While at sea, Daniel Epstein (co-founder of Unreasonable at Sea) and George Kembel (co-founder of Standford’s d.school) teach a class based around design thinking and sustainable entrepreneurship. As part of the curriculum, the class planned a field lab in South Africa. To better understand the course’s teaching about gaining empathy and developing a creative environment to solve massive problems, the class headed to a township outside of Cape Town. Although the two youth groups that attended the lab—the youth from the township and the SAS university students—were from different sides of the planet, they still managed to find the common struggles to which they could both relate and attempt to solve.
Could this exercise be a lesson in how we solve massive problems in the world, and more intriguingly, could this be a glimpse at the future of education?