You wake up, and it is the year 2076.
Colours of the leaves are changing.
You love fall.

This year, university is at the mall.
Get your shopping and education
done at once.

What a great idea! Someone thought.

All those years you wasted studying.
If only you had known that one day,
a university education would be
as easy as taking a pill.

The fiction is absurd!

But how far is it from where we are already heading?

SkillPill: The University of the Future is a critical speculative design research project that takes you into
a fictional future where higher education has finally achieved peak efficiency: education is a product, learning is instantaneous, and graduates arrive fully optimized for the job market. Through satirical and uncanny creative artifacts, SkillPill takes the form of a pseudo-pharmaceutical brand that exaggerates tendencies already shaping higher education. The SkillPill installations operate as pop-up stores where learning and skills can be purchased, swallowed, accelerated, and converted into employability.

By exaggerating the logics of efficiency, commercialization, and workforce readiness, SkillPill creates space to collectively question what we might lose if these become the dominant purposes of university education, and to re-imagine together what universities could become instead.

We want to re-imagine alternatives with you.

Help us build the universities of the future together. We want to hear from students, faculty, staff, community members, and others who care about the future of higher education. Join a focus group and become part of the conversation. Your perspectives will contribute to a collective exploration of how universities might better support accessibility, critical inquiry, creativity, collaboration, care, social transformation, and the public good. Learning more about participating in the study.

Visit the SkillPill installation
Sept. 24 to Oct. 9 in Toronto