How we learn changes everything. Our knowledge, our world, ourselves.
If we want to change ourselves and our world, we have to change how we learn. What if we could learn how to change ourselves and our world while we are learning? In a world that is changing radically, we need to learn radically differently:
More boundary-pushing, more unconventional, more courageous, more energetic, more rebellious, more far-sighted, more connective, more collaborative, and more impactful.
Because the more uncertain our future, the better we should learn to remain capable of acting and shaping it in as many different futures as possible. For this, we need learning spaces where we can bring the future into reality and social impact even as we learn. With new learning spaces in which we experiment with possible futures in a very practical way and in the middle of the world. We need future labs. That’s exactly the kind of place we want to be.

The Witten Lab is the interdisciplinary future learning lab at Witten/Herdecke University. It is a platform for individual, organizational and societal development and at the same time a growing network of people who want to promote social innovation and develop socially relevant impact through creative processes. Through new forms of transdisciplinary and tranformative education, in a diversity of cultures and with all means of the arts.

In our magazine we show what we do, what we think about, how we see the world, who we talk to and what interests us. It is an invitation to everyone to join in this experiment in learning, to challenge it, to strengthen it, and to connect with us – to make successful future learning possible. Our first issue makes our task itself the theme: new learning. And last but not least, this magazine itself is nothing but a practical learning experiment. Many people have contributed to it – in the Studium fundamentale center, throughout Witten/Herdecke University, and in a global network of people who have already connected with us and are currently connecting with us anew.

The joint work and networking will continue. With new topics that move our world. For new learning and development impulses, more curiosity, enthusiasm for knowledge and thirst for knowledge – in a world in which we are just beginning to realize what we still have to learn about it and about ourselves – in order to deal better with it and ourselves in the future.