Designing our Next Season: The Co-Lab
Following our pilot season of testing bold ideas and building the community, the University Design Institute's Co-Lab is launching its next chapter. Minu Ipe, UDI's Vice Chair and Managing Director, reflects on the lessons learned from a year of scholarly dialogue and outlines a rigorous, intentional roadmap for institutional transformation.
As higher education faces unprecedented shifts, UDI is narrowing its focus to the three critical pillars that will define the modern university. Read on to discover how design thinking is being weaponized to solve complex challenges in leadership, technology, and social impact.
Our first year of the Co-Lab at the University Design Institute has been what we've often referred to internally as our pilot season.
Every new idea deserves one. A pilot season is an opportunity to test new ideas, try bold things, and discover what resonates.
It is a time for experimentation—for building, learning, refining, and occasionally failing. More importantly, it is an opportunity to discover which ideas deserve a second season. The goal is never perfection. The goal is clarity.
That is exactly what this first year has been for us.
With a small team and ambitious aspirations, there were moments when it felt like we were building the proverbial plane while learning how to fly it. We experimented with new ways of convening conversations, tested different formats for sharing ideas, and explored how the Co-Lab could contribute meaningfully to conversations about the future of higher education. Along the way, we published a full year of Co-Lab Briefs, convened dialogues with our Fellows and partners across the globe, produced research reports, and began building a community of scholars and practitioners interested in designing the future of higher education.
Those experiences reinforced something we have long believed at UDI: meaningful institutional change rarely begins with universal solutions. It begins with careful attention to context, to people, to place, to relationships, and to the lived realities of practice.
In many ways, the Co-Lab Brief has become an extension of those conversations. We've referred to it as something of a scholarly group chat; that is to say, it is a place where ideas emerging from practice can continue to evolve, where questions are often more valuable than easy answers, and where conversations begun in one part of the world can spark new thinking somewhere else.
Across this first year, three themes surfaced with remarkable consistency in that dialogue.
The Evolving Role of the University
The first concerns the evolving role of the university itself. Around the world, institutions are asking fundamental questions about their purpose, their public value, and the responsibilities they hold to the communities they serve. Universities are increasingly expected to do more than educate students or produce research. They are being called upon to anchor regional development, foster democratic participation, contribute to workforce resilience, and respond thoughtfully to rapidly changing societal needs. These expectations invite institutions not simply to adapt, but to reconsider the distinctive roles they are uniquely positioned to play.
Artificial Intelligence
A second theme centers on artificial intelligence. Much of the public conversation has framed AI as a choice between fear and unquestioning adoption. Our conversations suggest the more important questions are institutional. How can universities integrate artificial intelligence in ways that strengthen learning, research, and administration while remaining grounded in their educational mission? How can leaders approach AI through the lens of principled advancement rather than simply responding to technological momentum? The question is no longer whether AI will shape higher education—it already is. The challenge is whether institutions can shape its use in ways that reflect their values.
Leadership
Finally, we continue to see that transformation depends on leadership. Not only leadership within universities, but across governments, philanthropy, industry, and civil society. Increasingly, the leaders shaping the future of higher education are those who can think beyond inherited models, work across disciplinary and organizational boundaries, and approach complexity as designers rather than administrators alone. Designing institutions capable of responding to emerging challenges requires a different kind of leadership—one grounded in curiosity, experimentation, collaboration, and a willingness to imagine futures that do not yet exist.
These observations are more than topics for future research. They are shaping the Co-Lab itself.
One of the most important lessons from our pilot season is that focus matters. Every conversation, every report, every dialogue, every brief should answer a simple question: Who does this serve?
We are not interested in producing ideas for their own sake. We are interested in generating work that helps leaders make sense of complexity, informs institutional decision-making, and contributes to meaningful transformation in higher education.
As we begin our second year, that clarity gives us direction.
Our work will become more intentional around three interconnected areas:
- universities as anchors of their communities
- artificial intelligence in higher education
leadership through design.
These are not simply editorial themes for the coming year. They are the questions that repeatedly emerged from our engagements across institutions, sectors, and regions. They are also the questions we believe UDI is best suited to lead to help shape the future of higher education.
Through future Co-Lab Briefs, Dialogues for Design, global partnerships, convenings, and collaborative research, we hope to continue bringing together perspectives from scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and institutional leaders who are actively designing that future. Our ambition is not simply to publish more content, but to create a space where ideas are tested against practice, where experiences travel across contexts, and where scholarship becomes a catalyst for thoughtful action.
This also reflects how we understand design itself.
At UDI, design is a way of approaching institutional change intentionally. It asks not simply how universities respond to disruption, but how they actively shape the futures they hope to create. Transformation, in this sense, is not an event. It is an ongoing practice.
Every pilot season exists for a reason. It permits us to experiment, the humility to learn, and the clarity to move forward with greater purpose.
As we begin our second season of the Co-Lab, we do so with a clearer sense of where we believe the most important conversations in higher education are taking place, and with an even stronger commitment to shaping them.
We invite you to join us.
