Quick Guide to the Disruptive Design Method

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Disruptive Design Method (DDM) is a systems-based approach to creative problem solving for tackling complex social and environmental issues. It combines sociological inquiry methods (mining) with systems explorations (landscaping) and design and creativity (building) approaches. The method is built on systems, sustainability and design, allowing for a three-dimensional perspective shift of a problem arena to ensure that interventions create positive change. Here we cover a quick guide to the DDM. 

We live in a complex interconnected world riddled with dynamic and often chaotic problems that requires a mindset and skillset shift in order for us to address them at a systemic level. 

The Disruptive Design Method is an approach to problem-solving that 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.

The three-phase process of Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) is cycled through to create outcomes that are creative and sustainability-focused. This approach offers a micro-to-macro-and-back-again perspective of the problem arena in which you wish to create positive change within and supports the development of a more three-dimensional worldview. 

The three phases of the Disruptive Design Method: Mining, Landscaping and Building

In this quick guide, I explain the what, why, and how of the DDM, along with ways it can help create non-conventional approaches to addressing complex problems, such as those presented by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

We use systems boundaries to define the spaces we wish to explore, and then find connection points perfect for a tactical intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problems arena). Then, because we have all this new knowledge from mining and landscaping, we can rapidly develop divergent and creative approaches to intervening in the systems the create change.

Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this method, and because it’s a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on the problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design.

POSITIVELY DISRUPTIVE BY DESIGN 

Design is an incredibly powerful tool that changes the world. Everything around us has been constructed to meet the needs of our advanced human society, and in turn, our individual experiences of the world are influenced dramatically by the designed world we inhabit. 

We are each citizen designers of the future through the actions we take every day, which is why I developed the DDM as a systems-based creative intervention design method for exploring and actively participating in the design of a future that works better for us all. 

Intended as a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools needed to activate positive change, the DDM approaches creative problem solving by mining through problems and employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through to landscaping the systems at play and identifying the connections and relationship dynamics that reinforce the elements of the system, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact by building new ideas that shift the status quo of the problem at a systems level. This is then cycled through in an iterative way until the outcome is tangible and effective at altering the state of the issue at hand. 

The DDM is an iterative process

As Buckminster Fuller teaches, often the smallest part of the system has the capacity to make the biggest change — and that’s one of the fundamental approaches that the DDM enables: identify the part within the system that you have agency and ability to impact.

Instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, we teach you how to be problem lovers who dive right into the sticky center of the issue; then, you will get busy designing divergent solutions that build 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. Your personal sphere of influence will grow and ebb and flow over time.

Additionally, the DDM includes a 12-part knowledge set that, when explored as a whole, equips anyone with the thinking and doing tools to be a more aware and intentional agent for positive change. It also has the tools to cycle through the issues and seek out the non-obvious opportunities, designing divergent interventions and solutions that build on your unique individual sphere of influence. These are topics of self-development explored in my latest handbook Design Systems Change and through my 30-day Challenge. 

Perhaps most importantly though, instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, this method offers up tools for shifting perspectives that enable one to become a problem lover with the ability to dive right under the obvious parts of the issue at hand, avoid laying blame, and instead, identify and uncover the parts of the system that reinforce the issue so that change can be created. 

In a world where many people see and feel problematic impacts with intensity — the social, environmental, and political issues especially — and then become overwhelmed or disabled by this complexity, we see good-intentioned people disengage from taking action. Thus, I can not understate how powerful seeing problems through the lens of opportunity, optimism, and yes, even a bit of love can be for someone. I want to provide an agentizing effect, a set of tools that enable people to move from overwhelming problems to possible actions; after all, the world is made up of the accumulation of individual actions of many, you and me included.

Problem loving is the DDM mindset

THE ORIGINS OF THE DDM

When I first started to develop the Disruptive Design Method, it was in part a reaction to the one-dimensional problem-solving techniques that I had been taught through my years of traditional education. Back in 2014, as I was finishing my PhD and preparing to launch the UnSchool of Disruptive Design, I knew that there needed to be a scaffolding that would support all the content I wanted to fill this experimental knowledge lab with. Drawing on the years of professional experience and research I had to date, I went about iteratively developing and refining the modules from 20+ down to 12 core components of the Disruptive Design Methodology set, a learning system that, once fully engaged with, fits together to create the DDM.

The 12 core modules of the Disruptive Design Methodology

It’s a ‘scaffolding’ because it’s not intended to be rigid and formulaic, but instead, it offers the support that one needs as they start to develop a more three-dimensional view of the world and adopt the skills of systems thinking, problem exploration, and creative intervention design. I personally use this approach in all the commissions and collaborations I do, like in designing learning systems for Finland and Thailand, and in creating sustainable living initiatives, like the Anatomy of Action with the UNEP.

A scaffolding is often used to create support around a building as it is going up — it’s the skeleton structure that enables the progression up into the air. This is the intention with the DDM, to offer support as a 3D worldview and mindset is developed to overcome reductive thinking and create a more robust set of tools that enable a problem-loving approach to solving complex real-world problems. 

I, along with my team, have taught the DDM and the core approaches of systems and life cycle thinking to thousands of people all over the world, from teenagers to CEOs, with hundreds of alumni completing our in-person programs and thousands enrolled in our online school. We have seen many different incarnations of the DDM and its tools in action throughout our five years of running the UnSchool and its various programs. 

The world needs more pioneers of positively disruptive change — people equipped with the thinking and doing skills that will enable them to understand and love complex systems and then be able to translate that into actual change. There are, of course, many tools and approaches for designing change, and the DDM is just one of a wide suite of tools out there. I am an appreciator of many of them, but for me, the reason why anyone should gain an overview of this approach is that it combines the three pillars of systems, sustainability, and design, of which I have not seen an approach yet to do the same. 

What this all boils down to is having a unique method on hand to positively intervene and disrupt the status quo of any problem arena to ensure that the outcome is more effective, equitable, circular and sustainable. That’s why we always offer equity access scholarships and ensure that people from all walks of life can gain access to these valuable perspective-shifting tools we offer at the UnSchool.

THE 3-PARTS OF DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD

There are three distinct parts of the Disruptive Design Method — Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) — each is enacted and cycled through in order to gain a granulated, refined outcome through iterative feedback loops.

The first part is Mining, where the mindset is one of curiosity and exploration. In this phase, we do deep participatory research, suspend the need to solve, avoid trying to impose order, and embrace the chaos of any complex system we are seeking to understand. The tools of this phase are: research, observation, exploration, curiosity, wonderment, participatory action, questioning, data collection, and insights. This can be described as diving under the iceberg and observing the divergent parts that enable us to understand a problem arena in more detail.

The second stage is Landscaping. This is where we take all the parts that we uncovered during the Mining phase and start to piece them together to form a landscaped view through systems mapping and exploration. Landscaping is the mindset of connection, where you see the world as a giant jigsaw puzzle that you are putting back together and creating a different perspective that enables a bird’s eye view of the problem arena. Insights are gathered, and locations of where to intervene in the system to leverage change are identified. The tools for this phase are: systems mapping (cluster, interconnected circles, etc.), dynamic systems exploration, synthesis, emergence, identification, insight gathering, and intervention identification.

The third part of is Building. This is the creative ideation phase that allows for the development of divergent design ideas that build on potential intervention points to leverage change within the system. The goal is not to solve but to evolve the problem arena you are working within so that the status quo is shifted. Here we use a diversity of ideation and prototyping tools to move through a design process to get to the best-fit outcome for your intervention.

The key to this entire approach is iteration and ‘cycling through’ the stages to get to a refined and ‘best-fit’ outcome. Why do we do this? Because problems are complex, knowledge builds over time, and experience gives us the tools to make change that sticks and grows. This cycling through approach draws upon the Action Research Cycle to create an iterative approach to exploring, understanding, and evolving the problem arena.

The three applied parts of the MLB Method are based on a more complex Methodology set. This set combines 12 divergent theory arenas to form the foundation of identifying, solving, and evolving complex problems, as well as helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works. From cognitive sciences to gamification and systems interventions, the 12 units of the Disruptive Design Methodology are designed to fit together to form the foundations of a practice in creative change-making.

THE FOUNDATIONS: SYSTEMS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND DESIGN

The UnSchool is deeply rooted in a foundation of applied systems, sustainability, and design, forming three knowledge pillars that hold up all we do — including leveraging the Disruptive Design Method. 

The three pillars of the UnSchool and DDM

Whenever we teach a program, we always begin with systems thinking as the foundation, as it is one of the most powerful tools that we can use to address complex problems. It enables any practitioner to see how everything is interconnected, and systems can be viewed from multiple perspectives, allowing a shift from rigid to flexible mindsets. We also engage with the principles of sustainability through each phase, which for us, means doing more with less, understanding how the planet works so that we can work within its means, and evolving from an extraction-based society to a circular and regenerative one. 

Through the Mining phase, systems boundaries are used to define the problem arenas that one wants to explore. Through systems mapping, research techniques, observation and reflection, all the parts that make up a system and their connections are explored through the landscaping phase, laying the groundwork for exposing unique places to intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problem arena).

From this, new knowledge is built from the Mining and Landscaping phases, which forms the foundation for the Building phase — rapidly designing divergent and creative ideas to intervening in the problem arena. Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this MLB Method. And, because it’s equally a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on any problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design. 

HOW THE DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD HELPS MAKE POSITIVE CHANGE

LOVING THE PROBLEM

Many people avoid problems, which means that they never truly understand them. By learning to love problems and see them as opportunities in disguise, you will develop an open mind that thinks differently. This is all about being curious and trying to understand something before you attempt to solve it! The more curiosity you can foster, the more things you will uncover about the world around you.

SEEING RELATIONSHIPS

Everything is interconnected, and actions create reactions. Being able to see the relationships that make up cause and effect are part of any good problem solvers tool belt. The content of the DDM is designed to foster systems perspectives as well as deep identification with cause and effect relationships.

PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING

The ability to see the world through other people’s eyes is critical to building resilience, empathy, and leadership skills. You will uncover how to constantly reflect and explore the world from diverse perspectives, overcome biases and be able to put yourself in the shoes of others to understand why people think or behave differently to you based on their own life and learning experiences.

COLLABORATION

Respectfully and successfully working with others, despite differences, is critical to creativity and leadership skills. The goal is to encourage people to see that diversity in collaboration is just as important as agreement, and that coming to a consensus can be achieved in many different ways. Many of the tools we teach, such as systems mapping, can be used as brilliant collaboration tools, so you gain incredible opportunities to foster effective collaboration.

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At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being; we believe that being change-centric is a way of defining a life agenda, finding purpose, and setting the tone for how you live and contribute through your life and work. We all have the power to affect positive social and environmental change in and through everything we do, from the things we buy to the conversations we have and the kind of work we do. This change-centric approach is by all means a cultivated one in which you have to work at wanting to make change. Because truly, it’s not always easy; in fact, trying to make change can definitely hurt sometimes — and frankly, it often requires some measure of failure along the way. How would we have evolved as a species had we not experienced millions of years of failure and accidents? Allowing the space for failing early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is one of the easiest things to make happen… if you have the right tools and resources, which are built into the DDM.

You can take the full program at your own pace via our online school here, or if you do a certification track, you get access to the full 12 modules, plus loads of extra content on activating and facilitating change. 

Quick Guide to Circular Economy Business Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Circular Economy is all about the transformation of the way we do business, create goods and services, organize society and ultimately respect and cherish the world around us. Moving from a linear to a circular economy requires a reconfiguration of nearly all business structures, which is where circular business strategies come into play.

In my quick guide series, I am providing an overview of the different decision making support tools that enable the transformation to a circular and sustainable society. 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. This requires a redesign of nearly everything, and the sustainable design decisions I outlined already cross over with these sustainable business strategies as they interlock to provide a pathway form linear to circular. Like any strategy, there is no one size fits all solution and there are new ideas and approaches being designed and tested in more detail as we see the advancement of this transformation.

As individuals, as governments and as organizations, we already encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we invest in and thus support, in our time, energy and money. If you are someone who works for a company and makes decisions, then you definitely need to understand how the economy is currently transforming and what the new types of business models are evolving to service the in-demand need for a resource-efficient, equitable, sustainable and circular world.

As we enter into this new green recovery stage, there are many businesses in need of reconfiguration, pivots and performance changes, where the standard business models, policies, products, and services just don't fit any longer. In order to meet the growing demand for sustainable and circular products and the political shifts towards equitable industries, companies need to come to terms with these new approaches to making money whilst also making good.

“Circular business models modify the pattern of product and material flows through the economy.” — OECD Business Model for Circular Economy Report

Within a circular economy, goods cycle through two main types of metabolism flows. One is the technical system, which includes all the human-made, technically-altered goods, and these must be designed to be recaptured, reused, repaired, remanufactured and where appropriate recycled, in order to ensure material values are maximized and technical products don't escape into the natural environment — which leads us to the other main metabolism, the biological one. This encompasses all the goods and materials that are biologically based and can easily and benignly be metabolized back into nature. All food products, for example, are biological, while all food packaging that has any technical additions like plastic is in the technical stream.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end-of- life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation for change thus far has been around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the system right from the start. In part, the circular economy is trying to address this by providing pathways for full systems redesign, rather than just end-of-life tweaks.

The global economy is designed around the consumption of goods and services, so much so that the measurement tool we use to determine the success of nations, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), only measures the things produced and sold in a country. It ignores the losses from the systems that it takes from, such as nature, ignores any activities that have no economic aspect to them and ultimately creates a very narrow view of value and wealth. GDP is a massive system failure as it externalizes all ecological impacts. This way of measuring the economy is only 70 years old, and it has helped to create many of the environmental issues that plague us today.

GDP is one of the driving forces that created the global linear economy, whereby every day millions of tons of raw materials are extracted from nature (through mining, harvesting, cropping, etc.); these are mechanically processed into usable goods in factories, shipped around the world, and then purchased, used up, and thrown out. When things are discarded, they often end up in landfills, incinerators or dumps, or worse they escape back into nature in harmful ways because they were only ever designed to maximize the benefits to the producers and not to consider the full life cycle impacts that they may have. Waste in all its forms is a byproduct of this linear system, whereas in nature, there is no such thing as waste; our species has created pollution of all sorts. This has created a huge strain on the waste and recycling systems, of which are currently broken, resulting in many ecological, equity and health implications, and created the demand for transforming the way we do business, meet human needs and structure the entire economy.

As we progress to the normalization and integration of the circular approaches, pioneering leadership is required from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo through designing new things that make the old polluting, degrading, inequitable systems obsolete. We are starting to see this, with many of the world's biggest companies committing to adopting circularity, carbon reduction, and sustainable design strategies.

We can speed up the needed change by incentivizing producers to approach product and business design differently — to use sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of closed-loop product delivery models.

“Circular business models are special in the sense that they look for value creation in places usually of little interest to companies that operate in the traditional linear production paradigm”. — Guldmann, Best Practice Examples of Circular Business Models

The future is circular, not just in the wider economy, but also in our daily lives. As we become more aware of the impact of our actions, we are more incentivized and agentized to make informed and effective decisions. We can no longer avoid the reality that our planet is in need of better care. The linear economy has helped us advance to this incredible point in time, but the advancement has come at major costs to the ecological systems that sustain life on Earth, which in turn affects our health and quality of life as we battle climate change, air pollution, global pandemics and loss of biodiversity. These issues are all interconnected, and until we change the way we do things, we will continue to be the victims of our own poor decisions.

The circular economy is seeking to remedy this through shifts in the way we arrange society, the way we produce goods and services, and the way we all consume, in order to ultimately design the kind of future we want to live in. One that is equitable, sustainable and regenerative by design.

Before we dive into the business models that are part of this transformation, let’s quickly cover some of the key concepts that are central to the circular shift.

Circular Economy Core Concepts

It's important to know that the movement for the transformation to a closed-loop circular economy has been well underway for several decades. Work at multiple levels of research, industry and government has been ongoing to advance the idea of product stewardship, cleaner production and extended producer responsibility. Here are the main overarching concepts that fit within the circular economy:

• Product Stewardship: The parent company of the design, production and sales takes full responsibility for reducing the environmental impact of the product they create throughout the entire life cycle of the product, ensuring that there are appropriate end-of-life options and that these are managed by the parent company.

• Extended Producer Responsibility: A policy approach whereby all of the full life-cycle environmental costs associated with a product are added to the final sale price, and this extra revenue is used to manage the product stewardship of the product.

• Eco Design: Approaches to designing products so that they last longer and have a limited impact on the environment across their full life cycle. This is also called sustainable design, and I have a quick guide to this here too.

• Cleaner Producer: A preventative measure by companies to reduce the waste and pollution associated with the production of goods.

• Industrial Ecology: Ways of remodelling industrial systems to perform more like ecological ones and maximize value exchange.

• Industrial Symbiosis: Part of industrial ecology, a network of diverse organizations collaborate to ensure that resources are used efficiently and value is cycled between them.

• Waste Equals Food: An approach where all ‘waste’ becomes a nutrient to something else in the system.

• Non-Fossil Energy: Energy derived from renewable resources.

• True-Cost Accounting: A type of accounting that takes into consideration the full externalities and costs associated with delving a service, doing business, or creating a product.

• Cradle to cradle: A concept of ensuring that the full life of a product is managed in a sustainable way that was made popular in a book of the same name and has a certification system for products.

• Biomimicry: An approach to creating products and services that mimic the way nature works by studying and replicating the solutions found in the natural world.

• Regenerative Design: A whole systems approach to creating solutions that offer back more than is taken in their creation by exploring the way natural systems solve problems and creating things that are interconnected with natural systems.

• Post Disposable: A movement to make waste obsolete by designing solutions that move beyond waste as a socially acceptable concept.

• Life Cycle Thinking: A framework that takes into consideration the whole of life environmental impacts of a product or service by looking at the impacts that actions in the economy have on natural systems by looking from the cradle to grave. I have a guide to this here.

• Disruptive 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 thinking, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact.

• Systems Thinking: Systems thinking is a holistic approach to understanding the way parts fit together in dynamic relationships to make up a whole system. It’s the opposite of reductive or linear thinking and involves a series of practical approaches and mental models that enable a more complex view of the world, focusing on relationships and synthesis.

• Closing the loop: This Is a concept promoted by some businesses as a solution to waste generation and in support of the circular economy. By closing the loop on the end-of-life impacts of a product from the design stage, the business can be redesigned to support end- to-end integrated systems.

• Technical nutrients: Materials or stocks that are manipulated by humans and cannot be easily re-integrated into nature (for example, plastics).

• Biological nutrients: Materials or stocks that can be easily absorbed or digested by natural systems in a benign way (unbleached paper or food).

• Metabolism rate: The ability for things to be reabsorbed or integrated into a system — food waste, for example, can be easily metabolized in a compost bin or biodigester, whereas it does not get effectively metabolized in a landfill.

• Zero waste: This is a strategy and movement to go beyond waste reduction and remove all disposable products from a place, company or lifestyle by embracing a set of strategies that eliminate waste completely. The goal is to avoid sending any waste to a landfill or incinerator.

(There are many more! I have a class that covers all of this in way more detail coming out soon, and we also have a gamified toolkit that asks these questions and helps you get to a sustainable outcome — see here)

Circular Economy Business Models

The types of business model transformations that are underway and will become more prevalent in the near future include different approaches to closing the loop so that end-to-end material flows are managed by the producers. The burden of waste is not transferred to the end-user, but instead, the company has stewardship over their products for its full life cycle and designs products to be recaptured to ensure that the values of the materials and embodied impacts are maximized.

Every industry and product category will need a different combination of business and design approaches, as some materials are easily re-metabolized and some aren't, some product categories are much simpler than others, etc. The fundamental shift here is how we design goods to flow through the economy and the responsibility that producers take of their goods, enabling customers to return, reuse, or repair to ensure that value is continually increased.

REPAIR

Designing products to have extended life spans by providing repair services and maximizing likelihood of repair during use and end of life phases.

REMANUFACTURE

Creating within a closed-loop system where products are intentionally intended to be taken back, reconditioned or fed back into the production cycle to create new high value products.

RESELL

The resale or buyback of products are encouraged, supporting the continuation of the functionality and increasing the usable life span.

SHARING PLATFORMS

The creation of service provisions within a product context to maximize the reuse and shareability of the goods.

WASTE AS A RESOURCE

Products are designed to intentionally use others’ byproducts or to ensure that their own byproducts are absorbed into a new system.

PRODUCT AS SERVICE MODEL

Products are reimagined into service delivery models, and long-term relationships are built with the customers. Products are always owned by the producer and leased to the customer thus they can be made of higher value and managed across their entire life.

CIRCULAR SUPPLIES

Products are part of the supply model, and consumers collaborate to share resources and ensure that circular products are available on the market.

RESOURCE RECOVERY

Mining landfills or extracting materials back from the economy to ensure that they are circulated back into the system. This could be a third party provided system.

PRODUCT LIFE EXTENSION

Challenging the traditional model of lots of customers buying individual units by offering higher value longer-term products and ensuring they are utilized. Perhaps with a pay per use model of another way of ensuring that materials stay in the economy longer.

But wait, there are more strategies!

There are actually many more considerations and opportunities that apply to different stages, product categories and the level of change you are at. I have created a free toolkit for circular redesign to walk you through a quick creative process.

If you want to learn more about this, we have an introductory class on the circular economy, many resources and several handbooks on Circular Systems Design that dive into this in more detail. I also host a group on LinkedIn for people working in systems change. Additionally, we are launching an extensive set of programs and services for businesses interested in advancing their skills in this arena as part of a new set of programs and masterclasses designed for business transformation.

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

5 Reasons It’s Time for Nature | World Environment Day 2020

Do you think it’s time for nature? The United Nations does, as “Time for Nature” is the theme for this year’s World Environment Day, which is celebrated each year on the 5th June. Of course it's in our opinion that every day should be a day to celebrate the magical natural beauty of the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe.

But we also wanted to take this opportunity to explore some of the top reasons why biodiversity is so bloody awesome and important, especially in a time where we are challenged by a global pandemic in which many top researchers and scientists warn that nature is sending us a message, drawing clear links between natural systems destruction and the rise of communicable diseases. 

Nature provides all the goods and services we need to operate the economy, not to mention life. We’ve only recently lost sight of the power and importance of nature in our human existence, with the last 70ish years creating the rise of hyper-convenience-fueled lifestyles that in turn created demand for the design of disposability that then led to environmental crises like ocean plastic pollution, climate change, destructive bushfires, freak weather events and deforestation - all issues that impact biodiversity. As these issues continue to be amplified as causes for encouraging sustainable lifestyles to be on the rise, the world is reawakening and reconnecting to the unrivaled power and importance that nature uses in creation and destruction alike. 

Here are five compelling reasons why this theme is so important, right now especially:

1. Biodiversity is critical to ecosystem success

Simply put, biodiversity is what makes Earth, Earth. Without diversity, we have weak systems that are susceptible to disease — which then breeds a new onslaught of system impacts. The UN explains that biodiversity encompasses the over 8 million species – from plants and animals to fungi and bacteria – that are all interconnected and share our planet as home.  All ecosystems need diversity to succeed. The oceans, forests, mountain environments and coral reefs are all teaming with genetic diversity of all manner of plants and animals. Ecosystems sustain human life in a myriad of ways, cleaning our air, purifying our water, ensuring the availability of nutritious foods, nature-based medicines and raw materials, and reducing the occurrence of disasters. 

To learn more about biodiversity and find out more about what you can do, check here for the UN’s “Practical Guide” to Earth Day 2020.

“At least 40 per cent of the world’s economy and 80 per cent of the needs of the poor are derived from biological resources. In addition, the richer the diversity of life, the greater the opportunity for medical discoveries, economic development, and adaptive responses to such new challenges as climate change”. - The Convention about Life on Earth, Convention on Biodiversity

2. All the beauty in the world comes from nature

There’s a reason that #naturephotography is hashtagged over 108 million times on Instagram. No manufactured life experiences can take the place of the beauty of what surrounds us every day in stunning sunrises, lush landscapes, and wondrous wildlife. We humans are biologically hardwired to be connected to nature (more on that in #3), and throughout human history we have been inspired and fulfilled through the unique, diverse natural beauty around the world. This inspiration isn’t just a feel-good philosophical inspiration (though, who doesn’t love to just feel the warm fuzzies when you see a baby animal or take in a breathtaking view) — it’s a literal contribution to the evolution of our species through ideas like biomimicry and circular systems design.  It's also no wonder that one of the most watched TV series of the last fifteen years  was David Antenborugh’s Planet Earth series. 

This collection of videos from TED Ed perfectly explores the wonderment of nature — not just in our environment but truly in an interconnected look at the nature of stuff, the nature of design, the nature of collection action, and of course, the nature of change. 

People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure. - David Attenborough

3. The human brain needs time in nature to restore itself — and thrives when exercising outdoors.

There is mounting evidence that time in nature has huge benefits to the human brain and our bodies. While most attention has been given to the psychological impacts of nature on human well-being, like increased happiness and creativity boosts, other benefits like reduced hypertension and cardiovascular disease, and even lower risks of chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes, and obesity have also been found. 

Over the last 10 years, we’ve learned that healthier soil microbes yield healthier humans (although, Marco Polo noted in 1272 in his travel diary that the people of Persia’s foul moods were attributed to the soil and conducted his own qualitative study by importing soil from Persia to his banquet hall!) and that three days in nature basically resets your brain. Additionally, exercising outdoors (just a walk will do) has shown improved cognition and increased neuroplasticity, which interestingly helps slow aging.  

4. Literally everything we need to sustain our lives comes from nature

Nature is beyond crucial to our personal health and wellbeing, as it provides all the foods, air and drinkable water we need to exist! Complex systems all interact to allow for plants to photosynthesize, create oxygen and filter water. We all are in an interdependent relationship with nature, and as long as we ignore that basic fact of life, we continue to ignore the need for political and cultural changes that will not just protect nature but also find incredibly regenerative solutions that enable us to live within nature and continue to advance our civilization into the future. Technically the services provided by nature are called ecosystem services, and there are more than one could imagine all working together quickly and tirelessly to help life on Earth flourish. So, next time you take a breath or eat a strawberry or drink water and get hydrated, take a moment to think of nature and all the services that the giant ecosystem of Earth provides for us for free. 

Nature’s oxygen factory

Every second breath of oxygen comes from the ocean

5. Nature is in a state of crises too 

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) recently declared that nature is in a state of crises too. Aside from the links between coronavirus, climate change and nature's destruction, nature itself is seeing species being lost at a rate 1,000 times greater than at any other time in recorded human history, and one million species face extinction, making this time what scientists call the sixth great extinction. The only difference is it's not a meteoride this time —  instead, it is us who are responsible for this mass extinction event. Scientists have also found something akin to an insect apocalypse, with bees and other pollinators being killed off in the millions. 

“Healthy ecosystems can protect against the spread of disease: Where native biodiversity is high, the infection rate for some zoonotic diseases can be lowered,” says United Nations Environment programme (UNEP) biodiversity expert Doreen Robinson.  

The foods we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink and the climate that makes our planet habitable all come from nature.

Yet, these are exceptional times in which nature is sending us a message:

To care for ourselves
we must care for nature. 

It’s time to wake up.
To take notice.
To raise our voices.

It’s time to build back better
for People and Planet.

Find out more here

This World Environment Day,
it’s Time for Nature.

---

So yes, it’s absolutely time for nature not just today, but every single day, from now until we figure this shit out and implement transformational systems change. 

To further celebrate and help you get activated to support the global transition to a sustainable and regenerative economy, we are having a flash 50% off sale on everything over at online.unschools.co for this week until June 12! Use code: timefornature all week (ends midnight 5th June GMT time)

Alumni Abi Mapúa: Academic Innovation Incubation & Service Design

Abi joined us on the San Francisco Fellowship from Manila, Philippines. She is a social designer working to drive forward innovation in her home community and wider global network. We caught up with her to hear about her creative change initiatives and how the UnSchool experience has impacted her work.

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

Hello, I am Abi Mapúa-Cabanilla! If I am to sum up what I do, I consider myself an environmental sustainability driver and social designer. Having worked at the intersections of academia, local communities and the private sector, I’ve had the opportunity to cross-pollinate various disciplines and facilitate co-creation of catalytic innovation.

These roles manifest in the two hats I wear: First, as Founding Director at the Hub of Innovation For Inclusion [HIFI] of the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde, a university-based innovation space that drives the development of academic-driven ventures, programs, research, and learning experiences for the triple bottom line of equity among people, planet-enriching, and profit-sustaining. 

HIFI social startup founders and Mr. Peter D. Garrucho Jr. (man in suit), donor of HIFI (Abi far left). Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa (left).

Second, as Co-Founder of KindMind, a service design laboratory that helps individuals, organizations, and governments generate business value from the design of services and experiences that are meaningful to people and nurture the planet.

KindMind workshop with a major restaurant chain)on experience design of dining and customer journey mapping. Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa.

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

Being in a country (the Philippines) gifted with so many natural resources, biodiversity, and gentle people, it pains me to experience a hodgepodge of problems like the loss of habitats and biodiversity, erosion of our culture and identity, continued poverty and inequality, and the ultimate lack of systems understanding and political will to build our nation. 

This pain has been my pilot and motivation to continue working and build new models that will hopefully bring much needed change. Cliché as it may seem, I believe the Filipino is worth ‘designing’ for.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I found out about the UnSchool because I have been reading up on Systems Thinking, design, and changemaking as part of my work. I’ve been very intrigued about the tools the UnSchool develops and its whole mindset of enhancing the agency of each person for disruptive change. 

A lot of what I do with youth and communities is really about transforming mindsets and behavior — the work of the UnSchool resonates so much and this motivated me to take a chance and apply as a fellow.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

The UnSchool experience in SF was a memorable one. Aside from the fact that SF is one of my favorite cities in the world, the program allowed me to see what other individuals from different fields across the globe are doing.

I learned so much from the rich conversations we had, that are not necessarily about agreeing. I love the fact that it did not seem like we were preaching to a group of converts but it was really about sharpening our skills to deeply understand contexts, listen, and learn to articulate perspectives. The UnSchool experience affirmed the work I do and fueled me to be braver yet more sensitive to nuances and systemic relationships.

Abi and her team during the San Francisco Fellowship. Photo from the UnSchool blog.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

That the future belongs to the brave.

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Innovation incubation has often been synonymous with a myopia over specific product and/or service development and scaling to solve problems, instead of understanding the many factors surrounding our social/environmental ills. 

Abi: “Organised the first Climathon in the Philippines under Climate-KIC. We are first city enabler and Pasig City is the city host. With me in the photo is Pasig City Mayor (middle) Vico Sotto and Benilde Chancellor Bob Tang.” (Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa)

HIFI programs have been driving the value of systemic change and the concept of sustainable proportionality rather than business scale at all time and at all costs. This can be seen in a number of youth-driven projects we support and help develop from the redesign of consumption to embrace post-disposable lifestyles, sustainable fashion, sustainable furniture, urban revitalization, and inclusive mobility to name a few.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

The experience definitely enriched and transcended into the programs I create and run. 

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

As part of my service design, systems mapping and human-centered design research work with KindMind, I have been helping out organizations and government agencies look into leverage points surrounding the issues of climate change, disaster resilience, and marine litter in the Philippines (our country ranks 3rd in the world for both disaster hotspot and ocean plastics contributor). I would like to believe that the country is still in its nascent stages of awareness and action. 

KindMind workshop with a major restaurant chain)on experience design of dining and customer journey mapping. Photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa.

A major part of my work has been to facilitate conversations, deep dive workshops, and action towards a rethinking and redesign of production and consumption to embrace a circular model because there is huge business value and opportunities we can derive from it. 

Creating a platform that will allow me to work with international NGOs, private corporations, and government agencies who play pivotal roles and create huge impact, whether good or bad, is our KindMind way to scale change.

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Sunny Po. Fruit cider drink from our indigenous tribes in the Mountain Province (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Kamulo. Furnitures made from construction and denim waste (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

A few of the social startups we mentor and support: Ha.Mu. Wearable art made from fast fashion waste (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

People and organisations interested in working with the academe on developing inclusive innovations may reach me via HIFI. 

If they would like to improve the way people live, work and scale impact through the design of services, experiences, and organisational processes they may reach me via KINDMIND. 

You may also ping me on LinkedIn!

Abi and her WIFI team (photo courtesy of Abi Mapúa).

The Case for a Post Covid-19 Sustainable Recovery

As the world starts to reawaken from its months of in-house sheltering during the COVID-19 crises, there are calls from around the world for the rebuilding of the economy to be done through a green and sustainable pathway. The lockdown has shown many people just how urgent our sustainability needs are. There are many links drawn between natural habitat destruction, climate change, air pollution and other environmental issues connected to the rise and devastation of a pandemic such as COVID-19. The head of the UN called for a global green recovery, and many governments are seeing the links between the climate and the COVID-19 crises. With recovery talks emerging and governments around the world beginning to propose new budgets, we thought we’d take a look at who is (and who is not) focused on implementing sustainability initiatives in their COVID-19 response and future planning.

Dan Meyers via Unsplash.com

The European Union 

Right before this crisis, the EU voted to approve the Green Deal, which sets out ambitious plans for a clean and circular economy that has no new net carbon emissions by 2050. This pandemic has emphasized the urgency of implementing the Paris Agreement, with Germany and the UK collaborating to virtually lead the the 11th Petersberg Climate Dialogue earlier in April, in which they, along with 30 countries, discussed how to begin recovery with the caveat of climate protection being linked to the economic perspective. The EU’s proposed Green Recovery also highlights the need to protect biodiversity and invest in “sustainable mobility, renewable energy, building renovations, research and innovation, and the circular economy.” While there isn’t unanimous agreement among all nations of the EU, there is certainly a majority that are in favor of using the European Green Deal as a framework for recovery, leading to rich discussions and (hopefully) favorable outcomes.  

“The restart can lead to a healthier and more resilient world for everyone.” - U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres (Source)

As usual, the main pushback against green initiatives is coming from a fiscal perspective (these are the people who created the reductive, linear economy based on the hyper consumption loop, after all). We saw this happen in 2008’s recession as well — carbon dioxide levels drastically dropped and then resurged with a vengeance due to carbon-intensive stimulus spending. As such, hundreds of the world’s top economists have banded together to advise that we learn from the 2008 crisis and choose more wisely this time by investing stimulus spending in climate action, stating that “post-crisis green stimulus can help drive a superior economic recovery.” This resounding call for a green recovery is also heard from the general populace, with over a million EU citizens sharing their support for green investments. Specific countries are also putting in measures such as France offering subsidies for bike repairs to entice people to bike rather than drive.

“The current crisis is a stark reminder of how closely human and planetary health are interlinked - only together can people and nature thrive. A green recovery means restoring nature, protecting our environment, and accelerating the transition to a carbon-neutral and resilient economy. MEPs must lead the way." - Ester Asin, director of the WWF European Policy Office (Source)

Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com

New Zealand 

Aside from having the leader many of us want for our own countries in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (The Atlantic hailed her as “the world’s most effective leader”), New Zealand has given personhood to a river, prioritized wellness as part of their economy, and now they are looking at ways they can rebuild in a greener and more sustainable way. For example, in the $50B recovery budget that was just proposed, they’ve allocated $1B toward environmental spend, creating 11,000 news jobs, and $430M is included for unemployed people to help clean up rivers and restore wetlands, as well as $300M is being allotted to prevent loss of biodiversity. To further improve energy efficiency, New Zealand is also investing $56M in their heating and insulation program, which simultaneously improves citizens’ health and thus reduces their vulnerabilities to diseases like COVID-19.

Dan Freeman via Unsplash.com

United States 

Politics and science continue to be at odds in the US, with environmental science particularly taking a hit since the current administration took office in 2017 and proceeded to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, roll back regulations on emissions in favor of the fossil fuel industry, and aggressively cut trees on public lands, among many other actions that have drastically changed and reduced US environmental policies. A bright spot came about, however, when the Green New Deal was proposed in 2019, led by the popular Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. While widely rejected at the vote, the Green New Deal continues to be a powerful framework for progressive ideas and is currently being praised by scientists for its relevance to the COVID-19 recovery. While as a whole the US is falling behind on the world stage in this matter, a few progressive states like California are talking about how clean energy jobs can be significant in economic recovery, and thought leaders are at least envisioning what the future of the US could look like with green initiatives in place. For now, it’s still a fantasy, but we remain hopeful. 

Researchers from University of Massachusetts working on the potential of growing crops under solar panels panels and the mutual benefits with agriculture (via Unsplash.com).

Asia

China and South Korea are leading the way in investing in sustainable recovery among Asian nations. With a total of $7T pledged as economic stimulus, China is heavily investing in infrastructure for electric vehicles, renewable energy, smart cities and smart grids, and healthier cities via focusing on reducing pollution, implementing stricter emissions standards, improving health facilities, creating more space for exercise, and promoting road safety. 

South Korea has emerged as an international leader in pandemic recovery. It became the first country to hold a national election amidst this pandemic, and as a result has championed a 2050 carbon neutrality goal, along with proposals for an impressive green recovery. Publishing a “climate manifesto” and giving nod to the EU’s Green Deal for Europe and the US’s Green New Deal, the plan includes “large-scale investments in renewable energy, the introduction of a carbon tax, the phase-out of domestic and overseas coal financing by public institutions, and the creation of a Regional Energy Transition Centre to support workers transition to green jobs.” 

Seoul by Daniel Bernard via Unsplash.com

Canada

While Canada has come under scrutiny for being off course on its Paris Agreement Goals, the pandemic recovery could certainly catalyze more urgent climate action. One such initiative was unveiled in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement that corporate relief money will be awarded on the contingency that companies commit to climate action. They’ll be expected to “publish annual reports on climate investments, detailing how they plan to reduce their environmental footprints, and how their operations support the country’s commitments made under the Paris climate agreement.” Other leaders are urging clean energy investments, and Vancouver’s mayor is part of a global task force committed to supporting a recovery that helps the transition to a sustainable, regenerative, low-carbon future.  

Ali Tawfiq via Unsplash.com

At the UnSchool, we are deeply committed to creating tools and resources that support the transformation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular economy. We see a strong need for more leadership in companies, governments and many organizations.

So, we are working hard on a series of new online learning systems around executive and business leadership. Over the next few months, we will be unveiling a suite of new tools and learning programs to support the rapid uptake of progressive changes to the way we do business. 

Stay tuned to find out more!

A year of Activating Change

It’s Week 52, which means we have officially spent an entire year writing and sharing new insights and ideas about how to make a positive impact on the world around us! What a year it has been — from hosting a Fellowship in Malaysia, to collaborating with the UNEP in creating our Anatomy of Action campaign, through to this moment in time, in which we’re hunkering down and figuring out new ways to support and activate positive change in the midst of a global pandemic. So this week we decided to put together a list of highlights of all the cool, creative changemaking things that we’ve talked about and experienced in the last year to get us all motivated for another 52 weeks of making positive world-changing change!

Week 1: One Person Can’t Save the World, But Everyone Can Change It

Global Climate Strike 09-20-2019 (photo by Markus Spiske via Unsplash.com)

In this inaugural article that launched the UnSchool Journal, our founder Leyla Acaroglu lays the groundwork for how we can start seeing the world’s problems as opportunities to activate our agency and make positive change — because intentionally or not, all of our actions already are changing the world around us: The power to make change lies in our personal ability to see our own agency and opportunity for for creative leadership and to then make intentional choices about how we will activate the influence we organically have on the world around us, while working on enhancing this to a point where we can actively make more positive systems change.  Read on >

Week 11: Yes, Recycling Is Broken

Photo: Vivianne Lemay via Unsplash.com

With plastic pollution totally out of control and systems in chaos following China’s decision to stop processing a large portion of the world’s recycling, we unmasked the harsh reality that recycling is a placebo that justifies and perpetuates waste: Recycling is a lovely idea when it works; in fact it's a fundamental part of the circular economy, after, of course, sharing services, remanufacturing and repair. But like any system that displaces the responsibility somewhere out of sight, the externalities come back around to bite us all in the ass eventually. Ocean plastic waste is just one of the massive unintended consequences of relying on a quick fix, which then, in turn, reinforces the problem you are trying to solve. Systems thinking 101: the easy way out often leads back in, and there are often no quick fixes to complex problems. Recycling as a solution has reinforced the problem, and now we are dealing with a ‘frankenproblem’. Read it >

Week 14: Systems Thinking 101

Creative problems solving requires a systems mindset, and that’s why systems thinking is one of the core pillars of the UnSchool’s core pillars. In this article, we dive into the foundations of systems thinking and share practical knowledge to help level up your systems mindset: A concept stuck in theory does little for the greater good. Understanding that everything is interconnected and being able to apply this knowledge as a tool for effecting change are two different things, and what’s most important is the practical experience plus the applied tools to turn theories into action. To move from ideas in the brain to practice in the real world, it helps to be equipped with the distilled and applicable knowledge about which tools can be used and how to apply these in ways that achieve the desired outcome — which in our case is always positive social & environmental change. Read it >

Week 18: Introducing our UNEP Collaboration: The Anatomy of Action

We were honored to collaborate with the United Nations Environmental Programme to create a project with the intention of activating sustainable living and lifestyles by exploring what types of actions individuals can take that will actually have an impact, if replicated and normalized, as part of people's everyday lifestyle actions. We launched the Anatomy of Action at UNESCO in Paris. We wanted to not only design something that supports lifestyle changes for sustainable living, but also base it on a deeper understanding of what is working, along with why and how to amplify it so that we get new types of behavior norms that encourage positive shifts within the economy: The action set presented in the Anatomy of Action shows everyday lifestyle swaps that fit easily into daily lifestyle choices. I drew heavily on behavioral and cognitive sciences to gain an insight into how to frame these actions as opportunities rather than losses, as the reality with sustainability is that it is a massive opportunity! Read it >

Week 28: The UnSchool Kuching Fellowship Recap

UnSchool Fellowships are nothing short of amazing, as we take a small group of creative changemakers on a weeklong, immersive adventure into activating positive change via systems thinking, sustainability, and design…as well as feast on exquisite local vegetarian cuisine, dive deep into our personal potential, and make lifelong friends. The Kuching Fellowship was the 10th (!) UnSchool Fellowship; it took place on the island of Borneo (Malaysia) in November, 2019. The Kuching cohort included seventeen fellows from nine different countries, and our Fellowship blog shares a day-by-day look at the adventures. Read it >

Week 41: Sneak Peek at the NEW Design Systems Change Handbook by Leyla

Leyla released her fifth handbook in her series on making change! Titled Design Systems Change, it’s packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future. It’s also a workbook, complete with interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make change. This article includes a sneak peek at the introduction and first section on design: 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.  Read it >

Week 47: #StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st, 2020, smack in the middle of COVID-19’s world takeover, we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future. And good news: you can still sign up! This article shares more details on how this challenge unfolds and helps you level up your changemaking abilities: Read it >

(BONUS COVID-related content: in Week 45, we took a look at how social distancing is doing some good for the planet!)

Week 49: Get More Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

Join us in celebrating the hidden heroes of our lives, vegetables (yep!), in this fun journal article that announces the release of Leyla Acaroglu + Emma Segal’s co-authored plant-based cookbook. Hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from their childhood and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen, this cookbook guides you in the art of intuitive cooking based on a veg-centric philosophy. And hey, there’s even some recipes for you to try in a special preview of the book ;) Read it >

Thanks for taking a trip down memory lane with us in this year in review! We also had loads of amazing inspiring alumni profile spotlights; a 5-year birthday celebration and thoughts on 5 more years; thought-provoking reflections on greenwashing, plastic bans, and other changemaking topics; an exploration of our digital footprint that includes a full audit report; zero waste party hacks and lots, lots more!

What should we write about this year?

Leave us a comment and let us know what kind of content you’d like to see next!

Alumni Kunal Kanase: First Generation STEAM Learners

Kunal is an incredibly inspiring Alumni who joined us on the Mumbai fellowship in 2017. We caught up with him to find out how his UnSchool experience impacted his work in his community in India for teaching youth how to code. 

(Photo: Maker’s Asylum) Q&A session in Innovation Programme called DIVE (Design Innovation Venture Entrepreneurship) at Maker's Asylum, Mumbai

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I am a first-generation lifelong learner who happened to be born and brought up in Dharavi, India which is one of the largest slums in the world. I have focused my learning pursuits on Engineering, Arts & Humanities, Sciences, and Design, I work through online learning and multi-potentiality through Interdisciplinary research to solve problems of underprivileged and lower-income communities and to positively impact nature.

I had been involved in the Slum & Rural Innovation Project called Dharavi Diary as a fellow and manager of the learning space to co-create the community of first-generation learners through STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, & Math) Education. (A first-generation learner is a person who comes from a family where there has previously not been any access to education, and so is the first generation to gain access to educational content.) 

Facilitating kids' learning at the learning center, Dharavi Diary

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

“Poverty is not just a lack of money; it is not having the capability to realize one’s full potential.”

- Abhijeet Banerjee, Nobel Prize 2019

I was born and brought up in an 8x12 feet hut with an alcoholic father, a depressed mother, and 2 siblings within a dysfunctional family in an underprivileged community in Dharavi where people struggle for the most basic of needs and survival is the main purpose of their life. My parents are illiterate, my father migrated from a rural part of India in search of livelihood and my mother was born and grew up in Dharavi as well. We belong to Scheduled Caste (officially designated group of historically disadvantaged people and depressed class in India).

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

- Max Planck, Nobel Prize 1918

I was the first generation in my family to pursue engineering studies, however, due to practical reasons and adverse & unfortunate situations in the family, I dropped out of my university education. In those challenging times, I discovered learning as a fantastic process to examine and understand the problems I was facing. I developed a passion to find the roots of things through research and critical thinking and became a hard-core MOOC-learner and now approach multi-potentiality through online learning to solve problems of lower-income communities that are unique and left unsolved due to many reasons. 

Kunal demonstrating VR experience to teenagers at one of the excluded places in Dharavi, Mumbai

I care for the good health and well-being of myself and others. Having faced those problems and living in harsh conditions, I have empathized with various issues that require knowledge from different disciplines to find solutions. 

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I have co-created the community learning space with 150+ students and 8 teachers from K to 12 over 5 years at Dharavi Diary where I was Fellow, Lead Facilitator of Learning, Manager, Coordinator, Teacher Trainer, Creative Content Designer, and Mentor and worked as a Lead Facilitator of Learning focused on experiential learning for STEAM aligned Sustainable Development Goals.

(Photo: Maker’s Asylum) While brainstorming in DIVE at Maker's Asylum, Mumbai

I participated as a member of the Dharavi Diary Scholar for the Mumbai Fellowship program in November 2017 to learn more about the design process, research, and systems thinking in the field of sustainability to advance my skills in interdisciplinary research and to collaborate with change agents from diverse backgrounds to create unique and impactful solutions.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Thrilling and adventurous! It was the first time in my life I collaborated with other humans to work on a project. I gained various insights, gained different perspectives, and learned fantastic tools for problem-solving in a rich, creative, and conducive environment which resulted in an amazing project over a period of 7 immersive days. The experience was so enriching and impacted deeply on me.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

Leonardo Da Vinci is my role model and I always try to learn from him. I had a fascination for the man and his work but couldn’t find (read) much about him except his Wikipedia page. A decade ago, I had been searching for a text on him and one day found a book called ‘Think Like Da Vinci’. I was so excited to learn about him and enlighted with the ‘Seven Da Vincian Principles’ given by the author are Curiosita, Dimostrazione, Sensazione, Sfumato, Arte/Scienza, Corporalita, Connessione. I used to ponder a lot of these principles which eventually integrated into me. 

One of the seven principles, Connessione, means ‘A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems Thinking.’ I couldn’t see ‘Systems Thinking’ in action until I participated in the UnSchool fellowship where I learned more about it and how to use it in the real world. That was a fantastic experience and the main take away from the UnSchool.

The first night of the UnSchool Mumbai Fellowship (from the UnSchool blog)

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Since I had to drop out of my university education, I consequently fell into a depression and was traumatized for a few years because I had been so ambitious and had struggled a lot to get to go to college to start with. In those challenging times, I discovered learning as a fantastic process to examine and understand the problems I was personally facing. As a result, I developed a passion for finding the roots of things through research and critical thinking, tools I could discover through online learning. 

I am continuing the endeavor by learning on online platforms like NPTEL, edX, and Coursera to explore various disciplines to do interdisciplinary research. I have completed 20 courses which include subjects like SDG, Design Thinking, Positive Psychology, Innovation, Anthropology, Management, Futures Thinking, Cognition, Problem Solving, etc. and pursuing more courses on Linguistic, Psychology, Data Science, Architecture, Graphic Design, Soft Skills, Philosophy, AI, Creative Thinking, Programming, etc. I have also planned to complete Electrical Engineering and Computer Science studies to develop technical competency for innovation and problem-solving. 

Recently, I have worked on the project while studying Innovation for teenagers in slums who are prone to alcoholism and how to make them conscious about the ill-effects of alcoholism using Virtual Reality and Storytelling and looking forward to work on more such projects in the future.

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

It all started at UnSchool. That was the first time I had ever collaborated with people from diverse backgrounds to solve problems faced in Slums. We worked on my case study of how curiosity can change the course of cognitive constraints and give breakthroughs. 

UnSchool and Dharavi Diary collaboration and systems thinking workshop day (founder Nawneet Ranjan on far right) from the UnSchool blog

The UnSchool Fellowship has ever since been helping me in my approach to facing challenges as I learned many tools and techniques to solve problems and find creating solutions. 

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

As a first-generation learner and with my complex historical and family background, I couldn’t get the opportunity to learn in osmosis with ‘learned and knowledgeable’ class of society and couldn’t be in proximity with people who can guide, encourage, support, mentor, share, collaborate to bring the best out of me to grow.

Social support and network are of paramount importance but I have been deprived of it as Dharavi is still backward in many areas despite being located in one of the most important metro cities in the world called Mumbai. Thanks to the Internet which is a blessing for learners like me who can get access to world-class education and meet/network people, communities, and organizations like UnSchool to learn from. I have a vision and potential to make an impact and need support, mentorship, and guidance to advance the efforts.

My coordinates are as follows:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Kanase.Kunal

Any other thoughts you want to share?

I am grateful to the UnSchool and family forever!

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During the Covid Crises, Kunal’s organization is raising funds to help feed families who live in Dhalvari.

Perspectives on Earth Day 50

By Leyla Acaroglu, originally published here

Last week, on Wednesday, April 22, it was the 50th celebration of Earth Day, a single day marked in the 365/6 days in a human-described calendar year that is dedicated to remembering or celebrating that we all need the Earth to survive. In my opinion, that should be inverted, and every day should be Earth Day, given we all live here, on the only known life-sustaining planet in the universe — yet we have, in the last 50 years, managed to make a complete mess of things. 

In 1968, astronauts headed toward the moon snapped a photo of the Earth from space, and this was beamed back to the millions of humans watching the Apollo 8 mission. For the first time in the history of humanity, we saw our home in all its fragile beauty from space, rising above the infinite black of the universe, and it changed the way the world saw our home, planet Earth. The image, etched into the psyche of all who have come since, is called Earthrise, and it helped spur on the burgeoning environmental movement. Maj. Gen. William A. Anders, the astronaut who took the photo, said that it changed the world: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." 

Earthrise Photo: NASA taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, at mission time 075:49:07

In the preceding years, the EPA was set up and the Clean Air Act passed in the USA. There were huge protests and some changes, there were clean ups and crack downs. But there was never a change in the way we do things, really. 

Now we have high definition, full color detailed satellite photos of every inch of our Earth — we can zoom in to see ice caps melting and rainforests on fire (remember when in 2019 it was a thing in Malaysia and Brazil to intentionally burn down rainforests to create farmland? Can you recall the devastating fires that ravaged Australia?). We know what we have, what we had, what we are losing...but do we know the cost? Back in the 1970s, “Americans had become increasingly aware that the same industrialization that had made the country wealthy was having an impact on the environment and their own health,” according to a reflection published in Scientific America this week. The article goes on to show all the exponentially growing graphs of ecological decay that have occurred since that day 50 years ago, when hundreds of thousands of Americans marched for planet protection, many of them now probably reaping the benefits of the industries that have gone on to pollute indiscriminately. This, of course, is not new to Earth System Scientists, as it was in the early 2000s when they first published these profound “Great Acceleration” graphs. They show the recurring hockey stick curves skyrocketing up into uncharted territories across many human socio-cultural changes and natural system impacts, all starting in 1950. 

The Great Acceleration Graphs, 2004, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, Image Source

“It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary-scale geological force,” — Professor Will Steffen, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

The last 70 years have seen some incredible changes to our societies, culture, technology and all the planetary systems. We now live in a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, where every centimeter of this planet has been changed by humans in some way. For the last 10,000 years, we have lived in the climate-stable Holocene period, allowing our species to grow ourselves, crops and our seemingly endless desire for natural systems destruction. Since the 1950s, however, we have entered into the Anthropoecene’s man-made era of ecological decay, and we are suffering the costs on many fronts. 

Nature is magic, yet we do unimaginable things to it for our own collective benefits, irrespective of all the other systems and species that contribute to the life-giving interplay that makes life on Earth possible. 

The tragic trade-off of our expansion and domination over the globe is all too obvious. Take a peek at any one of the exponentially-growing environmental concerns: ocean plastic waste, air pollution, deforestation, the Sixth Great Extinction, climate change. As we sit stuck in our homes, lamenting and stressing about the killer virus sweeping through our communities and blaming it on bats, we forget that we made all of this mess. We destroyed the habitats, we created the market for live animals, we facilitated the air pollution and environmental conditions that are starting to be correlated with high death rates of COVID-19. We lit the match that started the fire, and we are responsible for finding the means to extinguish it without destroying the place in the process. 

We don’t have direct evidence that climate change is influencing the spread of COVID-19, but we do know that climate change alters how we relate to other species on Earth and that matters to our health and our risk for infections. As the planet heats up, animals big and small, on land and in the sea, are headed to the poles to get out of the heat. That means animals are coming into contact with other animals they normally wouldn’t, and that creates an opportunity for pathogens to get into new hosts. — Dr. Aaron Bernstein, interim director of Harvard University’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Source

Earth Day reminds some people —  but let's be honest, not that many, and probably not the ones who are at the forefront of the damage to begin with — that we have a debt to the damage we have done. But in the last 50 years of “celebrating” it, we have done far more destruction than protection. Locking nature up in parks, reserves and protected spaces does nothing to realign our species with the harsh and critical reality that without nature, we are nothing — without the complex interplay between all the systems around us, we have no food, no fresh water, no atmosphere, no oxygen, no culture, no stable operating environment for our species to inhabit. We are nature, we are the systems that we destroy, and as long as we only prioritize a single day to blink at this reality, we will continue to allow the decay of the most beautiful planet in the universe. 

As long as you live here, remember: every day is Earth Day. 

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Believe it or not, individual actions do have impacts. I have done several projects and initiatives that help us all take action, own the agency that we have in this system and make positive change:

• Anatomy of Action, a sustainable lifestyle initiative we collaborated with the UN to create 

• The Post Disposable Activation Kit 

• The Circular Classroom, free educational toolkit on sustainability  

• Superpower activation kit 

• 30-day brain activating #staypositive challenge 

• The Hero Veg Cookbook

Get more Vegetables in Your Life with our NEW Hero Veg Cookbook!

By Leyla Acaroglu

🥁 Drum Roll Please 🥁

Emma Segal and I are excited to announce the launch of our NEW cookbook collaboration where we set about creating a celebration of the hidden heroes in our lives: vegetables. Yep, delicious, nutrient-packed, immune-system-building vegetables!

After years of cooking, eating and experimenting, we are so happy to share The Hero Veg Cookbook with the world! It’s designed to illuminate the secret, often-overlooked powers of plants (for our bodies AND for our planet’s health). Through our fun-to-read, easy-to-follow plant-based cookbook, you can also activate your curiosity and problem-loving superpowers by leveraging the art of experimentation through intuitive cooking (but don’t worry — the recipes ARE written in a standard format!).

We have been working together for several years through the UnSchool, Disrupt Design and the CO Project Farm, where we have made thousands of vegetable-centric meals, in all sorts of locations, challenging conditions and crazy scenarios so that we could feed our fellowship and workshop participants nutritious, delicious, brain-building plant-based food. Independently, we are both fascinated by vegetarian cooking, and we are always seeking out new ways of transforming vegetables into unique and delicious meals. After 2 years of hard work, we have finally assembled over 160 recipes in a 250+ page illustrated cookbook that is now here and ready to share with the world, right at a time when more and more people are embracing the benefits of a more sustainable lifestyle and looking for ways to boost immune strength.

About the Hero Veg CookBook

It’s hand illustrated by Emma and filled with recipes from our childhoods and current cooking adventures, along with things Leyla has learnt on the CO Project Farm and collaborations from the kitchen.

To complement the heroes, we have many sidekick recipes and fascinating facts about each of the 30 vegetables we included as heroes in the book — not to mention many pages of fascinating information on the health and sustainability benefits of eating more veg!

Through the years of running UnSchool programs and now hosting hundreds of people on the CO Project Farm through our community open days and sustainability workshops, we have explored and refined a series of hero vegetable recipes that are easy to make nearly anywhere, often with just a few ingredients.  We have mastered the art of creating elaborate, beautiful, colorful, flexible and adaptable plant-based meals that can feed and satisfy you, your family, and even groups of around 25 people or more (as that’s how many people we end up with on our fellowships). These recipes were tried and tested in many cases on people who have not had a lot of vegetarian (or not very good vegetarian!) meals in their life and have received rave reviews, so if you’re looking to add more plants to your plate or help others whose taste buds need convincing, then this is the cookbook for you.

To get a taste (pun definitely intended) of what this cookbook’s pages hold, we’re sharing here some excerpts that will leave your mouth watering and your mind hungry for plant-based change (food puns are just way too easy!). We can’t wait to see what you’re cooking and how you adapt these recipes to make them your own, so be sure to tag us at @COProjectFarm with your yummy food pix!

A Vegetable-Centric Food Philosophy 

Nearly all plants are still alive when taken from their parents... a bit creepy, but also an incredible part of the cycle of life. Eat fresh living things and all the colors of the rainbow that have been grown in ways that increase the nutrients that each mouthful can bring you. 

Our cooking philosophy is based on what we call “intuitive cooking” —  like driving a car, after a while you have done it enough times to be confident to do it without the stress and concerns you felt the first few times you took to the wheel. Each section of this book has been laid out to walk you through the process of learning how to turn vegetables into delicious and healthy dishes that will impress you and your friends. We also wanted to bust some myths, share zero waste cooking ti[s and help you find the right mix of healthy vegetables based dishes for your life and location. We are not fans of exact measurements, but we have included indications and suggestions. We always encourage you to explore and experiment with them and see what works for you. 

There are somewhere around 20,000 edible vegetables and plants in the world, and yet we only eat around 10% of those. Exploring the world of edible plants is an adventure that you could and should spend your whole life doing, but to help you get started, we have laid this book out in alphabetical order, across the 30 easiest to find vegetables around the world. They are the heroes of recipes from Thailand to Italy, and we take great pride in sharing this selection of easy-to-make and delicious-to-eat plant heroes that are staples in our kitchens! As we have co-written this book, we have also learned new recipes and techniques off each other, adapting our styles to work together when we get the chance to cook for people, and also finding the other person's tips to be very useful in our own stock of standard recipes. That's the beauty of cooking — you always learn how to make things taste better every time you take on the challenge to prepare a meal!

How To Use The Cookbook 

This is a cookbook that doesn’t really tell you how to cook; it’s more about sharing general guidelines to support you on a DIY adventure through the wonderful world of vegetables and is designed to invite you to develop the cooking confidence and creativity to make vegetables the heroes of your plate. Everyone has their own tastes, preferences, access to certain ingredients and time to spend putting stuff together. So instead of giving traditional very measured out recipes, this cookbook uses approximations from our own experiences and operates like a creative template. You will find that we have included ingredients and rough measurements based on what we would do whilst cooking that recipe, as our goal is to encourage you to adapt and expand based on your situation, which can spin off recipes into a new direction. There are some basic principles of cooking veg that are really important, and we have included all these insights. Once you master the basics, then you are set to get them shining in their full hero glory. 

We believe that cooking is about developing intuition and your own processes over time. Everyone is different, so the level of salt, spice and other flavorings will change based on your preferences and the availability of ingredients. That's why we provide amounts and ingredients as a guide and you can adjust as needed.  

This may stress some of you out, but please give it a try! We have added some descriptions of the basics in this cookbook so you can master them and move onto your own variations and creative interpretations. Over time, the more we learn anything, the more freedom we have to get experimental. Our goal is to inspire you to become an intuitive vegetable cook, so when you look in your fridge and see a couple of single veggies, you can come up with a creative outcome to bring them to life. We often play the game of how many delicious things we can make out of whatever is left in the fridge, making it up as we go.

The best way to use this book is to have a read, and then when you are hungry, need to cook for friends, want to experiment or just need some inspiration then find the veg you have most readily available to you, land on a recipe and get cooking! 

20 Sidekick Pantry Staples

In the book, we not only offer up recipes for the veg heroes of our lives, but also for the sidekicks that truly make them sing! Think: sauces, dressings, preserves, grain-based sidekicks like pizza dough (yup), nut cheeses, dips, and more! Here’s a sample of some of the sidekicks that we consider essential:

1. Olive oil is great in a more Mediterranean region, or if you are in a tropical region where coconuts are abundant, then local coconut oil is great. Similarly, if you are in a region with another local and abundant oil, use that. Local is always best!

2. Salt makes the flavor of everything come out. Different kinds of salt are great to have around and experiment with — some are saltier than others, some have a more mineral taste, some are great for dramatic sprinkles on top and others are best for cooking as they dissolve more easily. 

3. Black pepper to grind fresh (using a mortar and pestle if you have one is also a great stress reliever!).

4. Sweetener such as cane sugar, coconut sugar, palm sugar, maple sugar, agave, stevia — again whatever is closest to your region is best, otherwise try for something that hasn’t been super refined.

5. Honey, as local as possible to support local apiaries and plants, and is also then a natural way for your body to develop antibodies to local pollens. Some cities now also have programs to build hives in gardens and rooftops to help build habitat for these critically important pollinators — without bees, we wouldn't have any food! 

6. Flours of different kids are good, like wheat, oat, almond meal or rice flours, depending on where in the world you are.

7. Nuts of whatever kind you can find and afford. Some nuts are really expensive, but all nuts are extremely versatile so in most cases, you can sub for what you can find and what is most plentiful in your area.

8. Seeds like sunflower, sesame and pumpkin seeds

9. Onions, red, yellow, green, leeks, small and big 

10. Garlic —  different kinds, and try to get the non-extra-white one, as it's most likely bleached! There’s a world of garlics out there. Russian red is a favorite, elephant garlic is impressively gargantuan, and a very fun rainy day activity is roasting up a series of different ones, putting them next to a bowl of golden silky olive oil and some toasted bread, and having a garlic taste test. 

11. Lemons, limes and citrus of all types to brighten up your dishes

12. Vinegars like apple cider, balsamic and red wine vinegar 

13. Soy sauce or Tamari, either soy or mushroom-based

14. Coconut milk and/or coconut flakes: you can often find this in tin cans, bricks or powders, and it is good to have on hand.

15. Fresh ginger root; not only is it soooo tasty, it's very good for you too!

16. Some kind of legume like lentils or chickpeas are great to have on hand, either dry or in cans, as they can be a very quick base for all sorts of other vegetables.

17. Grains and pseudograins (things that look like grains but are not actually in the grain family) like kasha, quinoa, different kinds of rice (red, black, brown, wild, jasmine etc) to make filling bases or to add to soups

18. Plain flour, or specialty ones such as rice of chickpea for gluten-free — you can use this to make many yummy things, from fresh pasta to pizza and cakes.

19. Dried fruits such as apricots, raisins and figs; these are great for healthy snacking, popping in cakes and cookies along with making granola for a protein-packed breakfast.

20. Dried herbs and spices, like nuts, differ in price and variety depending on your location. We curated a list below to get you started, but spices really are the magic sidekicks for making anything shine!

And here’s a recipe for the road (it’s also one of the kid-friendly ones, as we encourage collaborative cooking in the book with the whole family!):

Get cooking with carrots!

Activating Change for the Circular Economy

By Leyla Acaroglu

ACTIVATING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Every time we purchase something, we are essentially voting for the kinds of things we want in the world. It’s through our purchase preferences, as individuals, as governments and as organizations, that we can encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we want to see continue. This is where there is great opportunity for change, as many of the products and services that fill our economy today have huge impacts on the planet, offer up many inequities along the supply chain and are designed to break.

We already have so much of the knowledge on what needs to be done to change this status quo. Scientists in the fields of life cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, systems dynamics and consequential impact assessment have been knowledge building for years, contributing to the rising shift toward a circular economy movement. A change in the way we design and deliver everything.

Thanks to all this work, we now have a much stronger understanding of the potential negative outcomes of our actions before we even take them, and we can avoid unintended consequences if we approach problem solving through systems and life cycle thinking.

Gaining this foresight allows us to integrate sustainability into design products and across business models, policies and services. What we need right now is the normalization and integration of these approaches into the things that make up our economy. We have an incredible opportunity right now to catalyze this change, and this requires pioneering leadership from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo.

We can speed up the change by offering up new ideas, incentivizing producers to approach product design differently and encouraging policymakers to change the dominant linear system. We can amplify sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment in order to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of product service system models.

Small choices, replicated many times, contribute to big impacts. This applies to all of our choices. Our world is made up of individuals operating as a collective whole. Through systems thinking, we understand the macro and the micro, the parts and the wholes. This thinking helps us gain a deeper understanding of our impacts and the power of influence that we all possess.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end of life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation is around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the start.

Recently I released a new handbook called Design Systems Change where I lay out the opportunities for activating our own agency to effect positive change. In the past I have written Circular Systems Design and the Disruptive Design Method Handbooks, all designed to support people in the transition to a circular, regenerative and sustainable economy by design. In thinking deeply about these issues for many years, I have come up with a new proposition, one where the interaction of new value propositions is prioritized in the decision making process.

Integrating value into the circular economy From the Design Systems Change Handbook

Designing Change

We should (and can) be designing products, services and systems that embed the avoidance of waste through their design, instead of designing things with no regard for their consequences and then trying to design services to deal with the waste and impacts they’ll cause.

We need to move rapidly to a post disposable society. The circular economy is helping to make this happen, influencing shifts in the finance sector and in the design of products and services we all rely on. Big players in industry and government are pioneering product-system services that will help to move us away from single-use products and systems to closed loop ones.

I hope and predict that within 5 years, the pioneering companies at the forefront of this shift will have transitioned away from single-use products toward more integrated closed-loop systems that maintain and increase value throughout the system and are designed to dramatically reduce the environmental and social burden that disposability results in.

Not only is this good for the planet, but also it makes good business sense. In an increasingly resource-constrained environment, we have to find ways of reducing supply chain costs, and there are many creative ways to do this while benefiting the planet. 

The opportunities are on the horizon — we just need more activated minds willing to pioneer capturing them. In order to support people in pioneering this transition, I developed the Disruptive Design Method as a scaffolding support tool that guides decision makers through the process of understanding a complex problem, exploring the systems dynamics and then building creative interventions to design positive change.

Embracing Change

Think for a moment of all the ways change occurs in our day-to-day lives. We change our addresses, our music tastes, locations, underwear, ideas, partners, schools, nationalities, cars, governments, jobs, clothes, perspectives, money, the subject... and our minds. We change and reinvent ourselves constantly. We change the world around us and ultimately, we change the planet through the things that we choose to do, and perhaps more importantly, the things that we choose not to do. 

Many of these changes are brought about somewhat organically, even unconsciously, with life events and individual circumstances dictating many of the changes that we make. This approach is no longer enough. 

Conscious observers everywhere are noticing that an individualistic approach to change has dangerous consequences. We see the evidence of this culminating in the major issues at the forefront of global conversations: climate change, renewable energy, refugee crises, to name just a few. 

So how do you go about it when you want to intentionally, proactively affect change? How does that differ from our natural evolution… and where do you even begin in a change making practice? 

Change is everywhere - and always has been

In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proposed that “the only constant in life is change,” that “stability is an illusion,” and, in his opinion, “there is a constant universal flux.” If, as Heraclitus says, change is constant, then it is also chaotic – “an inescapable paradox, yet a beautiful necessity, critical to all life.”  

We are all changing constantly, and the world is changing around, and with, us. The word change means to ‘make’ or to ‘become different,’ no matter if we’re talking about objects, people, or the natural world. Change encompasses all these, although they develop at varying speeds, be it constant, progressive, static, fast or slow.  

Failure Happens… and It’s a Good Thing!  

At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being. We believe that being change-centric is a way of defining an agenda, the objective, and outcome to effect positive social change in and through the things that we do. 

This change-centric approach is a cultivated one, in which you have to work at wanting to make change. It’s not always easy; making change can definitely hurt sometimes and often requires some measure of failure along the way. How would we have evolved as a species, had we not experienced millions of years of failure and accidents? 

Failing hard and fast early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is also one of the easiest things to make happen... if you have the right tools and resources, which you will receive when you engage in our classes, programs and content.  

Systems at Play in Change Making 

Everything is interconnected, so if we want to make change, we have to know how to understand those dynamics as a whole system and as parts of a whole system. When we look at the world through a change-centric lens, we first need to figure out if it’s structural or individual – is it personal or social forces that influence change? 

Social practice theory suggests that our agency for change lies in the influencers of social conditions. Anthony Giddens, one of the most prominent modern sociologists, proposed the theory of structuration. This theory explores the duality of structure where we continually make, and remake, ‘normal society’ through our routine actions and practices. 

Giddens suggests that social constructs influence the individual to a degree that choice is empowered by the practice, rather than the individual. Basically, we are influenced by social forces as well as personal choice-making. Behaviors are habits perpetuated through routine, which are either decided on consciously, or are subtly influenced by society at large. 

It boils down to this: in order to make change, one needs to consider the personal, social, and political systems at play and seek to intervene at different points.  

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JOIN MY MONTH LONG MASTERCLASS

JUNE 1ST-30TH, 2020

THIS PROGRAM IS LIVE, ONLINE, TWICE A WEEK FOR A FULL MONTH, AND INCLUDES 1 POST-PROGRAM MENTORSHIP MEETING WITH LEYLA

#StayPositive Brain-Boosting 30-Day Challenge

On April 1st we started our 30-Day Brain-Boosting Challenge to help get people motivated to stay positive, make change and develop their agency to get cool shit done for a positive, regenerative and sustainable future.

You get daily dosses of content and you can still sign up here, but we also thought why not share some highlights from the program with you today to help you activate your agency and #staypositive! In today’s journal, we have included some content from three of the daily sessions, which are delivered in “Watch” “Read” and “Do” segments each day.

DAY 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)*.  

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

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DAY 2: REFLEXIVITY AND REFLECTION 

Reflexivity is all about mental flexibility, which entails continuing to learn at the edge of comfort when it comes to understanding things, advancing your ability to think in and around something, and not just seeing things from only one perspective, but honing the ability to think from multiple different vantage points. 

You will benefit immensely from developing a super strong reflective thinking muscle that supports you in your ability to gain deeper insights into the way the world works, how you interact with it and how this can develop your agency. 

Self-reflection, divergent and non-linear thinking skills, hypercomplexity and reflexivity all involve asking a significant number of questions and fostering a deep sense of curiosity about the world around you. It is about assuming you don't know something until you know enough to know it. Whereas many people seek to avoid things they don't know, instead we relish in the fact that there are always new things to uncover. 

This is a lifelong practice, something that you develop over time, with consideration and connection to your inner self. Where reflection is the act of thinking back on something and gaining insights from the vantage point of hindsight, reflexivity is about a more dynamic, intimate and developed self-awareness, fostering the ability to think in and through something, rather than just look back on it after the fact. 

Reflexivity thus is about the circular relationships between cause and effect, especially when it comes to human belief structures. A reflexive relationship goes both ways, where we see cause and the effect both affecting each other in a dynamic relationship, rather than just seeing one part of the connection. You develop the ability to see what happens when an action is taken, and likewise you can see what would happen if you didn't take an action. 

Through this, we can see ourselves as part of the systems we are interacting with, instead of seeing ourselves apart from them. While reflection helps us learn from the past, reflexivity gives us tools to extract information from the moment we are in and the ones we will enter into. 

A high level of social reflexivity, for example, is defined by an individual having the ability to shape their own norms, tastes, politics and desires, and it is very much connected to the ability for one to identify their own agency and exert actions that connect to the advancement of one's influence on the world.

Reflection is a very useful daily practice tool that enables us each to see inside and gain insights into ourselves, which in turn enables us to grow personally and professionally. But to reflect on the world is equally as important. Tools like observing and recognizing bias, alongside learning to love problems and shifting mindsets, are all part of the tool set of positive, practical, proactive changemaking (and all of which we will explore over the coming days). 

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DAY 3: SPHERE OF INFLUENCE

Your sphere of influence is the space in which you have the ability and power to change things. 

The idea that one person can save the world is not very agentizing, as it either encourages people to deflect responsibility for change to that one magical “other,” or it puts an immense burden onto the shoulders of those who want to be involved in the changes and expects them to influence the entire world. What instead is so much more useful is for us all to understand, no matter who we are, that each and every single one of us change the world every day through our actions. We all exert influence over the worlds we inhabit.

The things we buy, the food we eat, the jobs we do, the way we move around — these all have profound impacts on the natural environment, the economy, and society. Unfortunately, many of our actions result in flow-on effects throughout the system, which are often invisible to us and result in some form of unsustainability. The perpetuation of this blind participation in changemaking is one of the major issues we face. That's why there are movements to change the way we design, produce and consume everyday things so that their impact via our actions is lower. The movement toward a circular and regenerative economy is well underway, and this challenge pack you are engaging with is designed to help you discover your agency and role in this bigger picture. 

The decision to be involved in change, be it in your personal or professional life, starts by discovering how to activate your personal agency (which we have been looking at), identifying the sphere of influence you uniquely hold (today's topic) and then adopting the tools that will enable you to expand that influence and activate your creative potential to engage with change (content covered over the next 3.5 weeks!).  

Your sphere of influence is the space that you hold court over, combined with the knowledge you have, the people and communities you engage with, and the integrity you hold (which often translates to how much others value your knowledge, etc). Your sphere of influence is also the scope of the potential impact that your actions may or may not result in. 

When we are kids, our sphere of influence is small, often restricted to our families, but it's potent because we often wield quite a bit of influence over them at this stage in our lives. Then, as a young adult, we expand to have a more significant influence on our friends and peer group (as they do on us), and this slowly grows out to colleagues and partners and then our own kids and others as time and experiences and life advancements give us more agency and influence over the space we hold. The influence that we can each have is based on the amount of agency we cultivate and the integrity we build in ourselves over time. I will note here there are many structural forces that can restrict some and enable others. This is an entirely different topic, and we will discuss aspects of it later on — I just didn't want it to go unsaid that the lack of equity when it comes to certain resources does greatly restrict some people. 

That being said, there is a reality that every agent in a system impacts it. Every action we each take or don't take will have an impact (good, bad and all the options in between) —  the things we buy, the conversations we have, the air we breathe, the things we post online — these all have an impactful relationship on us and on the world, as everything is interconnected. The domino, butterfly or flow-on effect reminds us that our actions have impacts. Both “bad” and “good,” intentional and unintentional, everything we do in this big complex system has an effect on something else, and if you identify your agency and sphere of influence, then you are in a unique position to have an intentionally positive impact with the intent to change the systems around you, as you will be enabled to see yourself within the systems and work within its dynamics. 

An agentized individual is aware that they have influence and that their dynamic relationships with the world they inhabit are influencing them, too. 

By working on identifying and expanding your agency and sphere of influence over time, no matter how few resources you have, you can find creative ways to leverage this into new ways of effecting positive change. The world has seen this time and time again — the smallest part of the system can, if positioned right, effect the most significant change. 

That's why it's so exciting to see that we are all in the middle of a great movement toward change. There are many people the world over redefining their lives so that they, too, can participate in the world with more purpose and contribute back to the planet and their communities. And I assume you are one of them too!

A sphere of influence does not just tally up the number of people you know or the social network you have, although these are important in some cases of social influence (and important for personal connections). The key thing to influence is the integrity you hold and the trust that others have in your ability to influence within the space you hold. 

FURTHER READING

• A quick summary of identifying who's in you your sphere of influence here

• Read about the concept of Locus of Control here 

• Read this paper on sphere of influence and ecological problems 

Alumni Sri Iyer: Behaviour Research, Literacy & Gamification

Sri Iyer

Sri is social behavior change strategist, design explorer, researcher, collaborator and writer who joined us first for a DDM workshop in Sydney, and then later joined the team for our Mumbai Fellowship.

During the Mumbai Fellowship, she shared a session on gamification and ethical research with the cohort as part of the week’s experience. We caught up with her recently to find out what she has been doing since 2018, and here she shares her recent work.

Sri leading her session at the Mumbai fellowship

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I work at the confluence of behavioral research, design, art and writing. I do three things, all circling around society and human behavior:

1. I independently collaborate with corporations, startups, conglomerates, ministries and NGOs on human behavior transformation projects. I use behavioral science, design and systems thinking for this purpose.

2. I write about being social and am more interested in exploring everyday practices and taboo topics.

3. I create artistic zines related to wildlife and our practices with nature.

Sessions with Sri

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

I am naturally curious about people and their practices. I am curious about why we do what we do. I find it difficult to operate without understanding self in such a manner.

I realize that these learnings from my curiosity can be constructively and disruptively put to use, to make ours and others' lives better. This motivates me to do what I do.

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

My then-approach to problem solving was struggling to comprehend the dynamics of interconnected systems. I was, therefore, seeking to learn systems thinking, and I came across the UnSchool workshop in Sydney.

I liked the disrupting attitude of the school of thought and decided to learn systems thinking from the UnSchool.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

Stimulating!

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

At the workshop, it was that systems thinking tools could be used single-handedly by an individual. They don't necessarily need teamwork.

As a co-host in Mumbai, it was a) the importance of identifying, acknowledging and managing group dynamics while facilitating, b) a peek into how to make group interactions experiential. 

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

The few initiatives I am looking out for are:

1. Gamifying training modules for industry/construction laborers and lorry drivers who are illiterate to semi-literate

2. An organizational experiential workshop intended to transform behaviors to being sensitive to self and other

3. Advising a team of architect-developers to design evidence-based built environments, so as to enhance well-being, creative thought and productive energy among its occupants

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it?

UnSchool helped me by giving me the confidence to play with big interconnected ecosystems. It has given me confidence and also helped me identify my process and style in designing experiences.

Whenever I use the systems maps or design experiences, Leyla's vibe rings in my ears. In a way, envisioning her motivates me and lets me know that I am doing it right.

How have you amplified this change you do in the world?

I’m still figuring it out. Meanwhile, I write about projects, processes and impact, and I attend some worthy conventions to talk about the use of behavioral science and systems thinking for problem-solving. Both are generating noise, conversations and network.

Prototyping session with Sri

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

I am an independent collaborator. I always welcome conversations and collaborations. One can approach me here:

LinkedIN
Instagram
Twitter
Medium

Inspired by one of my projects on adolescent sexual health, I am writing a book for adolescent boys and girls. It is aimed to be a reference guide for respect, consent, quality, self-determination and agency. I am seeking a mentor and/or funder for this endeavour!

Any other thoughts you want to share?

Most of my work is work in progress, and I am looking forward to where this is taking me.

#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?

Now Published! Design Systems Change Handbook + Excerpt: Speed of Change

Today’s the big day! We have been working extra hard to get it ready to release (Covid-19 and all!). The new handbook by Leyla Acaroglu, Design Systems Change is ready to transfer creative provocations, reflective activities and fascinating knowledge on design, systems and change directly from its digital pages to your brain!

Accidentally released just in time for a unprecedented change in our entire world, Discover how to activate change plus build the knowledge and resilience needed in these constantly-changing times by downloading the e-book here.

Over the last three weeks, we have been sharing fascinating excerpts from the new handbook that you can read here, here and here. In this week’s journal, we wrap up our series of sneak peeks by sharing another brain-activating excerpt from the final section on Change, all about the cognitive impacts that the speed of change has, taking a hyper-focus on climate change.

The world has changed rapidly over the last week, and many people around the world are now dealing with this extremely fast state of change. With this week’s excerpt being all about the way that the speed of change affects us, hopefully it will offer some food for thought during these reflective and challenging times.

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Excerpt from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

SPEED OF CHANGE 

Things that accumulate slowly over time make it hard to tell what is happening until there is a really obvious tipping point, like when you leave something in your fridge for too long and mold slowly grows —  first you can hardly see the tiny blue spores colonizing last Sunday’s dinner, but then suddenly it’s a full-on mold infestation, and it almost always seems to have appeared out of nowhere. 

The rate of change affects our ability to see and comprehend it. 

Slow-moving change is a beautiful thing in nature. Leaves turn golden and fall to the ground, we grow old somewhat slowly, hair graying overtime, skin wrinkling at a much slower rate than a dehydrating zucchini in your fridge. But the incremental changes in our atmosphere, the daily contributions of carbon and other gasses like methane back into the open space between the soil and the sun, for example, this slow seemingly invisible version of change is a significant challenge for us to comprehend, as it makes it very hard for people to accept the impending reality that the planet is warming as a result of our actions. 

Incremental changes, over time, have significant accumulated impacts, unless there is a mitigating factor that alleviates the increase (a balancing feedback loop). When you are boiling water on the stove with the lid on, it starts off all calm and then suddenly the heat generated turns into steam-filled bubbles which want to escape, and as they get pushed to the surface steam accumulates inside the small space between the water the lid, and suddenly, all that trapped steam energy escapes in the form of a rattling lid and spurting hot water. The cumulative outcome of slow change is hard to see until the pot is actually spitting the water all over the place as you attempt to calm the storm inside it.  

Most of us are oblivious to the way the planet regulates temperatures through complex interconnected systems, from the ocean currents, carbon cycle to the seasons and wind systems. The relationship between these is where the perfect living conditions for life have come into being, we have lived in a relatively stable climatic period of 10,000 years called the Holocene. 

Yet subtle shifts in the natural systems that regulate the temperature over time has starting to jeopardize the fragile space between the Earth and the Atmosphere. We feel like we live on a stable planet, one in which days tick by and not much changes, except for the leaves during autumn and the politicians in government every few years. But actually, we live in complete chaos. The systems around us are constantly changing, many of them through the interaction with our human-created interventions, we just don’t have the time-perception to see it in real time. 

We are living in the equivalent of that pot of water right before the moment of boiling, and the person responsible for watching it has walked away. The climate crisis is a result of millions of micro actions by industry, individuals and governments, a multi pronged attack of sorts as greenhouse gas emissions are not just from the burning of fossil fuels (although this is quite a lot) but also from gasses such as methane and hydrofluorocarbons which are released as a result of many different activities embedded in the economy and all aspects of our daily lives. 

In some situations, it’s easier to see how actions lead to reactions. For example, we have a fight with a loved one and the emotional fallout is usually immediate. We can see how small things, like regularly spending too much money, or ignoring an illness for too long, or trash building up in the kitchen bin, quickly accumulate into larger problems that require us to take action to alleviate the issues. You need to say sorry, go to the doctor or take the trash out. Unless something is done to change the accumulating situation, then you will find yourself in a sad, sick or smelly mess. Yet many of the accumulated impacts of our actions when it comes to contributing to climate change, for example, are well beyond the scope of our immediate perception. We don’t see any of the released gasses accumulating, this is the danger of hard to see change.

If you say, chipped away at your savings bit-by-bit, it may not look that bad day by day, but soon you will have nothing left. Every action has an impact by either adding to or taking away from something else. In a closed system like Planet Earth, this means all our incremental changes accumulate and eventually create a tipping point of change. That change can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’; this just depends on what your perspective on things are and what the consequential outcomes will be. For example, when your government has elections, depending on who is elected and what they stand for, some people are elated by the change in government whereas others are in despair. This one change generates polar opposite emotional states. But no matter what political position you take, accumulated gases in the atmosphere are being trapped and generating a locked-in effect that prevents heat from escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, and unless we dramatically reverse the release of these gases, by changing the way our societies and economy is designed, the resulting heat will continue to push back against the system that regulates the weather and thus create flow on effects that none of us want to have to deal with. 

It can’t be a toss up between the economy and the planet. There is no economic activity without natural resources, and there is no human life (or any other life, for that matter) unless we have complex interconnected systems working to create the base materials that enable life to flourish, like water, oxygen and food. There is an old saying that I am reminded off regularly; it’s a bit hippy but remains true: “There are no jobs on a dead planet.” 

The economy is still largely run on oil, but not just through the stuff that’s burnt to keep the lights on or the transport sector moving. The design of our houses and cities operate as concrete heat traps, this creates an increased reliance on energy intensive products like Air Conditioners. Around 10% of global energy use is currently dedicated to keeping interior space temperature controlled. In Japan, after the tsunami hit and took out the Fukushima Nuclear reactor, the power supply to Tokyo, the second most populated city in the world, was sketchy. As life started to resume there needed to be drastic energy saving measures, so workplaces implemented dress code changes (even Hawaiian shirt days) to encourage casual dress as a way of decreasing the amount of AC needed to keep workers comfortable and productive. The culture in Japan is to wear full suits, even in smelting summer temperatures, thus requiring higher amounts of AC to be used in offices. The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2050 over 5.6 billion AC’s will be in use, that’s up from the 1.6 billion used in 2018. Currently, Japan, the US and Korea are the most AC obsessed nations in the world, but the predictions are that China and India, with a combined population of 2.8 billion people, will contribute to a global spike in energy needs for powering AC units. Of course, one of the main drivers for the need to increase AC use is climate change. 

This is a dynamic relationship between what we do and what then happens to us. Hurricanes get their energy from warmer sea temperatures. They grow stronger with all the extra moisture in the air, and then they wreak havoc on the humans who unwittingly helped create the conditions for them to grow by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere via constantly running air conditioning units to stay comfortable in poorly designed houses. It’s a vicious feedback loop whereby the things that we design to cure one problem create the conditions for a bigger problem to occur. 

House design plays a big part in the need for AC. Insulation, eaves over windows and location-specific construction materials and techniques can dramatically reduce the need for AC, but instead, all over the world, we now have these shoddy pre-designed fabricated, un-insulated, eave-less heat-boxes being built alongside giant glass and metal skyscrapers, all of which attract and store heat. It’s called the “urban heat island effect”, when so much concrete and heat-absorbing surfaces, like black paved roads, suck in and store heat during the day and then pump it back out at night, increasing the temperature by several degrees. In Los Angeles, where the city is designed around cars and thus has a huge amount of land dedicated to black roads, in a creative attempt to address this, roads have been painted white as a way of reducing this effect. 

Sadly, as more tragic weather related events, triggered by a changing climate, such as hurricanes and Tsunamis, when they hit a city they increase the gross domestic product (GDP) of the nation it affects as all the damaged goods need to be replaced, increasing consumption. New air conditioners purchased, new cars and TVs, clothes, sofas, mattresses and kitchen utensils, people will go out and buy all the everyday things they need to live their lives. Emergency services will truck in bottled water and bulk amounts of food. People will go into debt to get their basic needs met. All of the recovery actions from tragedy will look good on the balance sheets of the nations affected, reinforcing just how broken our systems of economic measurement and incentives are. 

Added to this all is that the inefficiencies of our current energy production systems is staggeringly bad. The old-school way of getting power to customers has been to burn energy-dense things found under the ground like coal, natural gas or crude oil. They are burned to heat water to make steam to drive turbines, which then creates energy that has to be transported to the end-user along wires. Thanks to the laws of thermodynamics, about two thirds of the energy embedded in the raw materials make it into the grid system in the form of electricity, and then another 5% of that is lost in the transmission down the line. Then there’s waste energy at the home, and the impact of power lines falling and creating fires, of which many towns in rural California now have regular intentional blackouts to decrease the risk of wildfires starting, forcing a move to small-scale, decentralized solar grids. One of my favorite facts about the inefficiencies of current energy generation is that old power stations cant be turned off or slowed down; they have to keep running no matter what the demand is. And since we have peak energy demand points, like when the office day starts, or everyone gets home and turns on their TV’s at the same time, energy companies have to run their systems at a high rate to accommodate this peak demand. Which means overnight when less energy is used, in some cases partnerships are set up with other types of energy providers to make better use of this wasted energy — like a coal power plant selling cheap energy to a hydroelectric plant so that it uses the night energy to pump water back up to the top of the dam so it can be released during the day.  

Herein lies the issue with incremental and invisible changes: they are often so hard to make visible that denying them is easier than acknowledging their reality and they happen so slowly that we all become habituated to them. Just like any cycle of addiction, noticing and then admitting you have a problem is often the hardest part. 

Slow changes just end up becoming normal.  

Like how each year the summers get hotter and drier, or the hurricanes come more frequently or with more intensity. First they are isolated incidents, with enough time in between them to forget about the last one when the new catastrophic event happens. This slow normalization process conditions us to accept the new operating environment, so by the time the events are more frequent, they are now a normal part of life, dulling us from the urgency that is needed to pull back the domino effect of a changing climate. 

It is now even more normal that we hear how each year was is the hottest and driest on record, weirder winters with less rain or much more than normal, earlier springs, freakier storms, more intense and regular wildfires. This is change in action. Sure there are many factors contributing to these changes, but the climate is one thing we have been measuring long enough to know categorically that the system is messed up somehow and that we should get our global act together to stop our shared house from burning down, flooding or being blown away. 

One of the main issues embedded in these changes is that often, extreme weather events don’t offer a clear and direct correlation between cause and effect. There is a big delay in the system from turning on your AC to a freak wildfire. Change is often not related in time, so the ability to connect the dots become more removed. The reality is that these big events are often a chaotic manifestation of a million different types of human interventions to natural systems that culminate in an array of impacts that have significant consequences for human livability. 

Thus, proving that the changes in climate are singularly linked to XYZ actions is difficult — like the increasing impact of server use on energy demand as a result of all the new data hungry “internet of things” gadgets in so many peoples homes. Or the collective impact of meat consumption of an industry that moved from pasture-fed to grain-fed, factory-farmed livestock. 

The consequential impacts from all our actions are resulting in the impacts that slowly add up to the mess we are in. And now, the rate of change is being accelerated, so the system is reinforcing itself. 

Design Systems Change excerpt: The Mushroom Model

Just one week until we launch Leyla’s newest handbook, Design Systems Change! We’re really excited about this release as we know that our community of creative changemakers are super motivated to activate their agency to help change the world in incredible ways — but just as with any skill, we all need some motivation and tools to help figure out exactly what to do!  

The drive to be involved in change, whether in your personal or professional life, starts by discovering how to develop your personal agency, identifying the sphere of influence you uniquely hold and then actioning your creative potential to participate in positive change. Sustainability is about finding ways of harmonizing the social, economic and environmental impact of the things we do, and the core content of this new handbook presents provocations and concepts that support you in gaining the knowledge and tools to participate in designing a sustainable and circular future. This is the fifth in Leyla’s series on how to make positive impactful change, and it offers a practical roadmap for activating a career as a creative changemaker. 

In this week's journal, we continue with sharing excerpts from the handbook (to be released on March 16th). From the Systems section, we explore the concept of the Mushroom Model, an adaptation of the Iceberg Model. If you are into or new to systems thinking, then this is one of the best ways to start to think in dynamic, complex systems! If you’ve missed the past few weeks of the journal, check out other excerpts here and here!

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Excerpt from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

The Mushroom Model

The Iceberg Model is a classic systems thinking tool that shows how the most obvious part of the system, the tip of the iceberg, is held up by the non-obvious weight of the iceberg that is hidden under the waterline. The tip represents the events that occur around us, and right under the water, we have the patterns of behavior, then the systems structures, and finally the mental models. Moving from just seeing the events to understanding and challenging the mental models that reinforce the rest of the structure is one of the goals of a systems thinker. 

In exploring the dynamic systems that allow nature to do her magic, I came to understand this concept as “emergence”, whereby the obvious parts of the system that we see with ease are deeply connected to complex elements that came together to enable the obvious thing to occur. 

So for example, take a common field mushroom. If you have ever stumbled across one, you will see the delightful little cap and stem sticking out of a bit of soil, often right after the rain has come. The conditions that enable a mushroom to form have to be just right, but the mushroom is far from an isolated element. It is connected to a highly complex underground network, a giant living organism called mycelium, and it runs its long thin fungal networks all through the Earth, supporting the vitality of the ecosystem of which it is a part and allowing for mushrooms to pop up in many locations, in over 1.5 million varieties.  

Just like the iceberg, much of what is sustaining a forest is not visible to us. We see a mushroom, but not the complex web of mycelium that operates like a neural network connecting all the trees and plants deep within the soil. Mycelium runs throughout the Earth, operating like an internet for trees. They work together symbiotically by sharing resources, through a mycorrhizal association whereby they connect at the root level. The fungus works to decay organic materials around it, allowing it to distribute nutrients to the other plants it’s connected to in exchange for things it can’t create. The mushroom you see popping up is only the emergent outcome of the systems needed to continue itself by forming a fruiting body that will propel millions of spores out into the world so that the mycelium can continue preforming its role within the system. 

Fungi, in all their diversity, including the everyday mushrooms that we eat, are the original recyclers of nature. Their main role in an ecosystem is to support the decay of organic material so that it can be broken down into the building blocks that help new life emerge. Through this process, they themselves are born, creating spores inside the gills of the mushroom head to enable them to replicate the process of seeding new mycelium so the cycle of decay and life continues. 

A mushroom is thus an emergent property of the complex hidden system of mycelium. The crown of the mushroom is the obvious outcome that we each see (the tip of the iceberg), while the gills and spores are the slightly less obvious patterns that help the system replicate itself. The stem represents the structures that hold it up, but underground is where the mycelium runs deep, representing the complex mental models or mindsets that connect all the underlying systems that sustain it all. 

I thus redesigned the iceberg model to show the interconnected relationships that reinforce the systems around us through the metaphor of the way that the mushroom/mycelium system enables ecosystems to communicate, share resources and flourish. 

Take a moment to think about other emergent things that are just the tip of the iceberg and what structures are hidden from your everyday view. This type of practice of considering hidden systems is a powerful tool in enabling you to effect change. 

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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the final section on Change, and the handbook will be available for purchase online here >

If you want to dive into systems change for the circular economy, then apply to join one of our 2020 programs here >

Design — It’s not what you think it is | Design Systems Change Handbook Preview

In case you missed it in last week’s journal article, we are gearing up for the exciting launch of a new handbook by Leyla that will be released on March 16, 2020, called Design Systems Change! This is the fifth in her series of handbooks she’s written about making change, with other series titles being: 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.

This newest handbook, Design Systems Change, includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a life and 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, by design, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with over 30 interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make positive change. 

Leading up to its launch on March 16th, we are sharing excerpts from the handbook from each of the three main sections Design, Systems and Change. This week, we take a peek at the power of design in creating a circular, regenerative future and dive into what design is not. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can preorder it here, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched! 

Expert from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

Design — It’s not what you think it is

Design is one of the most powerful and pervasive influencers of our lives. It is everywhere, from the bureaucratic processes that drive us all mad (often ad hoc and reductive design), through to the beautiful user experience of our treasured devices (often addictive and intentionally designed to steal your eyeballs away from other things). 

There are the pain-in-the-ass-designs, like call centers that are intentionally designed to make you hang up before you can voice your complaint, stores that usher you past expensive items in your search for the basics like bread so you buy more, or my personal pet peeve: the airport security line that requires all humans to momentarily become a cow as they are herded through a maze of control. Cities, buildings, products, services, bus routes, election processes — everything that we humans created has been designed by someone or a group of people. 

As a powerful social scriptor, design gives narrative; how you move around a city or the rules you obey or disregard, for instance, design influences your mind to create actions and form opinions. Our mind is activated in conscious and covert ways by visual signs and physical forms, wayfinding devices, restrictions, symbols and aesthetics. 

From the moment we are born, to the day we depart this Earth, our lives are profoundly influenced by the designed world. And, despite the hugely influential far-reaching impact of design as a profession and a socially forming process, for some reason, as a society, we seem to succumb to reducing design down to the basics of aesthetics and function, rather than what it is really doing — influencing and forming the entire world as we know it. 

Perhaps it’s through this mystique that it helps to perpetuate the systems of unsustainability that design enables in our extraction-based economy? 

One of the things I think about a lot is the relationship between design and the social structures that also influence us all immensely. After all, we are social animals, and humans attribute their success to collaboration and the social connections we form. 

Sure, we are riddled with biases and are as equally un-cooperative as we are collaborative, but we also look after our young intensely and form strong social bonds and smile when others smile at us, we work towards effectively getting along. We speak shared languages and operate under social expectations that condition us to behave in socially-beneficial ways and to value things in culturally appropriate ways. Objects and symbols are central to the forming of our cultures and interpreting the physical world we inhabit. 

Designers in all their types and roles – industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture designers, architects, landscape architects, interior designers, user experience designers, service designers, graphic designers, even engineers – all work to create the services, products and processes that the world engages with. Why? Because people have needs that are met through the creation of things. Designers are thus charged with the task of converting these needs into things that meet them and doing it in unique and novel ways that beat the competition. Designers are value creates. 

This system has incentivized many to come up with the desires before the products can fill them, but that’s an entirely different story to tell. Individually, we might want to stay connected to friends and colleagues so technology helps us do that, but collectively, we need to have a system of governance that keeps society in some sort of stable place. So, we iteratively design governments and legal systems with penalties for misbehavior.

Design thus operates on many levels to combine competing aspects, such as function, aesthetics, enjoyment, desirability, entertainment and control. The latter can be seen in many of the design decisions around shared communal artifacts, like street side seats or public buildings; there are often many aspects incorporated to deter certain types of people and engage others. The park bench is perfect for the office worker to sit for 30 minutes and each their lunch, but intentionally designed so that the homeless person can’t sleep on it or the skateboarding kid can’t grind her board against it. 

Design may be the output of imagination and creativity, but it forms the structures that create our societies as we know them.

The one unifying factor of design is that the driving force behind it is to create something that meets a defined or intended “need”. We define this as functionality, and everything that exists can be defined by its core function. If a product or service does not fulfill a clear functionality, then it doesn’t function, and it’s often seen as lacking value or being purely aesthetic. 

A chair with two legs that does not stand up is broken, a car without a drive shaft may look like a car but is unable to achieve the act of driving, a blunt knife or a bucket with a hole, a hat with no rim, a building without a front door — these are all pointless things as they don’t serve the core function that is needed for us to ascribe value and thus use them, desire them and keep them in our lives. Or more importantly, we may not part with money to own them. A government without a way of collecting money from its citizens may find that it is quickly unable to afford to pay for the services it intended to offer in exchange for votes, thus it is unable to function in terms of being elected or seen as governing. 

All designs can have unintended consequences, such as creating perverse incentives, spillover effects or externalities. These are often not conceived at the point of creation and are thus dealt with after the thing has come into existence and the feedbacks of interacting with the world can be seen.  

Design is therefore an all-encompassing human capacity that reaches beyond the known professions of industrial, fashion, graphic, user experience and interior design. There are also policy writers, researchers, scientists and administrative professionals who likewise employ design as a tool for enacting change. Absolutely everything that humans have conjured into being is, in some way. a designed artifact and thus, should be seen as a product of our constructed world. But perhaps the most important, unspoken thing about design is the fact that whatever we can make, we can redesign, which further opens up the opportunity for the idea us all being everyday citizen designers of the future. 

The way we each make choices, move through our cities, select food, and act on our consumption preferences all create a type of design outcome, as every action has impacts. 

By understanding the power of design, both as a profession and as an outcome of the choices we make in our daily lives, then we can gain the tools to redesign systems and unlock some of design’s potential to be an effective tool for enacting positive change. 

Many designers are none the wiser to the impact that they have; with short timelines and demanding briefs, it’s difficult to find the time to adequately assess the impact of any one or combined design choices they make. But this has to change. We need to foster within the design community a collective code of conduct, a set of standards and ethical guidelines to ensure that what we create is not just serving a system of exploitation and extraction, but instead creating greater value than is being taken. This is what circular systems design is all about!*

Thus, if we are to design the world that works better for all of us, then our perception of design, what it does to us overtly and covertly — that reductive idea has to change. Instead of it being a fruitless contributor to the world of luxury, business and entertainment, we can leverage design to be the incredibly powerful social influencer that it is by default, as it can make or break elections, control societies, create change and dictate the future. 

Contrary to all the design thinking rhetoric out there, ask any designer how they do what they do, and they will each give you a very different set of tools, processes and design practices that they use to get from a set brief to a solid outcome. Design thinking is one approach put forth by one set of designers who do a particular type of design work. There is nothing wrong with design thinking; it’s just that it’s not the defining process of design. There is no standardized design process, as design is an experiential act that requires many different tools. For example, an architect uses very different processes than a fashion designer or a UX designer. 

Design thinking can be done well and certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not the only type of design approach and should be like everything else: questioned for its integrity and viability to solve the more complex problems we collectively face. 

We can’t solve complex problems with simple solutions that don’t address the root cause of the issues within the system. We need depth of understanding and to embrace complexity. This is why applying systems thinking to any creative process is critical to coming up with solutions that fit within the complexity, rather than trying to design it away.

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

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!

Alumni Umang Sood: Future Proofing Real Estate & Co-Working

Umang and his team during the 24hr challenge at the Mumbai fellowship

We met Mumbai alumni Umang Sood in 2017 when he hosted our 8th fellowship at his cool new co-working space in Powai, Mumbai. It’s been a couple years since he went through the UnSchool Mumbai fellowship with 16 other wonderful humans, so we checked back in to see what he is up to, how his space is evolving and how the UnSchool experience has helped him make positive change. 

Can you give us an introduction to yourself and your work?

I am the founding partner at Of10, a co-working space located in the heart of Hiranandani Gardens, Powai (Mumbai, India). I am on a mission to prove that any of us can champion ideas that change the world around us. 

Umang’s Of10 co-work space, formerly an unused gym that was renovated

What motivates you to do the work that you do?

We have seen too many good ideas perish simply because their creators are too scared to leave behind a traditional professional life to go against the grain and pursue their ideas. We have all personally experienced the monotony of a corporate job that confines people to a box and conditions them to believe that work is simply following orders and not pushing boundaries.

This is one of the reasons why I started Of10; here my cofounders and I hope to inspire millennials like ourselves by  showing them that there is absolutely nothing stopping them from changing the world. We hope to give people so much more than just a co-working space; rather, it’s a community that they can learn from, be inspired by, work hard and play harder. Good ideas and unconventional wisdom need to be championed, and we intend to promote the people behind them.

UnSchool Mumbai in the of10 space

How did you find out about the UnSchool, and what motivated you to come?

I found out about UnSchool when they were looking to find a venue to conduct their Mumbai event. The fantastic mission and vision of the founder and the dire need for the kind of work that UnSchool is doing motivated me to attend.

What was your experience at the UnSchool like?

The experience was fabulous. From the highly engaging method of instruction to the planning and logistics, everything was top-notch. I think meeting people from different backgrounds from around the world was a fantastic perspective-widening experience for me. I was able to get out of my comfort zone and take a long hard look at the way I was running my business.

What was the main take away you had from coming to the UnSchool?

I learnt that everyone has the power to make changes that will save our planet from climate change.

Umang and Alumni Camila collaborating during the Mumbai fellowship

Tell us more about your initiative(s), and how is it all going?

Through Of10 I am committed to building an experience that is not only better for the planet, but also better for the people living on it.

Of10 before renovations

Real estate in Mumbai is notoriously unavailable and extremely expensive. I think building more real estate is NOT the answer, and instead, believe in better utilizing the current real estate in Mumbai, like by converting previously un-utilized or defunct spaces (dead spaces) to community centers and co-working spaces for small businesses. For example, our current office space in Powai used to be a defunct gym lying vacant for over 2 years. We came in and transformed the space into a state-of-the-art, profit-generating, co-working and events space. There are millions of square feet of dead spaces around the city Mumbai, and probably in many other cities around the world, whose potential is waiting to be unlocked. Throwing money and constructing new buildings is not the answer to Mumbai’s real estate problems. Instead, I feel we should future-proof real estate by creatively and sustainably making the best use of the resources at our disposal. 

Of10 co-work space now

We’re only as strong as the community around us, which is why our mission is to support the micro-communities which began in 2016 as a way for us to give back to the communities that support us. We only hire from the local neighbourhood, and all our spaces are designed by local architects, furniture makers and contractors. We believe in giving talented young people a chance. All the material used in our spaces is sourced responsibly from our immediate surroundings. Our mission is to empower the micro-communities we are a part of. No international teams, no national teams. There’s no need to outsource when our communities themselves have an abundance of talent we can tap into to create a space made by the community, for the community.

Most businesses in India are either riding the startup wave or catering to large enterprises; however, the future of the country rests on its small and medium businesses. So all Of10 spaces are built with the needs of these small business owners in mind. The only way for a business to succeed in India is through building better networks and working together. We are big on collaboration and bigger on events.

Working hard at Of10

How did the UnSchool help you start/evolve it? 

I think UnSchool was able to give me a much more macro perspective on the problems we are trying to solve. What it taught me most importantly is how to think about a problem rather than just execute and ideate. It made me a better problem solver as a result. 

UnSchool has allowed me to make more actionable changes in my current business model so as to become an example for other coworking spaces to follow in terms of building a culturally and environmentally-aware business.

How have you amplified this change you do in the world? 

The creative arts are the backbone of a truly entrepreneurial community. At Of10 we have hosted experimental theater, music gigs, comedy, design workshops and even short film screenings. We give local artists a platform to showcase their talent.

India’s unemployment rate is the highest in 45 years, and the jobless rate stands at 6.1% in 2019. The demographic most affected by increasing unemployment is the youth. At at Of10 are committed to change that. The only thing the youth in India lack are the opportunities to prove themselves. We provide opportunities exclusively for people under the age of 25. After 2 years of being with Of10, we encourage all of our employees to start their own businesses.

My team and I believe in building better and more socially-responsible businesses, and our mission is to use our planet’s limited resources better and for better. We are committed to building a product that is not only better for the planet, but also better for the people living on it.

How can people engage with, support, or follow your work?

Our Instagram
Our Facebook
My LinkedIn
Come visit us!: Of10, Ground Floor, Prudential, Hiranandani Gardens, Powai 400076

Any other thoughts you want to share?

On a personal level, UnSchool has helped me realize that an optimistic approach to problem solving is way more effective when dealing with seemingly insurmountable problems like climate change. I am able to work through harder problems and iterate and resolve them. 

On a professional level, I am hoping to make my business, Of10, an example for an eco-conscious, circular economy brand, rather than just a profit-making enterprise.

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If you are keen to have a unique UnSchool experience, apply for one of our 2020 programs here.