Curating History
Addressing Complex Problems
through
Human-centered Design (Re)Thinking
What Are We?
Our Neurodiversity Innovation Media Lab offers post-disciplinary strategies built around emerging networks of (un)like-minded academicians and practitioners. The aim is to ignite collaboration to bridge the gaps in knowledge mobilization and expand spaces for translating research to practice for impact. The Lab creates a space to transcend knowledge silos.
Our moonshot mindset is repurposing the MIT Media Lab model as a launching pad for creative, iterative and experimental interventions to mobilize sociological imagination for connecting biography to history.
Who Are We?
The Neurodiversity Innovation Media Lab provides an open space to collaborate and cross-pollinate among visionary scientists, sociologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, historians, lawyers, journalists, economists, engineers, musicians, dancers, actors, filmmakers, artists, activists, chefs, architects, philosophers, political theorists, diplomats, and business, union, civic and faith leaders.
Our Goal
By embracing the power of creativity, we aim to design and experiment with a novel organizational architecture. On our journey, we recognize Iain McGilchrist’s The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning as a point of departure. View animated video here.
Our line of inquiry has led to exploration of neurodiversity as a powerful force for solving persistent, complex problems.
We seek to connect:
theory and practice
private and public
art and architecture
biography and history
generalist and specialist
micro to meso to macro
local to national to global
personal to political
ethics and aesthetics
creativity and conviviality
poetry and neuroscience
Our Approach: Pathways to Social Innovation
We believe there are three key pathways that are critical to creating a novel organizational structure capable of solving wicked problems, such as unsustainable levels of inequality, climate crisis, and global conflicts.
Mobilizing Sociological Imagination
"The sociological imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another —
from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world;
from the theological school to the military establishment;
from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry."
C. Wright Mills, Introduction Sociological Imagination
Curating Transcultural Encounters
In Introduction to the Philosophy of Liberation, Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel explains that two people encountering one another involves a give and take action, and openness to mystery and relationship. To encounter another person is to realize that no matter the depths to which we may know each other, the well of mystery will never be exhausted.
In this sense we seek to create creative contexts for people to live and flourish by seeing their own reflection in the “other.” The process mobilizes John Paul Lederach’s approach in The Moral Imagination by utilizing the power of serendipity, sagacity and peripheral vision to usher a just and peaceful paradigm of global relations.
Storytelling to Counter Social Exclusion
The seminal report by the Social Exclusion Knowledge Network and other reports by United Nations agencies on Social Exclusion provide an excellent framework for tacking this complex and multidimensional global problem. We are developing strategies to implement the recommendations by the World Health Organization:
People affected by social exclusion should be involved in the development of policies and services relevant to their needs
Social Exclusion Knowledge Network’s recommendation to record relevant “stories,” which is as important as collecting quantitative data
