U INSTITUTE

THE BIG IDEA

Sprouting from UNFINISHED’s core DNA as a strategy for non-stop learning, the UNFINISHED Institute applies our principles of curiosity and multidisciplinarity to the academic environment by creating an infrastructure to encourage and facilitate the exchange of information and practices between otherwise siloed academic domains.

U INSTITUTE

HOW IT STARTED

In the early days of UNFINISHED in 2016, we struggled to talk about multidisciplinarity. Why try to gather so many different fields under one roof? What can a doctor learn from a musician? Or an artist from a politician? Over the years, the answer has become more and more obvious: because multidisciplinarity is one of the most efficient and authentic strategies to achieve wholesome, productive, inclusive, and innovative change. In other words, if we don’t pay attention to what’s outside our field of knowledge, then our work and our impact will remain limited to inside our field of knowledge. And what’s an easier, more accessible, and more exciting way to say “multidisciplinarity”? Curiosity! So that’s what we are building the UNFINISHED Community around.

U INSTITUTE

WHAT IT MEANS

While the UNFINISHED Festival bridges disciplines once people are already on a certain career path in their lives, the UNFINISHED Institute aims to bridge disciplines earlier, at the root of specialization: the education system itself. The UNFINISHED Institute is a constantly evolving methodology which can be applied within any existing educational institution or, even better, between several institutions. It employs familiar tactics, tested and proven across the UNFINISHED Community, within the educational environment such as gatherings, workshops, debates, meals, connection experiences, walks, talks, residencies, etc in order for students, as well as faculty and staff, to reach out across their field of knowledge in an exciting and productive way. Such interventions can be carried out in a long-term, recurrent manner over several months or years just as well as short-term, unique occasions.

U INSTITUTE

WHY IT MATTERS

Not only is multidisciplinarity enriching and exciting, we argue that it is essential. Few summarized it better than David Epstein, the author of Range, whose research warns against the dangers of specialization, saying that “it [specialization] infects not just individuals, but entire systems, as each specialized group sees a smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle.” As Epstein further points out, “highly credential experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.” Time and time again, especially in recent years, we have collectively paid the high price of entrenched monodisciplinary thinking. Social media bubbles and misinformation. Monoculture and the global industrial food complex. Even climate change and the 2008 global financial crisis, which occurred when, in Epstein’s words, “legions of specialized groups optimizing risk for their own tiny pieces of the big picture created a catastrophic whole.”

 

At UNFINISHED, we have to come to believe that the movement of information is the basis of all information, not its storage. And this is why the UNFINISHED Institute, building on the foundations already laid since 2016, has the mission to build bridges and cross trenches at the very heart of where information is typically born: in education.