is and how to apply life cycle thinking to your creative decision making. We run through how to do a life cycle map as we uncover the secret lives of everyday things and discover ways of accessing life cycle data. Gain the skills to do quick, paper-based life cycle explorations for comparing products and services, know when and how to get LCA data, and then apply all the new knowledge through practice exercises. 

Introduction to Sustainable Design Strategies 

All design is powerful in its role in society. It is the all-pervasive social scriptor that influences almost every aspect of our daily lives, shapes our bodies, and influences our minds. At nearly every single moment of our lives, we are in contact with designed things. In this course, you will learn a full suite of sustainable and circular design strategies and how to apply them to the design process in order to leverage the power that design holds for making positive impacts. You’ll also learn how to manage trade-offs in decision making, along with holistic systems considerations, and engage in a product redesign using your newly-learned sustainable design strategies.

Introduction to The Circular Economy 

If you haven’t taken it already, we also have this introductory class for the Circular Economy. It makes the case for changing the economic mechanisms within which we currently exist and for shifting from high waste to high-value goods and services.

By the end, you will understand the difference between our existing, resource-draining linear systems and the circular systems that we need for a regenerative, sustainable future. You’ll learn about both the Circular Economy model and movement, as well as gain insight into how governments, industries, and individuals are shifting toward it.

All of these short classes are designed to rapidly transfer the key foundational knowledge and then encourage you to get right in and apply the knowledge by doing the activities yourself. They include a mix of video and written content, along with downloadable worksheets and practice guidance on how to apply this new knowledge in your professional life.  Get started today by taking one of our new short classes! 

New year, new you? On resolutions and getting over cognitive barriers to get shit done

By Leyla Acaroglu 

How many of us kick start a new year with a list of resolutions or actions, or even just ideas to make changes and finally get our shit together?

It's such a nice opportunity, the ticking over of a new year, and in this case a new decade, to take action on all the changes we have floating around at the back of our minds. Quite the job we hate —  start exercising, clean up the mess in the back room, change careers, volunteer more, start a new hobby, become a vegan, or in my case, every year for the last five years it has been, “Write the book.” Yes, it's hard to admit, but that has been my New Year's resolution for five solid years and, no, there is no completed book yet (although it's happening and I do have a new handbook coming out early this year! My 5th in 5 years, so I clearly have a complicated relationship with writing). 

Why do we all seem to have this innate desire to make changes when the year changes? It’s possibly because humans actually really enjoy a bit of healthy disruption, and the collective release of the old year allows for a really clear demarcation from the old to the new. The birth of a new year offers space for reflection and agenda setting that many other busy moments throughout the year just don’t allow us to catch. And of course, we also have all that ‘free time’ over the holidays to think and ponder and plan...

There is a growing body of research around how humans accept disruptions and adopt new behaviors at certain times in their lives. When I was researching sustainable lifestyle changes for the Anatomy of Action initiative, our collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme, I uncovered some fascinating things about social norms and personal behavior disruptions that may help you get a grip on your New Year's resolutions.

Understanding Social Norms

Social norms are the unwritten rules of what is/isn’t deemed ‘acceptable’ in any given society. They are pervasive and often implicated in influencing how we act, especially when around others. They are regulated by shaming those that don’t conform to them, and rewarding those that do.  In the context of everyday life, social norms subtly influence the decisions and choices we make each day. 

Norms, like so many other things in life, are in constant flux, so they require constant check-ins and recalibration to the evolving practice of everyday life. It would be exhausting if we had to consciously check in with all the appropriate social practices of our communities, so the human brain does a lot of this social norm calibration subconsciously by mirroring the behaviors of others around us. 

There are two prominent sociologists who have contributed to the understanding of how social norms influence us — Anthony Giddens’ Structuration Theory (1991) and Elizabeth Shove’s Social Practice Theory (2012). Both speak to the notion that change occurs when agents within a system are enabled to alter their everyday practices.

So, we don’t have our behaviors changed by others, but instead we are changed by the structural forces and interactions in our daily lives with the output of others actions. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation, meaning that it's hard to determine who is the first to make a shift in the status quo that then catches on and becomes a new social norm.

What we do know is that comparing our own practices against those of others affects what we do - or don't do.

There was a study in 2008 that demonstrated this; it looked at what would motivate people to opt into reusing their towel in a hotel. Goldstein and fellow researchers tried out a few approaches to socially normative messages to the inhabitants of a hotel room, ranging from, “The majority of guests reuse their towels,” to,  “The majority of guests in this room reuse their towels.”

The latter was way more successful in influencing people to opt to reuse their towel. Why? Because the desired behavior (of towel reuse) was seeded with a marker of social location-specific behavior to plant the normative expectation.

Basically because it said IN THIS ROOM, it made people even more aware of the social cue of reuse being specific to that space they were in, so the norm was set and people complied. The researchers go on to point out that, “A wide variety of research shows that the behavior of others in the social environment shapes individuals' interpretations of, and responses to, the situation.” 

It’s not new to us that we humans respond to cues in our environment, but how does this apply to something like a New Year's resolution? Do you think you would make a commitment to doing something differently if nobody else was doing it? I am one of those people who pride myself on being a bit different, so whilst I don’t write a list and share it with others as that would be way too obvious, I do totally make a mental mark at the turning of the new year to accomplish certain goals in that year. Knowing how social norms affect you and using these to your own motivational advantage could help you stick to your goals and make those positive changes contagious.

Overcoming Cognitive Dissonance 

The gap between what we say we will do and what we actually do is referred to as cognitive dissonance, a prevalent aspect when considering any form of behavioral economics. Research has found that simply caring about something does not mean that someone will alter behaviors towards it. Once we are made aware of a gap between what we think and what we do, we are more likely to change our opinions rather than our actions. 

The reality is that we often benefit from ignoring ourselves and behaving in other, more habitual ways, even if we are totally aligned with one value, we can still end up doing something completely opposite to it! Barkan and colleagues (2015) call this ‘ethical dissonance,’ which they say “arises from the inconsistency between the aspiration to uphold a moral self-image and the temptation to profit from unethical behavior.” When confronted with this, people often find ways to redefine their unethical behaviors as ‘non’-violations based on pre-violation justifications — like when you know that the cheap chocolate is unethically produced but you are able to rationalize purchasing it, just this once. 

Basically, we are all very good at messing with ourselves. So you need to find a way of reducing and identifying the dissonance so that you can stay on track with your goals.

Disrupting Everyday Habits 

The good news is that we can mess with ourselves and disrupt our own everyday habits by engaging with new experiences. Swapping from an existing one to a new option in an environment that reinforces the positive benefits, or when we are already experiencing dramatic changes, can all help us overcome inertia. A study by Fuji and colleagues from 2001 found that people were more likely to alter the way they commuted to work when they were forced by a temporary freeway closure to pick between a shorter train trip or larger drive. Many people who tried out the train then continued taking the train after the freeway reopened but they needed a disruption to force the new behavior to start.

This ‘habit discontinuity hypothesis’ states that habit-changing interventions are more likely to be effective when they are delivered during life changes (Verplanken and Roy, 2016), like when we move houses, go on vacation, or have a baby. Likewise, interventions that allow for habit swaps and new behaviors to be tried out are often more successful when the environment in which the habit is performed is altered (Carden & Wood 2018). So, as you start the new year, when we are more than likely on vacation mode, you have the space to start a different routine, this is the perfect time for your brain to offer you the commitment ceremony of New Year's resolutions to actions.

The challenge now is: how do you mess with your own mind enough to ensure you stick to them? 

When we developed the Anatomy of Action, our goal was to find a series of tangible, practical and achievable everyday lifestyle swaps that anyone anywhere could start to adopt to integrate sustainability into their everyday lives. We looked at many of the growing movements that are already happening, from zero waste living through to protein swapping.

There are 5 main lifestyle areas that we all engage in that we offer 3 swaps for each, and then there is also a further detailed list of actions you can take. In total, there are over 65 actions! So, if you are looking for some planet positive actions to start disrupting your life a little bit with, then head on over to the website. Check them out, and get started with your sustainable lifestyle hacks in 2020! 

References 

Gifford, R.D. and Chen, A.K., 2017. Why aren’t we taking action? Psychological barriers to climate-positive food choices. Climatic change, 140(2), pp.165-178.

McDonald, S., Oates, C.J., Thyne, M., Timmis, A.J. and Carlile, C., 2015. Flying in the face of environmental concern: why green consumers continue to fly. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(13-14), pp.1503-1528.

Barkan, R., Ayal, S. and Ariely, D., 2015. Ethical dissonance, justifications, and moral behavior. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6(DEC), pp.157-161.

Giddens, A., 1991. Structuration theory. Past, Present and Future. In: Bryant, C. and Jary, D.(eds.). Giddens’ Theory of Structuration. A Critical Appreciation. London: Routledge.

Goldstein, N.J., Cialdini, R.B. and Griskevicius, V., 2008. A room with a viewpoint: Using social norms to motivate environmental conservation in hotels. Journal of consumer Research, 35(3), pp.472-482. 

Shove, E., Pantzar, M. and Watson, M., 2012. The dynamics of social practice: Everyday life and how it changes. Sage.

Fujii, S., Gärling, T. and Kitamura, R., 2001. Changes in drivers’ perceptions and use of public transport during a freeway closure: Effects of temporary structural change on cooperation in a real-life social dilemma. Environment and Behavior, 33(6), pp.796-808.

Verplanken, &  Roy., 2016. Empowering interventions to promote sustainable lifestyles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, pp.127-134.

Carden, L. and Wood, W., 2018. Habit formation and change. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 20, pp.117-122.

Lally, P. and Gardner, B., 2013. Promoting habit formation. Health Psychology Review, 7(sup1), pp.S137-S158.

Why you should NOT get Certified with the UnSchool

A few months back, after many requests from our community for more lengthy, detailed, intensive learning experiences, we launched our certification system for the UnSchool.  It took us a couple years of design, iteration, and development, as we wanted to create three different tracks that would offer unique, specific levels of application — the Practitioner, UnMasters, and Educator certification tracks. Each track starts online and involves self-directed community activation points, direct mentorship, and personal agency development. They are connected to our face-to-face programs and enable people anywhere in the world to gain the tools and skills of activated creative changemaking. 

We thought about why someone would or would not take a program like this and decided to list all the reasons why someone interested in activating their personal agency for a positive and sustainable future should not get certified with us. Without further ado, here are five reasons why you should absolutely NOT get an UnSchool certification: 

1. We have no accreditation. We decided early on that the UnSchool is not interested in having some current, status-quo-system validation, and that instead, our approaches would speak for themselves. So, we intentionally got absolutely no external validation (and we certainly did a thorough review of many of them before rejecting them all!), and to this day, the ‘value’ anyone gets from attending any of our programs is the value they take away from it! Which, if you’d like some examples of this value, you can read some alumni profiles, like those of Laura Francois, Bao Yen, Loo Ly Mun, Neha Rao, Lourdes Martinez, or Zoë Palmer. 

2. The content is complex. No easy A’s here! But that's the reality of the world —  it's not simple, linear, easy-to-digest, pre-cut-up stuff. It's messy and interconnected, and the kind of content we teach includes the tools to design interventions for all of that. So, at times it can be a bit of a mess, but the outcome is a way more dynamic, detailed, and flexible mindset. 

3. You have to be self-directed. This is the hardest thing for many people: finding the brain hacks to trick themselves into staying on the track, getting the work done, and overcoming the inevitable procrastination that we all deal with. We don't step in for direct support until you get 75% of the way through (but of course, we respond to emails, you have a LinkedIn support group, etc.).  This is when the three-month 1-on-1 mentorship kicks in, and that's when you will have slayed all your procrastination demons and be ready to level up :)

4. Leyla speaks VERY FAST! People sometimes complain about this. And that's why you can slow all our videos down to half-speed, watch them again and again, or read the subtitles (handy for catching all the nerdy jokes!). But it’s true... we all get so overly excited about the content and that comes across in the speed of our it.  Thus, many of the videos involve an excited, fast-talking Australian. So, you have to be able to put up with hours and hours of that to survive to certification — but don’t worry, each video is fairly short.

5. It will NOT solve your existentialism. We all wish there was a simple solution to the personal battles we each have with the purpose of the world and our role in it, but alas, there is not. Perhaps reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the best way to deal with this one, and of course, the tools of systems thinking and perspective shifting are fundamental in gaining some agency over the bigger questions we each hold. But an online learning system is not going to be the remedy for the universal, age-old conundrum: Why me? Why us? Why now? What it will do, however, is help you identify why YOU, why US and why right NOW when it comes to making positive change in our world.

In all seriousness though, we designed the certification tracks to be something that we would want to do; it's a mixture of videos, written content, and a bunch of challenges that you have to complete. AND then, we enforce you taking action (as that is the entire point) by doing random (fun, positive-changemaking!) things, like having dinner parties and running workshops to collect community activation points.

These combined experiences set you up to get certified, and once you have that UnSchool-issued validation (there’s even an official LinkedIn certificate you’ll get), you will know what you know and be equipped to go out into the world and mess with it in positive and provocative ways to help ignite changes for a more sustainable, regenerative, and circular future. Oh, and you get access to our stuff to do that :)

Guaranteed, or your money back ;) 

Is 2020 the year for you to kick start your creative changemaking career? Sign up for any one of our tracks over the holidays (24 Dec until 4th Jan), and get the first month FREE! You can try it out before you buy. Just use the code ACTIVATING2020 when you register, and month one of any one of the tracks will be free. Payments will begin by month two, so if it's not for you, then you can unregister and not pay a cent. 

Start the UnSchool certification process now > 

Tips for a More Sustainable Holiday Season

Activating your Anatomy of Action for a more Sustainable Holiday Season 

Holidays are a great time to connect with friends and family, take a well-earned rest, and experience new things. Many of the everyday actions that we built into our UNEP collaboration, the Anatomy of Action, are perfect to try out around the holiday time — not just because it can be an incredibly wasteful time (think of all the unnecessary and unwanted gifts, the wrapping, the traveling, the wasted food, the packaging of the food and the stuff, etc., etc.), but also because it fits into our method of working around habit disruptors. 

Did you know we are each more likely to make changes to our lives when we already have changes occurring?  When we are moving house, having a baby, or going on vacation, for example, these moments are so different from the norm that our brains are more ready and willing to take on all sorts of changes and adopt new behaviors. So, give some of these actions a shot this holiday season, and see if you can help design a future that works better than today! 

FOOD

This is a holiday MUST! So much food is purchased, eaten, and wasted around the holidays, but there are many simple steps you can take to reduce your negative and increase your positive impact: 

• Protein swap from high impact to low impact by trying your hand at vegan potlucks, plant-based parties, and meatless main meals.

• Get creative with your leftovers, and find ways of converting them into a new meal or composting (you can even just bury your food waste in your backyard if you have one!). 

• Give the gift of herb gardens or plant-based cookbooks to help find ways of supporting your friends’ and families’ adoption of more healthy and nutritious plant based meals. 

STUFF

This is by far the biggest impact of the holidays! How much wasted, unwanted, needless stuff is purchased and then stuffed in drawers and cupboards over the gift-giving season? I shudder to think. Here are three easily-adoptable, stuff-reducing actions you can take: 

• Arrange a second-hand gift trade or experience extravaganza instead of doling out things you don’t know if people want or need.

• Make something instead of buying more sh*t. Think beautiful preserves, your famous pasta sauce, or handicrafts —  I even once made a DIY kids’ game that was the hit of the holidays! 

• Ditch disposables and go for a zero-waste approach, whether it’s free from packaging altogether or wrapped in newspaper, cloth, or other reusables. Make it a fun challenge in your family to see who can zero waste the most!

MOVE

Many people have to move places to see their loved ones or go on adventures over the holidays. Airports are packed, and the skies are filled with more people and thus, more Co2. Here are some simple tactics for getting places with less impact:

• See if you can take a train to your destination over flying — consider it a more relaxed way of entering into the holiday time. 

• Arrange a rideshare system with extended family and friends if you have to drive to your destination.

• If you have to fly, then find a way of offsetting your carbon, like by buying a tree for family members (and planting it, of course).

MONEY

We all spend way too much of it at this time of year, and what we do spend it on will have a huge impact on what is on the market next year and into the future! So, here are simple money impact hacks:

• Instead of buying stuff, make an ethical investment for yourself or a loved one.

• Divest from high-impact stuff, and opt for lower impact things (for example, swap tech for board games). 

• If you are in a cold place, turn down the heat and pull out those ugly Christmas sweaters! If it’s hot where you spend your holidays, then find ways of staying cool sans-AC.

FUN

This is the entire point of the holidays —- rest and relaxation, fun times with the people we love, and a break from work life (for some!). Here are a few fun-inducing, lower-impact actions you can take: 

• Try out a staycation by exploring somewhere closer to home. 

• Ask for gifts that help you stay curious, like books, games, and e-learning subscriptions.

• Opt for time well spent over stuff-heavy experiences.

And remember to enjoy this process! Making changes and lifestyle swaps is about experiencing new things and being more courageous. Sometimes, change can feel a bit uncomfortable at the start, but that's the good thing about it: you can change, see what works, adjust, and then try again in different ways until it fits for you and your life. The actions we each take everyday have impacts, and we all have the power and opportunity to make more effective lifestyle choices so that the planet and all the people we share it with can have a better future. 

Find out more about the many actions you can take to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle by checking out the UNEP collaboration we developed, the Anatomy of Action. And if you haven’t yet joined our LinkedIn group for creative changemakers, join us there and share your tried and true sustainable holiday hacks!

The UnSchool Kuching Fellowship Recap

UnSchool Fellowship Number 10 happened in Kuching, Malaysia on the island of Borneo between the 17th and 23rd of November, 2019. The Kuching cohort included seventeen fellows from nine different countries (meet them here). Read all about the incredible adventure into all things systems change over on our fellowship blog >

Are we exploiting empathy?

By Leyla Acaroglu

Empathy, a term that was first brought into the English language in 1908, has become somewhat of a hot topic in design and business circles of late. A key part of the process of design thinking and human-centered design, it seems that “more empathy” has become the go-to solution for a myriad of problems, becoming a key part of the mainstream conversation around improving relationships and making better products and services. From better leadership, improved bedside manner for doctors, more progressive politics, and a fix for social crises like refugee relocation and homelessness, the call for more empathy is everywhere. Some schools, like this one in Denmark, are even teaching empathy in their curriculum in hopes of creating happier, kinder adults. But with considerable ethical and social implications, empathy as a tool for engaging with humans is a bit of a complex space, one that offers up many ethical issues that need some deeper exploration of this all-too-human experience.

What is empathy, and how does it affect the human experience? 

By now, you may have already seen Dr. Brene Brown’s work on empathy, especially since she has a new Netflix talk out at the moment that also dives into shame and compassion. If you have never heard of her, then you should at least check out the short video below, which illustrates the difference between empathy and sympathy and highlights the pitfalls in getting these valuable human experiences mixed up. 

Empathy is defined as the ability to feel, see, and understand the feelings of others. But empathy has a very clear physiological and neurological side to the experience (which, by the way, is a fascinating scientific process). We connect with the feelings of others because we are social beings that benefit from empathizing with those around us. In fact, our brains have mirror neurons, whereby our minds mimic the actions and facial expressions of those people we see and interact with so that we are more connected. 

Evolution has served us well when it comes to ensuring that we connect with our fellow humans. You may be one of those people that feels like vomiting when you see someone else doing it, or perhaps tears well when you hear of a friend’s pain. These are all triggered by the vagus nerve, which supports the biophysical reaction that makes up the empathetic responses we have. The vagus nerve runs down the spinal column and connects the emotional center of your brain to all the primary organs in your body, which then interprets things you see into feelings that trigger physical reactions — like vomiting or crying, or even that pang your get in your guts when you hear of a tragedy that doesn't affect you, but you can feel the loss and grief of others. 

Empathy is a cornerstone of the mammalian experience (humans are not the only ones who show prosocial behavior connected to empathy!), as it supports social bonding and builds connections by helping to identify with another’s pain or pleasure so that we can find common spaces and provide support when needed. However, there is a rising trend in misusing this powerful human connection tool to sell more products. 

Exploiting Empathy

Google search ‘empathy map’ and you will find a simple canvas used by design and marketing teams that doesn't really involve engaging with real humans most of the time. Instead, it is used to imagine a potential customer’s emotional space in relation to your product or service. Stage one of the design thinking process is to empathize with your ‘user’ by way of basic interviews and ‘putting yourself in the shoes of others’ by observing and gaining insights into how they feel or think of whatever problem you are attempting to solve. You can read more about the process in over at IDEO or d.School.

This approach to empathy has it diluted down to the sum of its parts — not as a complex holistic experience that considers the emotional, physiological, and deeply critical interpersonal experiences which have effects on people's emotional states and worldviews. Instead, it’s being leveraged to exploit people’s needs in order to sell them more stuff — stuff they may not actually need, nor perhaps can afford, because when we feel like someone understands us and we feel connected to them, we are more likely to connect with what they are trying to get us to buy. Not all empathy building is sinister by any means; much of it is done with good intentions to understand the human experience so that better services can be designed. But there certainly is a host of ethical conundrums that are evoked when empathy is used more so for extraction than for amplification of compassion and intercommunity understanding. There are many different opinions and critiques on design thinking that are worth the read (see here, here, here and here). Touted as the future of sales, with the ability to ‘empathize’ in the design thinking way, empathy can be used to find hidden desires and manipulate these into purchases, which unfortunately plays right into the systems failure of the hyper-consumption loop that has led to so many negative impacts in the first place and continues to create unintended consequences.

Does Empathy Promote Human Connection? 

I did a project a few years ago exploring leadership and specifically looking at why there are so few female leaders in the design sectors, despite the high rate of female graduates from design programs. I use the Disruptive Design Method for all my work, and in the mining phase, I conducted 30 face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with men and women from within the design industry. I asked them all the same starter question and then allowed the 20 minute conversations to flow based on their reactions. I collected data by touch typing their responses instead of recording them so that they felt more comfortable sharing their stories. As a sociologist, I am hyper aware of the power of asking questions, since questions triggers all sorts of emotional reactions in the interviewee and can open up old wounds or trigger entirely new avenues of thought.  As such, respect and consideration need to be held by the questioner. In my case, I felt so many connections with the stories and experiences of the people in front of me that, as a researcher trying to understand the experiences of others so that I could interpret a potential place to intervene to support changes, I ended up identifying a lack of empathetic understanding as a tool for shifting the status quo on this problem arena. 

But for me, this was the critical thing: this was not just about a lack of empathy toward women —  it was a two-way street. People just didn't understand the conditions and experiences of the other gender; thus it reinforced this inability to provide equitable access to resources such as mentoring, emotional support, time off for childcare, etc. Men told me of being seen as being lazy for wanting to leave early to hang out with their kids, and women found it hard to break into a Friday evening drinking circle because it just wasn’t their type of good time. Either way, everyone was stuck a little bit in their own understanding of the world, so in the context of allowing people to flourish in the workplace, building connections between genders, different age groups, and cultural diversity was a point of intervention that I felt could be leveraged to increase leadership opportunities in creative industries. 

So, I developed this Gender Equity Tookit… however, I may have been wrong. I tested the activities with hundreds of people and found, in the moment, increased levels of understanding, empathy, and connection — but I have no idea if this will affect anyone's lives when it comes to work opportunities. I believe the ability to understand others in whatever ways we can is a powerful approach to effecting positive change, but I also worry about the risks associated with one-dimensional empathy building, which leads me to the wider questions around the limits to empathy as a tool for affecting change.

Limits to Empathy 

A decades long study by Sara Konrath on the empathy levels of young people in America has shown that since the 2000’s, empathy has started to decline by around 40%, with many people saying it is not their responsibility to help other people in trouble. For some people, being empathetic is a problem; being able to feel other people’s pain can be debilitating, as it’s exhausting and can lead to a surge in the stress hormone, cortisol, and can even result in bad decision making.

In our current media landscape, where many agents are competing to milk your emotions through the algorithmic cycle of serving your own interests (like most social media platforms now do), we see just how easy it is to be drained by the pull on our empathetic responses to others’ pain and suffering. Click on a story about a child cancer survivor, for example, and the next time you are online, you are served more heartbreaking stories of children's illnesses. This uptick in feeling empathy-induced stress has led to the coining of the terms “empathy burnout” and “compassion fatigue.”  

There are counterarguments against empathy, such as the those put forth by psychologist Paul Bloom, who argues that because empathy creates a hyper focus on one individual that we identify with, it distracts us from feeling connected to bigger issues. There was this story that emerged after the disastrous earthquake that hit Mexico City in 2017 — the story of a small girl being trapped under the rubble of a school that had collapsed. The entire country was gripped with hope and anxiety when authorities announced that Frida Sofia was rescued from the rubble, only to find out days later that the entire story was made up. The backlash to this hyper-focused collective empathy was profound, especially since this same false story line had played out in the 1985 earthquake. 

Adam Waytz provides other areas of concern regarding empathy. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, he says, “Failing to recognize the limits of empathy can impair performance,” arguing that it is a zero-sum gain, where the more empathy you expel in one area, the less empathy you have left for others, and critically that in itself can erode ethics.

Ethics can be misguided by empathetic responses, especially when paired with the cognitive biases we all have that support our brains categorizing and preferencing people akin to ourselves. Empathy can absolutely be exploited — and in some cases, weaponized — in order to dehumanize others. We’ve seen this play out in the political theater of the last five or so years, for example, as right-wing populist candidates have come to rise around the world.  One of the common denominators among these politicians is their use of “othering” techniques that utilize empathy for some victims and not others. They evoke a sense of hate toward some victims (such as the parents of school shootings) and portray them as liars, thus othering them. This results in what’s been called selective empathy, which not only creates division, but it also creates a major distraction around important issues that the world so desperately needs to focus on, like climate change, poverty, clean energy — basically all of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

The Ethics of Empathy 

So is empathy a useful tool for effecting change? Yes. Is it a tool that can be misused or exploited? Yes. Can empathy create more problems than it set out to solve? Yes, yes, and yes. When used as a core part of decision making, consciously or not, empathy can lead to positive, negative, and even immoral outcomes.

So what should we do with empathy? Use it well. Like any knowledge, knowing how something works should inform us on how to ensure we use it well, with respect and integrity, which is critical in the case of empathy. This means empathy should always be served with a good helping of ethics. Considering the ethical implications of triggering an empathetic response, or extracting responses based on empathy triggers in people, should, like all other aspects of our social conduct, be used in ways that don't manipulate, exploit, or create suffering in those around us. Of course, this Utopian view of ethical empathy use is far from the reality, but the case for ditching the fake one-dimensional version of empathy used by marketing and business development people is the first step in getting over the tragic empathy milking that occurs in the name of sales and profits. And for our day-to-day interactions with other humans, perhaps we should leverage compassion instead.

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At UnSchool Online we offer a host of deep dive classes into topics like ethics and empathy, cognitive bias, and systems thinking. You can also to level up your leadership and creative change making skills.