Free Circular Redesign ToolKit

Free Circular Redesign ToolKit

We created this free toolkit for professionals interested in applying systems-based circular economy solutions to their products, services or company designs.

This toolkit was developed through the thousands of hours of life cycle and circular design workshops and trainings we have conducted with groups around the world. Specifically designed to be easy to print and use in an workshop setting and to support a flow from traditional linear thinking through to circular and sustainable solutions, within a short or longer workshop setting, the kit includes six worksheets and general information on how to apply circulate economy principles.

These worksheets step through the following process:

1. Understanding a linear system through doing a product life cycle thinking exploration

2. Identifying areas of intervention that could be adopted with this current model

3. Exploring circular business strategies

4. Looking at sustainable redesign options and then ideating a series of propositions

5. Converting into a new circular flow

6. Conducting a quick product viability assessment to see how viable the new circular solution is

We teach how to use this approach in our workshops and hope that by making this toolkit free and open source, we will see a rapid uptake of circular and sustainable design principles in product development and business decision making.

Free Post Disposable Toolkit

Free Post Disposable Toolkit

Our #postdisposable initiative is a challenge to design a future that eliminates waste by design and creates closed-loop circular solutions at all levels of society.

The big challenge in front of us is to see how quickly we can redesign the current systems that facilitate waste, and move from unsustainable to regenerative.

To ensure we can reach these lofty goals, we started the post disposable movement and developed an 80 page activation toolkit and series of three design challenges that can be applied to educational and professional settings.

We built these design challenges for e-waste, fashion and ocean plastic waste to encourage creatives, visionaries and everyday people to take action and to re-design the production, consumption and waste systems to be circular, sustainable and regenerative. 

This set of free tools are meant to help anyone activate their leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future. Based on the idea that we are all citizen designers of the future, we are always looking for unique ways of equipping people with the tools to take action on the big issues around us.

The CO Project Farm Living Learning Lab

The CO Project Living Learning Lab

In 2017, Disrupt founder Dr. Leyla Acaroglu took on an abandoned olive farm in Central Portugal, and spent the next two years designing and building a regenerative living learning lab: CO Project Farm.

CO stands for creative optimism, and this is one of the core motivations and offerings that this beautiful rustic rural retreat offers: an inspiration and place of exploration and engagement with nature.

The farm hosts UnSchool programs and has developed unique off-site programs and farm-based immersive learning experiences in sustainable living, organic agriculture and creative changemaking. 

We offer corporate retreats and nature-based experiences on location at the CO Project Farm as an experiential knowledge-building nexus for advancing leadership and activating social change in the circular economy.

Through hands-on, immersive workshops and expert curriculum, our corporate clients engage with the core pillars of systems thinking, sustainability and applied design thinking to educate and empower genuine “leaders of industry” across a range of interconnected sectors and services.

Free Superpower Activation Kit

Free Superpower Activation Kit

In late 2016, Leyla Acaroglu was honored by the United Nations for her pioneering work in activating innovation for sustainability by being named Champion of the Earth. This started a conversation about the everyday superpowers that we all have.

We decided to develop a set of everyday super powers that anyone, anywhere could identify within themselves and use to help make the world work better for all of us. 

Through our work, we see just how true it is that everyone, no matter how small or big their sphere of influence is, has the capacity to make a positive impact on the world around them. And so, we created a visually-engaging set of 12 superpowers that we can all adopt to advance changemaking even more.

This superpower activation pack is a 12-part illustrated guide to activating agency and leadership for everyday changemakers.

We build tools like this to foster unconventional approaches to creatively addressing the systems, rather than the symptoms, that lead to the origin of the problems that we see in the world.

The project was developed as a creative collaboration between our lead creatives Leyla Acaroglu and Emma Segal. They wrote about their collaborative experience (one of the superpowers!) in this Medium article.

Designercise Ideation Toolkit

Designercise Ideation Toolkit

Developed in 2016, Designercise is an active ideation toolkit for professional play, designed to increase flexible, agile, divergent and creative thinking through a series of short productive activities. Based on a unique combination of cognitive sciences and creative thinking techniques, the Designercise exercises help bust through the thought processes that inhibit creative problem solving.

The main Delux kit has 20 games and three high-energy warm-up activities; there are also five small kits that focus on a specific skill such as design thinking or storytelling. All the Designercise activities create clear gamified experiences that allow the players to break down and expose cognitive biases, allow groups to power past mental blocks and develop new and creative ways to solve complex problems.

Designercise is designed to be highly adaptive for many different settings. There is a game for every group scenario: for boring office meetings, creative brainstorm sessions, and large group activities such as conferences and seminars (just to name a few). We even released a kids’ kit that has a range of fun creative thinking games for kids.

All the activities are inspired by a range of common cognitive biases and creative thinking inhibitors. We noticed that the more aware of them people are, the more empowered we are to move beyond them to think in innovative ways and find non-linear solutions to complex global problems.

Designercise is available as a print-and-play kit to reduce the ecological impacts of production and shipping.

Game Changer Game

Game Changer Game

The Game Changer Game is a campaign development game developed for workshops or meetings to help reorient campaigns to be positively-focused by challenging players to come up with the most creative idea for a quest to creatively address social and environmental issues. It's a ready-made process for outside-the-box idea generation.

The approach with this intervention was to create a gamified experience that forces you to think around your own established opinions of how an issue should be communicated. The Game Changer Game introduces a public peer-voting mechanism that motivates players to be rewarded by the group for the most creative and exciting idea.

This makes it much easier for groups of colleagues to quickly edit and reward the ideas that have the most consensus (a process that is often hard to get to). The different rounds present different thinking lenses for players to frame their creative thinking, allowing for many divergent perspectives to be mined in a short period of time.

The game kit includes several examples of how to effect change, how others have done so and fun frames to consider when designing campaigns to engage others.

The UnSchool of Disruptive Design

The UnSchool of Disruptive Design

Nelson Mandela was right when he said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world,” but the education system no longer serves the world-changing-types. All too often, we see education churning out “cookie cutter” ideas and reducing the complexity of the world down to reductive silos. So, we set about disrupting the way we share and experience knowledge by creating an experimental knowledge lab called the UnSchool of Disruptive Design.

UnSchool Kuching Fellowship, 2019

We also decided to challenge the dominant discourse around the power of individual agency in affecting positive change through the development of our non-school school.

The UnSchool offers face-to-face and online programs designed for the purpose-driven leader, career shifter, creative agitator, and all those passionate about activating their skills as a creative changemaker.

Through the UnSchool, we curate unique, cerebrally-activating experiences designed to reorient the way people participate in the world around them. Employing a foundation in critical pedagogy, we co-curate experiences with our community.

The UnSchool encourages people from diverse backgrounds to maximize their capacity to influence and affect positive social change. We help emerging leaders and established professionals rapidly upskill in designing interventions for social innovation.

Our programs center on our exclusive approach to changemaking, the Disruptive Design Method. The UnSchool’s three critical knowledge pillars of systems, sustainability and design allow us to build fascinating programs that don't exist anywhere else in the world.

The UnSchool San Francisco Fellowship 2017

UnSchool Cape Town Fellowship 2018

The UnSchool Berlin Fellowship Oct 2016

The UnSchool Mumbai Fellowship Nov 2017

The UnSchool Christchurch Fellowship Jan 2017

UnSchool Cape Town Fellowship

UnSchool Mexico City Fellowship Program 2015

Design Play Cards

Design Play Cards

One of the first games created by Leyla and now used by schools and creatives around the world, The Design Play Cards are a great way to introduce the sustainable design principles and encourage creative solutions for real world probes.

The award-winning card deck helps players explore and frame creative problem solving through the lens of design for sustainability.

The full deck includes 50 cards in three sections: Design Problems, Design Solutions and Design Strategies. The deck is available as a DIY project, available here in both English and Spanish.

Winner of the Core77 Design Education Award