Starting to build our social lab and learning space with Manasc Isaac!

At Skills Society some exciting changes are upon us. Despite having to move our offices into a smaller and more affordable footprint in our existing building, we now are able to design a more creative, collaborative and efficient training space.

In 2013 Skills Society was honoured and grateful to be awarded the Manasc Isaac Architects Blue Sky Award to develop a creative social lab space that could potentially be a social enterprise for Skills Society. Yesterday, a diverse collective of Skills Society leaders, community builders, Make Something Edmonton leaders, Social Lab experts and Design Thinkers came together in what will be our new training space to envision and prototype what an amazing social lab and learning environment could look and feel like. This is going to be an amazing space for sparking new thinking and community action.  Skills Society will use the space for internal workshops,  training, and our Citizen Action Lab, and in the near future we will also make the space available to the public.

“Social labs are intense meetings of diverse groups of people who are searching for break-through solutions to problems. Some labs run over days and others have ongoing gatherings and activities that last for years. Almost all lab processes strive to make space for new, creative collaborations and to stimulate new ideas for change.”

The Social Innovation Generation Group

We want this space to be the talk of the town and be a place where businesses, community organizations, government, university classes and other groups can come to do creative strategic planning, team visioning, community building, design thinking and navigate complex challenges. We are very grateful to all that came out to help us explore and especially grateful to Manasc Isaac for being so awesome in how they are leading the design of this exciting project.

Stay tuned. We hope to have this space developed and ready in May 2015.