Designing Education for Tomorrow – Jumpstarting innovation through thought experiments

Opportunity to ask ‘what if’

**Please note the revised workshop timeline**

Designing Education is a University College London (UCL) ChangeMakers project that proposes a series of collaborative workshops between students and faculty members to learn about compulsory educational systems through deconstruction and simulating designing one. Read more about what the project entails in the ‘about the project‘ page.

The aim of the project is to encourage innovative thinking in education through thought experiments (taking the sandbox exercise approach). There is a need in the field of education to analyse age-old assumptions and to open our minds to new ways of thinking regarding the future of education. By taking a sandbox exercise approach we can suspend certain restrictions such as ‘what works’, the status quo and what predominant voices say it should be, in the way we frame discussions in the field.

The exercise then becomes, ‘if you could design an education system from scratch, what would it look like?’. ‘What lessons could we draw from the differences between our thought experiment and the system as is today?’

At the end of the project we will be published a ‘toolbox for innovative thinking’ for students and faculty to encapsulate the views gathered during the workshops and to provide them access to a range of thinking tools useful in dealing with complex social problems, such as those encountered in the field of education.

What can this project do for you?

The aim is to provide students with a learning opportunity complementary to their studies and to provide our faculty members with a fertile testing ground for potential synergies between well-established ideas in academia.

This can also be the inspiration for your next research project or an opportunity to acquire the innovative mindset that employers are looking for. Participating may help with uncovering personal blindspots and challenging own assumptions about the field of education.

Our blueprint for stirring innovative thinking

In our workshops we are aiming to create the right environment for creative thinking by:

Opening ourselves up to the endless possibilities thought experiments have to offer.
Discussing new perspective with participants from diverse personal and professional backgrounds.
Thinking laterally by infusing our discussions with theoretical concepts and practices from other fields and industries. Find our list of cliff notes on some of the concepts we plan to discuss in the context of education on Our Inspiration page. We’ve also prepared an FAQ page with queries raised during our discussions.

Our project is now live! We are now preparing to run our 5 workshops between students and faculty members planned by the end of September 2021. Inspired by our project? Find out how to get involved.

Thank you to all who attended our LAUNCH (3 June), 2nd (24 June) and 3rd (22 July) workshops so far!

Please note that our next workshop has been rescheduled to take place on Fri, 1 Oct, 10am-12pm. Please register to attend here.

Schedule of Project and Workshops – check them out in our Project Timeline post. Make sure you fill in the consent form before you attend any of our workshops, if you haven’t done so already. It takes only 5 min and you only need to do it once. **Please note the revised timeline**

Not able to join us for one or more workshop discussions? Send us your thoughts and comments (e.g. an email or short think piece) and we may incorporate them in our discussions and final report (Toolkit for Innovative Thinking in Education).

Participation in the ‘Designing Education’ project is currently limited to UCL students and faculty. However, if you want to get in touch regarding the project and the content of this webpage check out our Contact Us page.