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MANIFESTO

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Curious?
If you’d like to know more, reach out to Tikvah on tikvah@studioblended.com or +31 6 42 47 29 69

1. By design -

We focus first and foremost on independent senior advice on curriculum design, at the drawing table, because this relates to a structural part of a coordinator’s own human resilience and the technical resilience of their course or degree.

We love teaching the teachers. Yet, we do not focus on instruction or didactics, as we believe there are already plenty of possibilities for that in teacher qualification, and each teacher may also develop their own style. We focus on curricula – by design.

We are well versed with ‘fit for purpose’ approaches, designing, developing and advising on the delivery of pilots and their consolidation.

Incrementality, and modular approaches are our signature strengths.

In a context of complexity, uncertainty and risk, we use rolling wave planning to manage a longer project with impact, using more detail now and higher level planning for the future until we’re closer to doing it.

2. Alignment -

From an organic way of life we derive our strength, calm, humanity, health, simplicity, balance and enjoyment of the work generating effective and resilient curricula.

We are unapologetically rested.

We set out to enjoy our very own day in our very own lives because we believe this is infectious and will enable clients to do the same.

Through this we are able to sustain fresh, innovative and strategic approaches.

We believe in doing things well, not simply for the sake of creating something good but as part of our mission to create resilient curricula.

We support a work week that feels natural to our biorhythm. We take care in the timing of initiating and responding to things, and are convinced that overall it amplifies our impact.

We work with high quality and prioritise simplicity.

By prioritising relaxation our brains are calm and we come to work fresh. We are able to imagine new things, make better decisions and ensure the right direction.

3. Time, Rhythm and Attention -

We love the natural rhythm of the seasons. We follow the seasons as natural time demarcations of project cycles and contracts.

We have an entrepreneurial spirit. We don’t strive for a certain ambition, but rather act and take on assignments based on our value system, seeing life as an adventure and a miracle [after Pepe Muijca].

We love to work in a way that allows us to give our undivided attention to each project. We are engaged - fully present, with the people, the team, the work, which is why we only take on one large project per season. We realign for each season what makes sense for us to take on and give our undivided attention to.

This makes time is our most expensive currency. We protect it ruthlessly.

When we’re working on an assignment with a client, we constantly monitor the time and realign as needed. In this way we foster healthy collaborations and finance.

4. Independence

We operate as an independent studio.

Despite being a foundation and having the possibility to raise funds via donations, we consciously choose not to do that.

This means we can commit only to work we believe in and must prioritise a robust financial base to take care of this independence. Through this we strive to offer clients the highest quality of advice and training.

This independence protects our capacity to bring in something refreshing to your institution and people.

5. Light and agile -

Our Studio is lean and doesn’t have its own employees, instead we only work with freelancers.

We are consciously agile - we work in a flexible, adaptive way to deliver value incrementally instead of all at once. Our agile team plans, builds, tests, and improves continuously, responding to change rather than sticking rigidly to a fixed plan.

We move lightly between people, and institutions and need little hierarchical guidance. In this way we are able to have the desired impact and lead to the required outputs, on time and within budget.

Depending on the assignment, we can propose an agile team of experts who are both very good at what they do, and wonderful to work with.

6. Bespoke and technical -

We only work on bespoke assignments for clients.

We don’t work in generic ways on curricula - we are always guided by you to ensure outputs speak to your content field.

Higher education must constantly tread the line between real world tensions and academic freedom. As a STUDIO we only work on technical matters of educational design, as we consciously want to allow a legitimate, contextualised curriculum that frames the space our clients want to create in their classrooms. Our focus therefore is on understanding and serving your mission.

We discovered that more than traditional teacher training, bespoke advice assignments offer the best learning curve and maximum impact for the work of our highly specialised and busy clients and the unique courses and training they deliver.

7. Resilience -

To us, technical and human resilience are two sides of the same coin and should be developed in a systemic, entangled and structural way.

Therefore in each project we seek to contribute positively to both the technical content and to the wellbeing of the teachers.

8. Making science actionable,
infusing practice with research -

We are passionate about bridging silos between your field (architecture / urban / land / water / climate/ development ), and the world of expertise in educational design.

We can be both high level and conceptual as well as and grounded and practical. This allows us to anchorring in a given in a variety of reality and contexts. We have a broad technical professional network with experts we can consult as necessary.

We make a conscious decision to not speak of capacity building, speaking instead of capacity development, as a two-way process for training teachers.

We see a continuum between capacity development of university teachers, and of trainers of professionals. Making science actionable, and infusing practice with research.

We are always creating opportunities and possibilities for this dialogue and exchange in our capacity development implementation.

When it comes to curriculum design, we strongly believe in continuous professionalisation on the job, as a coordinator, trainer, teacher runs into design challenges or other structural issues whilst they work with the design.

9. Green –

‘Green’ to us is not an add-on, ‘green’ is a fundamental to our design - wired for simplicity.

The internet is silently polluting the earth. Every text we read; every search we do; every email we send; every piece of data we store in the cloud; every AI prompt we use; generates CO2 emissions, uses scarce water to cool the servers in datacentres which has an impact on our common planet and climate.

There is therefore no such thing as green (higher) education – it always requires technology and communication across its phases yet many resource rich materials remain unattended in the cloud. Does it all still make sense?

The process of identifying, interpreting, and implementing societal values in university education is an essential part of responsible innovation and designing for equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies.

How can we minimise our ecological footprint further? This is a question we at STUDIOBLENDED always ask as part of our value-based approach to curriculum design.

The internet isn't an autonomous being. Its growing energy demand is a direct result of our decisions. We have agency.

At STUDIOBLENDED we actively experiment with innovations in curriculum design for value, by ensuring high quality, high impact education using only the minimum technological requirement.

Digital behaviour requires choices. We dare to lead and keep learning as we look for concepts, tools and practices. Not as an imagined future, but for now.

10. Equal partnerships –

The professionals we work with and for are not just our paying clients: they are partners with whom we have a strong, respectful relationship grounded in continuity and trust. We look for authentic collaborations that further amplify our mission and impact.

We come alongside a client, and operate as equal partners throughout the project duration of an advisory assignment.

Our senior advisors expect to have an equal partnership with the client’s main focal point (i.e. a coordinator), whereby client and advisor work together, combining the advisor’s specialist knowledge with relevant knowledge about the content, the organisation and access to the relevant departments. Therefore shared responsibility and joint decision making are essential and allow the success and relevance of the identified outcomes and outputs.

We care about the human connection with our clients, and always look to the long-term in the relationship. Consistency and organic, open communication are important to us.

11. Knowledge and craftsmanship of the teacher go hand in hand -

We see knowledge development and acting always as two sides of the same coin.

Craftsmanship (of the teacher) takes center stage but science and craftsmanship shouldn’t be disentangled.

It’s not true that ‘objective’ technical/technocratic scientists and educational advisors know how good education should be done. And that teachers are merely executers. Intellectual knowledge is not the same as actionable knowledge of the brain, the heart and hands.

Rather than seeing science as absolute truth, we see it as incremental insights. We need the knowhow of the teacher and the fostering of craftsmanship.

12. A pedagogical lens to technology and blended approaches –

We take a value based approach to all technological and digital aspects of (higher)education and its (open) materials.

We look at technology through a pedagogical lens, and can propose a bespoke pedagogy to your education.

Good education to us moreover involves a blended approach to teaching / training, a thoughtful combination of face to face and online delivery.

It is also about the new value of face-to-face time for pedagogy - as absolute premium time, no longer taken for granted. This is why we continue to experiment and innovate with ‘live’ time from a pedagogical angle.

The blend that makes sense varies for every individual context, and even for the one delivering a course, training or degree.

Our response is therefore a highly personalized, uniquely tailored approach.

13. Financial clarity matters -

We love how finance can bring clarity, health and simplicity. We prioritise accountability and transparency. This way we ensure honest prices for our expertise and products, and ensure sound financial management and reliability.

In the end finance is a means to an end and we exist to make things concrete - matter matters to us. Our raison d’être is to bring ideas and values into actual transformed structural designs.

We are flexible in our range of deliverables, from bringing innovation to the most ordinary solutions to the elegance of simplicity in corporate and even artistic end products.

Beauty is a language of calm to us. It instills calm, and a calmed nerve system is essential for learning and enjoyment of teaching.

Resilient education that stands the test of time - by design.