We’re creating learning systems infrastructure with social designers, civil servants and activists to learn from mentors and each other: The Residency.
The Residency is a learning collective for Change Design practitioners. It is for people looking to start, transition or advance their impact and career.
“Bridging is a body of practice that includes translating across scales, cultures and approaches.”
Tim DraimiN | SI CANADA
Introducing the Residency
The future of work and education across the globe is uncertain. For government, civil society, and social design and innovation practitioners solving complex public problems, limited learning opportunities and constraining work environments threaten possibilities of expanding and elevating their collective practice. Within their institutions, practitioners face a multitude of challenges ranging from siloed work to homogenized practice. From entering the workforce to retirement, they hit difficult-to-traverse learning plateaus.
The Residency is a global collective of Change Designers—civil servants, activists and social designers/innovators upskilling in multidisciplinary and cross-sector practice. We act as a Union, Guild and Council.
Research, concepting and co-designing informed a learning prototype embedded in a collective action model. The collective is a first-of-its-kind test of global learning systems infrastructure that can facilitate the exchange of mindsets, share power across adjacent disciplines, and privilege plural craft through self-determined exchange.
The Residency asks:
If our unique capability as humans is to be endlessly curious, and the complexity of current and future socio-political challenges demand us to be—how might we spark curiosity and become infinite learners?
If public problems connect across borders, but practices to address them are local—how might we facilitate ‘situated’ learning at scale?
If situations vary across disciplines and sectors, and accordingly, so do mindsets—how might we enable self-determined and self-governed learning that encourages and sustains plural mindsets?
If formal education and adult upskilling programs are cost- and time- prohibitive for practitioners—how might we design learning systems infrastructure that creates inclusive access to knowledge and skills?
“Right now, however, if you are trained as a designer, you are rarely engaged with this kind of systemic change in practice. Equally, if you are trained as a policymaker, you are rarely engaging with the reality of delivery in detail, or incentivised to proactively move across the silos you find yourself in.”
DAN HILL |UCL IIPP
Goals
The goal is to develop a malleable learning exchange that permeates traditional boundaries - the result would be a networked exchange that quietly infiltrates a system rather than overtly disrupts it.
Through the residency we aim to:
Fuel effective multidisciplinarity: To tackle increasingly complex socio-political problems through multidisciplinarity, including advancing the use of change design and ameliorating the tensions between change design and other common public/social sector disciplines.
Provide support at crux transition points: To establish a residency program that supports the transition from education to meaningful participation in the civil society and public administration workforces or growth leaps for people hitting plateaus in the sector or catapulted from craft specialisms to management positions.
Elevate the collective practice: Create a learning network that leverages global intergenerational expertise to meet the scale of the problems we’re aiming to tackle.
“People need an education that prepares them for a lifelong process of training and retraining. They will need more than anything else, to learn how to learn. Flexibility and resilience will be crucial”
JOHN LANCHESTER | The Next Industrial Revolution Is Coming
