What are the specific responsibilities and tasks of the organisers?
Your responsibilities may encompass a wide range of tasks. From planning and coordination to resource management, facilitation, and logistics, you will be at the heart of it all. Your first task will be to meticulously plan and organise the project. Set ambitious goals, create a comprehensive timeline, determine the necessary resources to bring our vision to life, and support the application for funding. Managing resources will be an important aspect of your role. You will allocate funds, materials, and other essential resources, ensuring that everything is utilised efficiently. From arranging transportation and accommodations to handling all necessary arrangements, you will ensure that every aspect of the project runs smoothly.
Effective communication with stakeholders is vital. You will engage partners, experts, participants, policymakers, local community members, and the public, planning and facilitating sessions and keeping them informed of the project's progress and any exciting developments. Lastly, you will evaluate the impact of the project. By analysing its successes and lessons learned, you will shape future initiatives, ensuring continuous growth and improvement.
Can you provide more details about the project and its goals?
What are the objectives of the project? The Unthinkable Experiment (TUE) aims to give young people a voice in the great debates that will help determine the future of humanity. Developed as an antidote to an increasingly polarising and regulated world, TUE provides a pluralistic, free space for young people to meet and reflect profoundly on our coexistence. A safe platform to think creatively and collectively about potential new structures, new models, new knowledge, and survivable ecosystems. Directed and guided by young people, it explores how, in the midst of all this craziness that is our world today, we can find hope, strength, community, and resilience in the possibilities of diversity and creativity and how we can take a lead role in working towards new sustainable models.
TUE’s guiding principles are 'crossing'. It brings together disciplines, perspectives, culture and nature, art and science, domestication and wilderness, knowledge institutions and communities, young and old.
What activities are implemented?
The Unthinkable Experiment brings together 24 young people between 18 and 28 and 15 transdisciplinary team members. Each chapter comes together in 5 steps: in step 1 ideation, participants consolidate knowledge and experience on a complex social issue and propose an Unthinkable Experiment.
In step 2 fertilisation, participants go on an inspiration tour through Brussels and Genk. The issue they are working on is brought back from the perspective of science, culture, society, and the city.
Step 3, feedback & cross-pollination consists of different facilitated sessions between participants, local policymakers, and a transdisciplinary team of artists, scientists, experts, and policymakers.
In step 4, inspiration & co-creation, participants consolidate their new insights on the topic in different media and finalise their proposal for an unthinkable experiment. In the final events, participants engage the wider community and policymakers in their discoveries and proposals through different presentation moments in Belgium, Portugal, and Austria.
What results and impact do you expect your project to have?
The Unthinkable Experiment seeks systems and laws for a new, better society through young people. It gives young people a voice and a platform to work together - with all elements of society - in a constructive, critical, and creative way to build the world of tomorrow where we do not lose our faith in social engineering. By initiating change today, we reshape the future.
Collectively, the project generates insight and experience in how to counter polarization and monocultural thinking, develop critical and diversity thinking, and nurture the belief that one can contribute in a valuable way to the common good and create alternative pathways to the challenges of the 21st century.
Explore previous chapters to find out more about the project
Who are the partners in the project?
The Unthinkable Experiment was initiated in 2020 by Studio Koen Vanmechelen. Key figures in the project include Filmmaker Stijn Coninx, Olympic Gold medallist Élodie Ouédraogo, and social entrepreneur Chido Govera.
Today, in addition to the initiating organisations, our partnership also includes: Philoxenia Belgium, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, University of Applied Arts Vienna, VUB, ULB, and many more.
