MENTORSHIP BY SOCIAL MEDIA

Taking advantage of the pandemic-induced accelerated shift to the digital — and the infrastructural advancements that made it possible — several new organizations have sprung up (and others have expanded) to offer a variety of services such as mentoring and tutoring. Two that stand out for their innovative contributions to education are Office Hours and the Architecture Is Free Foundation (AIF). Both combine the momentum of emerging social movements across the world with new technologies that lend themselves to bottom-up, decentralized deployment.

Office Hours is a people-powered platform created by multidisciplinary artist Esther Choi that offers mentoring and access to knowledge by and for BIPOC creatives in the fields of architecture and design. Anecdotal evidence supported by data shows that there is currently a lack of mentorship resources for people of colour. With a strong social media presence through its Instagram account (@officehours.design) and action-packed bimonthly 75-minute video sessions, Office Hours is, in its own words, “filling a void.”

The Architecture Is Free Foundation is an educational platform led by a diverse group of architects, educators, students and professionals that endeavours to extend education to those who face a lack of access to in-person resources. Aiming to reduce economic barriers, AIF does away with fees, applications and prerequisites. All that is required to join is to follow its Instagram account (@architectureisfree) and connect through direct message to schedule a mentoring or tutoring session.

EXPERIMENTAL CURRICULA

Long in gestation, novel approaches to education were ramped up in the wake of the challenges we now face. These experiments help us rethink what education can be by focusing on radical transformation. But while crises such as a global pandemic might produce an impulse to change how things are done at the root, ideas such as Floating University Berlin and the Temporary Programmes at the Sandberg Instituut can foster fundamental reimaginings that will endure beyond these nail-biting times and after mainstream activism and movements for change lose steam.

Floating University Berlin began as an experiment by Raumlabor in 2018. It was intended to be temporary but has since become an association by the name of Floating e.V. It’s both a physical place — a multi-structure amphibious complex on stilts situated on the rainwater retention basin of a decommissioned airport — and a digital one. Both enable practitioners, collaborators and participants to “imagine and create different forms of living.” Current programmes include Urban Practice; Kids Uni; Climate Care; Contaminations; Learnscapes; (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures; Neighbourhood; Water, Earth, Biodiversity; and Extradisciplinary.

The Sandberg Instituut’s two-year Temporary Programmes, on the other hand, were introduced in 2011 by Jurgen Bey, the institute’s director since 2010. Developed to respond to issues of immediate concern, they allow the institute to quickly adapt and address timely questions. Previous programmes included Vacant NL, Designing Democracy, Radical Cut-Up and The Commoners’ Society. Among its newest areas of study are Blacker Blackness, which aims to develop methodologies to “decolonize, uncode and liberate representations of Blackness in art and design,” and Ecologies of Transformation, which responds directly to the political instability gripping the new decade with a focus on the relationship between art and activism.