What will you learn at HOLIS?
You probably heard already that HOLIS is fun and you meet interesting people there. You also might heard how good the food is because we use fresh local ingredients and Eszter makes sure that the outcome is delicious. But what will I actually learn at HOLIS? — you might be asking. And that’s a good question.
First of all to get a better picture about what HOLIS International Interdisciplinary Summer School is (kind of too long title, isn’t it? Have a better idea? Let me know!) you have to understand where HOLIS is coming from and what are our aims with it. You will see that there is a duality in what we do.
HOLIS is about interdisciplinary collaboration meaning that we bring people from different disciplines (designers, engineers, economists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, you name it) and mix them in 5–7 members teams. Why is that important? A personal experience made me realise (and there is a lot of literature about this) that professions have their limit and when facing challenges that require the knowledge/experience of other disciplines the collaboration (if it happens at all) is not that smooth. This is especially true for the higher education students where most of the teaching still happens in knowledge silos. This is the teaching / learning part of HOLIS where the organisers and team leaders bring the latest experience based methodology of how to work with different professions together and deliver a project.
Delivering a project is the other aspect of HOLIS. You don’t want to get the resources, knowledge, motivation and energy wasted. This is why every year we partner up with organisations or individuals and figure out where could be HOLIS helpful, what kind of social innovation project could we work on. We try to get our hands dirty with (re)solving wicked problems.
“Social problems are never solved. At best they are only re-solved — over and over again.” (Rittel and Webber, 1973)
We believe that the answer to this kind of problems can be only a complex and comprehensive one, delivered by an interdisciplinary team. Those are real projects involving real problems, challenges and people. Delivering a useful project is as important for HOLIS as learning.
We use, merge and experiment with different methodologies and approaches to achieve the before mentioned aims. I think this is one of the reasons why HOLIS keeps attract people who already participated. Let see what are these, what can you actually learn while working on meaningful social projects.
(Interdisciplinary) Collaboration
Following the Collaborative Innovation Report by the World Economic Forum, collaboration is one of the most important features of competitiveness named by senior managers and at the same time it is something that needs the most improvement. The research also shows that there is a lack of advanced knowledge on how to set up and operate a collaborative team. (World Economic Forum, 2015)
As already said (well, written) we believe in the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and will show you and learn with you how to do it effectively and efficiently.
And when we say interdisciplinary we mean it. You don’t have to be a designer or engineer or economist to be part of HOLIS. Good ideas might come from surprising places.
Organisational/team design
I am personally obsessed with organisational/team design. Yes, I finished an economy university and had many management classes. That’s right, I didn’t finish any design courses let alone university. You will learn about decentralised organisations and about patterns that make it tick.
Community building
We think that every team and every organisation is (or should be) a small community. This is why we love The Community Canvas. An easy to understand and practical framework to build meaningful communities. We introduced the canvas last year and we had a positive feedback.
“Oh and I already used the community canvas at the company with a great success. Thanks a lot it was really inspiring and an eye-opener.” HOLIS participant
Collective Action Toolkit (CAT)
Collective Action Toolkit is a set of activities and methods that enables groups of people anywhere to organize, collaborate, and create solutions for problems affecting their community.
Every year we are trying out something new (as for example last year we tried out community canvas). This year we will use CAT. We had a brief emailing with Kara Pecknold (Creative Director at frog) who was involved with CAT. She is looking forward to hear about the outcomes.
”If you want to use it for your teams, you are more than welcome to and frog would always love to hear about how it is being applied.” Kara Pecknold, frog
Social Innovation
It’s not a toolkit it’s more like an attitude. This is a topic that won’t be discussed during the workshop hours. This is something that we rather talk about during our meals or in the evening. We are constantly thinking and talking about what can we do personally to change the things around us for better.
What are we proud about
Beside this you can learn from Eszter how to prepare simple and tasty dishes that are good for you. We are even considering to have a food workshop :). Every morning you can join either a yoga group or have a run. And every evening (if the weather is right) we are having a bonfire and drink some beer or wine and talk about the intergalactic collaboratively disruptive decentralisation of the social tissue. NOT!
If you feel like joining us check out the details on our website and apply for HOLIS 2018.
Holis is an educational experiment to foster innovation through interdisciplinary education. Every year we bring students from a wide range of disciplines together to work on social innovation projects with the support of outstanding team leaders.
