Kulturhus Björkbuda KUBU
Kimito, Finland
2024
Future Super Skills. What tools you wished you’d learned at school?
Before
Kulturhus Björkboda KUBU is the former Björkboda Folkskola; a 100-year-old school on the island of Kimito, Finland. Since 2022, this house started a new life as a cultural center, with a year-round exhibition program, workshops, library, café, and its own shop. In this iteration of Rotulama, the goal was to explore what happens to places that have already been gentrified, and how to create non-monetary economies around them. For that reason, this intervention took place in the physical space of KUBU’s shop.
Process
School makes us think of what we have learned, and what we haven’t. But education is a life-long process, and we have to keep learning to tackle the challenges of the future.
In constant dialogue with Tuomo Tammenpää, co-founder at Kubu, we developed “Super Future Skills” an interactive game that playfully maps out the skills that are most needed for the future. To activate it, we worked on an in-situ installation by transforming an old locker cabinet in Kubu’s shop into a large-size game board filled with texts, instructions, and drawings. Through different combinations sparked from a set of coins and a die, the game participants are prompted to answer a set of questions about the skills they had learned and those they’d like to have, and finally share their experiences with everybody.
This is how you play Future Super Skills:
1. Throw a die and two coins.
2. See the combination you got.
3. Find this combination on one of the locker doors and read the sample sentence below.
4. Finish the sentence on a post-it note and stick it inside the locker (you can secure it with masking tape too).
5. You can repeat this as many times as you want.
6. Check out other lockers to find out the skills we learned in the past, and the skills we will need in the future.
This is how you play Future Super Skills:
1. Throw a die and two coins.
2. See the combination you got.
3. Find this combination on one of the locker doors and read the sample sentence below.
4. Finish the sentence on a post-it note and stick it inside the locker (you can secure it with masking tape too).
5. You can repeat this as many times as you want.
6. Check out other lockers to find out the skills we learned in the past, and the skills we will need in the future.
Results
We organized an event at Kubu to introduce this interactive game / on-site intervention to the local community. This gave us the great opportunity to interact directly with people that live in Kimito, discuss pivotal issues about the region, and think of possible futures. It’s important to mention that this installation is also completely automatic. That means that it doesn’t need a moderator to guide the participants through game. Visitors at Kubu can just follow the instructions displayed on this installation and play individually or collectively. All the answers are written on pieces of paper and put up on the cabinet, so that everybody can have access to a fantastic depository of ideas at a glance. This game / exhibition brings people together and invites us to actively reflect on the skills we learned, the ones we’re missing, and the ones we need in order to tackle the challenges of the future. Did we mention it’s a lot of fun too? We had a blast! In words of Tuomo Tamenpaa: “This work is important for KUBU to show our local potential in informal education, and reach out as collaborative creative rural hub. KUBU was originally built as a school: it worked as a grammar school for 100 years. We hope to lay the foundation for the house activities and become a place for life-long learning for the next 100 years.“
Super Eclectic would like to thank Kulturhus Björkboda for the collaboration, and @nordiskkulturfond + @konstsamfundet for the support. Stor tack för stödet!
Super Eclectic would like to thank Kulturhus Björkboda for the collaboration, and @nordiskkulturfond + @konstsamfundet for the support. Stor tack för stödet!
