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We started Lab 4 of the Learning Lab in Amsterdam. An amazing kick-off in Chartres and Illiers-Combray, the birth place of Marcel Proust, set the stage for a thrilling adventure. Before such an event I am filled with expectation and excitement. It is always a gift to be allowed in the lives of people on the moment that they decide to stand up, to live the best version of themselves and engage fully in their research. The conditions for that decision we try to put in place at an early stage. After that the creative enquiry that they will carry out, and the initiatives that they will take rest on a firm foundation. But to most educators’s ears this sounds strange. What has the one to do with the other? Why should educators, learning agents, or what else we should be calling the pedagogues in our organisations and schools, be concerned with the learner’s decision to live a full life? We educate the mind, if only to one side and rather uncreatively. We have began to start thinking about the importane of emotions and relationships. But to educate the will of our students, or co-creators for that matter, has not even crossed our minds. The will to live, to find out, to know, to engage and create what really matter to you.
Over the past century the control of humanity over its environment has overcome almost every constraint that nature imposed on us, and in large parts of the world we have liberated ourselves from social, cultural and religious bonds. We can choose to study, buy, or do almost anything that before was reserved for only a few. With all that freedom and power, what still makes sense? What responsibility does that imply, not necessarily in a moral sense, but existentially?
Schools and universities educate to analyse the world in ever greater detail by which we gain an ever greater feeling of control over what we see. But in fact we still stand powerless at the overwhelming range of possibilities from which we have to choose, or which we might still create. Knowledge and possibility are paralyzing without purpose. Like Ulrich from Musil’s “Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften” we wander around in an abundance of skill but without a craft and vocation through which to realise ourselves and shape the world around us.
What if we need to re-think practically every system in which we live (from the family to politics, from religion to the economy), and never learned to design the world in which we want to live? Not in a utopian sense, on an idyllic community eco-farm, separated from the mess we made, but in the middle of it and through our own vocations. How do we discover and educate our deeper will to want what fulfills us? And how do we learn to develop our collective will to create the highest version of what we are together as a city or society?
Two ingredients form the basis of the learning laboratory this year; a certain quality of resistance, and a certain quality of attention. So far the resistance our students met has been more than they have had to deal with in any other academic endeavour. Physically on their ‘pilgrimage’ to France, emotionally in confrontation with themselves and wach other, and mentally on their own responsibility to find out what matters to them. The experiment has begun.

The BMW Guggenheim lab is an amazing initiative that I got involved in this year. A temporary and mobile laboratory/urban think tank/art and community centre to solve the wicked questions of living in world cities. But what is really exciting about it is that it is to result in built and living exemple on that site of what living in a world city c/should look like today. In the 3 months or so that the Lab settles in the heart of the city (in this case Manhattan) the neighborhood, scientists, artists, politicians, business and the global community is activated to think along and enact what needs to be build or done on that very spot that will develop the city on a local, social and systemic/global level.