OPEN CALL FOR SOS-25

Curators

School SOS

SOS-25 is a free 6 week art, architect and spatial design development programme based in London, UK. Run from the 22nd of July 2025, 12 participants will develop individual projects from their own lived experiences and communities. 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 its base for studio work as well as all public events and presentations from practitioners at the cutting edge of design, academia, journalism.

Alongside our 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 ANNEX (The Koppel Project's Elephant & Castle gallery space) opening on Friday 29th August.

SOS-25 is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

2025 Brief:

We build on an evolving conversation brought by peers around centering lived experience to spatial practice and engaging with community to reimagine our shared spaces. 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 you as SOS peers, alongside a framework of support sessions run by practitioners, with a focus on individual projects and specific readings of ethics, knowledge production, design and space. You will be 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 you 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.

Collectivising the Curriculum

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