School of Speculation

🆘 What is SOS? 🆘

1️⃣ SOS is an independent and nomadic critical design school that aims to challenge current models of delivering higher education. Through partnerships between museums, galleries, libraries and other public institutions, SOS aims to build relationships between the diverse latent pedagogy in our cities to create a different kind of educational offer.

Untitled (2017). Katja Novitskova.

2️⃣ Universities today gravitate toward market-driven education, not only through the education as product model, but in their delivery of market-ready students. SOS disputes this approach. SOS is an alternative model of education afforded by its own institutional framework outside of the traditional university. SOS is workshops, speakers’ events, summer schools, writings, lectures, discussion, making and drawing, visualising and critiquing the status quo using critical design.

3️⃣ SOS is an alignment of aims and objectives toward challenging today’s ways of doing things. We’ve found that the independence of the school environment from society is invaluable but in crisis. How can we prevent the crucial role of critique, nurtured for so long by the Arts, from disappearing in our schools?

The Oxbridge Fibre Orbital (2018).
Pierre Shaw (SOS Co-Founder).

4️⃣ To react against the consumerisation of higher education, SOS has had to develop a different understanding of school; it is a connection between spaces and cultural institutions, students and practitioners through discussion and making. SOS is an evolving experiment in how a collective of thinkers and doers can reshape the educational model around independent critique through design. We want to ask questions like; can we make higher education affordable again? Isn’t critical design just as powerful as affirmative design? Who is education for?

5️⃣ SOS tours existing universities and bridges between cultural institutions to form a skeletal framework for students to find a more independent way of thinking and working.

The Ecological Fortification of the Chagos Islands (2019).
Kishan San (SOS Co-Founder).