Business
Design is amazing! It truly has the ability to radically improve life on this planet but, also the opposite, destroy this planet. Dr. Leyla Acaroglu is a millennial on a mission to challenge the status-quo of the design world. She’s dead-set on helping people realize they don’t need to accept the way things work – we all have the agency to rescript the future by taking the right actions today. She is a highly intelligent, modern day super hero, an anti-establishment, creative boundary pusher and thinker. In this episode, we explore how to radically change the education system to correspond to the world we live in, how to mobilize people to change the status-quo, nourish curiosity, see all things as interconnected, embrace failure, create space for creativity to flourish and how living a life of purpose influences your brain and well-being. We talk all things change and how to shift our collective capacity to become regenerators who spend our lives adding value instead of just extracting, consuming and exploiting. This episode is nothing short of exhilarating! WHAT WE WILL COVER: The defining moment which led Leyla to commit her life to making designers and product-makers aware of how their choices impact the well-being of people and planet Leyla’s approach to curiosity, how she never pretends to know it all and how she constantly fills her own knowledge gaps What is a good first step towards becoming a regenerator – a disruptive designer that makes this planet better The disruptive design-method, key elements of problem-solving and how your brain tricks you in these processes The tools you need in order to make effective change through your creative practice Why she has bought a 2000-year-old farm she calls “a crazy project” – the co-project (CO standing for Creative Optimism) How she spends time in nature to admire the intelligence of nature design and to create the space for generating new ideas and nurturing curiosity Her personal reflections on dealing with success, stress, anxiety and burnout as a passionate change-maker who had no idea how to stop and rest SELECTED QUOTES: “I wanted to solve the problem that I experienced in Academia which I was constantly feeling extremely oppressed creatively. I was very frustrated with the type of pedagogy in knowledge transfer that Academia has so I got very much into critical pedagogy and the idea of the educator being the guide through knowledge and not the dictator of knowledge.” “Many people wake up one morning and go: “Hey hang on a second. Deep down inside me I have this sense of purpose and belonging that I should do something more meaningful with my life and now I’m stuck in this system…and I’m unhappy. It’s a sad state of affairs that we don’t have businesses that can accommodate the needs of their people and that we’re still stuck in an industrial mindset when it comes to education and the relationship between work, purpose, production and society at large.” “Each human has the agency to affect a positive change in the world and we don’t need to believe what is perceived to be the status quo… you have to know that the future is NOT defined. It’s based on the actions we take today and every minute of our lives.” “You have to remember that life is a magical wonderland. It’s absolutely phenomenal that life exists on this planet. Physicists have never found anything anywhere in the cosmos even remotely as magical as this planet.” “We need to shift to being producers. We are all interconnected with the planet, we cannot deny that. You have to breathe, you have to eat, you have to drink water – free resources provided by this earth to us – but, as a species, what we have done is we keep extracting resources, we keep polluting. We are being extremely selfish teenagers essentially.” “How can we quickly grow up and become regenerators? Instead of just degenerate the natural systems that we are a part of. This to me is the ultimate design challenge.” “If you are an organization that prides itself by being an innovator and you are not at the absolute forefront pioneering sustainable change and circularity within your industry and meeting the needs of your employees in a more harmonious way with purpose and fulfilling opportunities, then you are FOR SURE going to be disrupted in a way that you are NOT going to like. For sure.” “I truly believe that creativity brings hope and, in this current narrative of dystopian futures, the one thing we need to be reminded of is we built this world – and we can rebuild it in a way that helps make it more equitable and ethical and constructive.” “The little people are going to inherit a legacy of our inaction unless we start to work together to really re-imagine the future.” “I’m super excited about failing well. I really like it when I screw up. Once I get over the sting – cause there is always a little sting especially when you’re a high-achiever – I’m focused on what I can learn from this.” RESOURCES: Leyla's website UnSchool of Disruptive Design Disrupt Design Portugal Project - the CoProject ABOUT LEYLA ACAROGLU Sustainability provocateur and cultural protagonist Dr. Leyla Acaroglu challenges people to think differently about how the world works. As an award winning designer, UNEP Champion of the Earth, sociologist, and entrepreneur, she developed the Disruptive Design Method and designs cerebrally activating experiences, gamified toolkits, and unique educational experiences that help people make the status quo obsolete. Her mainstage TED talk on sustainability has been viewed over a million times, and she leads presentations around the world on activating positive social change through creative interventions and systems thinking.