Some new "pilots of kaos" in town... University of the Underground

Our sister organisation, the Alternativet party in Denmark, is infused with the spirit of Kaos Pilots - a radical business school (founded by Alternativet's leader Uffe Elbaek) which has generated all manner of challenging projects and social leaders in the last twenty years.

It looks like, entirely separately and spontaneously, a set of 'Kaos Pilots' have just launched in London... The University of The Underground is a new kind of institution for radical designers, founded by the designer Nelly Ben Hayoun. 

The mission statement will tell you all you need to know:

With the aim of teaching students how to engineer situations, to design experiences and events, to best support social dreaming, social actions and power shifts within institutions, companies and governments; the University of the Underground promotes unconventional collages of references, interdisciplinary practices and experimentations at the start of any creative processes.

The University of the Underground is lead by a multidisciplinary team of‘dreamers of the day’, who believe that a positive inspiration and disturbance to the current cultural and educative system is required to best support the young generations in their creative and political endeavours. This university is bold, ambitious, and unapologetic.

The University of the Underground exists at the nexus between critical design, experiential, theatrical, filmic, semiotics, political and musical practices and it results in the design of experiences.

The Master programme in Design of Experiences is concerned with a contemporary and strategic foresight implying politics, sustainability, institutions, new technologies and scientific developments both in Artificial Intelligence and in the current digital ecosystems. It makes innovative use of design, linguistic, experiential, mythological, musical and filmic practices as tools to engage members of the public with the experiences and the debates created.

The University of the Underground lives in the undergrounds within a hidden network of urban spaces. It supports forms of deviance in creativity, the non-established and the unconventional, revolutionary practices, theatre of cruelties and musical concerts will be celebrated as we manufacture countercultures, radios, pirates utopias and experiences for power shifts.

More here.