team member

Radical Imagination for Tomorrow

Seoul City’s Long-term Strategies for Future Transition Campus

The world is jointly experiencing a crisis of human civilisation. We are witnessing the catastrophic impacts of multiple crises such as climate change, rising social inequality, and political polarisation across the world.

Amidst the COVID19 pandemic, cities are experiencing an urgent need for a radical transformation, which can only be possible through a critical and fundamental reflection on the relationships between ourselves—our inner self—with others; non-human actors, and the ecosystem we live in. In order to make the transition towards equitable futures, cities not only need to invest in transition funds and portfolios of interventions, but also in the foundational capacities for innovation among all its citizens.

Based on this demand, Dark Matter Labs and Cdot carried out a collaborative research project, spanning a wide range of areas such as: strategy building for a global social innovation campus in Asia; iterating architectural plans and facility management/operation plans; and designing a sustainable social innovation ecosystem with financial models for long-term outcomes.

The Global Open Campus, currently renamed ‘Future Transition Campus’ focuses on emerging realities and practices during the Pandemic, and makes a case for the integration of systems thinking, future thinking and collective storytelling to cultivate our ability to imagine and create radical futures.