Learning and Education

School SOS-25

22nd Jul 25 -> 29th Aug 25

Closed month-long programme with select public events

Heights

Curators

School SOS

SOS-25 is a free 6 week critical designer development programme where 12 participants selected by an open call run between April and May will develop individual projects from their own lived experiences and communities. The programme, run by SOS, aims to help develop these projects as part of developing participants' unique design and spatial practices.

This year, the programme is hosted exclusively by the Koppel Project, which will act as SOS' base for studio work as well as all public events and presentations from practitioners at the cutting edge of design, academia, journalism and more, including Leah Cowan and Nishat Awan, alongside more guests.

Alongside public lecture series, participants will attend a closed-door Sustainable Finance lecture series dedicated to finance and funding emerging practice. This year, this includes POoR and Collective Works alongside other guests. SOS-25 provides weekly technical workshops in digital media making software, including; 3D Scanning, Visual Communication and Data Analysis.

All participants will publicise their work and research during a final one week exhibition at The Koppel Project's gallery space ANNEX opening on Friday 29th August. SOS-25 is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

2025 Brief: Organising Around Restorative Practices

SOS is designed to progress your practice, to challenge the traditionally commercial routes through your discipline, and help you to express your politics through spatial practice. What we typically mean by politics isn’t defined by the chaos in Westminster, rather the intimate connections between people, communities, and space.

This year’s programme emphasises relationships, bridge-building, community conversations, organising, collective intelligence building, and consciousness raising to help peers write a brief for their first, or next project. SOS build on an evolving conversation brought by peers around centring lived experience to spatial practice, and engaging with community over the imbalance, or abuse of power in space. For this reason, this year peers will bring an existing theme or emerging project to SOS-25.

SOS is organised into a combination of co-produced sessions run by SOS peers, alongside a framework of support sessions run by practitioners, with a focus on individual projects and specific readings of ethics, knowledge production, power and politics in design and space. Peers are supported in knowledge sharing of how to potentially fund a project as well as how to technically build it through new media. By the end of SOS-25, they will have made a unique Project Map; an open document for recording a project’s changing aims, stakeholders, relationship dynamics, through a set of organising principles and ambitions.

A project might cover, but is in no way limited to, ecological investigations, intersectional climate community work, strategies for designed de-growth, design for social care, support of forcibly minoritised communities, investigations of exploitative industry and labour relations, investigation of state and corporate violence, amongst other urgent and necessary interventions that are affecting you, or your communities.

Taking cues from restorative practice, described as “an ethos with practical goals, among which to restore harm by including affected parties in a process of understanding through voluntary and honest dialogue” (Gavrielides 2011), we will help guide a project road map relying on the power of conversation. You will spend your time at SOS in the first phases of initiating projects with community stakeholders and forming practices but will hopefully have life long after your time with us.

Collectivising the Curriculum

As part of the short six-week programme, SOS are interested in collectivising on how design pedagogy can and should be shaped by its participants. Through a series of structured group seminars, participants will help to co-construct the design projects of others’ as well as their own.

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