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. This research project emerges from growing concerns about the changing roles and responsibilities of public universities. The overarching question guiding this work is: What are the public’s aspirations for universities that truly serve the public?
The SkillPill installation presents a speculative design scenario in the form of a pop-up store set in the year 2076, where learning and skills can be purchased, swallowed, accelerated, and converted into employability. By exaggerating the logics of efficiency, commercialization, and workforce readiness, the installation opens
a space to collectively question what we might lose if economic productivity becomes a dominant purpose of the university.
Over the past year, the team has engaged in designing as a way of knowing, drawing on their multidisciplinary creative practices, lived experiences and positionalities, and shared commitment to justice-informed education and pedagogies of collective freedom and liberation. Through the installation and its fictional design objects, the researchers aim to immerse the public in a speculative future that raises awareness of present conditions and asks how far that imagined future really is from where we are today.
The installation is a site of social critique, but also an opportunity to collectively imagine public universities that live up to liberatory models of un/learning together. In addition to experiencing the SkillPill installation, the public in Toronto and Montreal is invited to participate in focus groups to discuss how universities might free themselves from the shackles of their racial-capitalist and colonial foundations, as well as the growing pressures to operate as engines of economic competitiveness and market productivity.
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. Learn more about participating in the study.
This is a project of the Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought (smact.ca) at Toronto Metropolitan University and is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Participate in
a focus group
Visit the SkillPill installation
Sept. 24 to Oct. 9 in Toronto