Building Connected Spaces Where Local Problem Solvers Derive Globally Needed Solutions
In the second installment of What if Instead? podcast’s “for us, by us,” series, co-hosts Alejandro Juárez Crawford and Mim Plavin-Masterman interview Bermet Suiutbekova, design thinking program coordinator at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In the episode, Suiutbekova focuses on what happens when young people pursue their questions about failing systems around them, by mounting experiments in how things could work. She says:
I had a group of students that [said] ‘We want to create eco-friendly sustainable furniture.” And they were able to create the prototype, for creating it using mushrooms.
This capacity to escape assumptions about the way things work, Suiutbekova says, creates a ripple effect. That’s why it’s so important that an education that creates space for students to launch their own experiments not be restricted to the privileged few… if I can impact one person’s life… and that student can go and teach another two, that’s actually four… My impact would be actually higher and bigger… education shouldn’t be actually limited to those who are privileged.
Bermet sees this experience of questioning assumptions not only as revealing new potential solutions. It also gives us the power to escape the rigid roles society often tries to assign us:
I think here Mim I have to also add… you are actually raised like you are a girl. You have to act like a girl. You have to smile like a girl… so many disciplines and rules on how to be a woman or lady… but there are no rules for how to be a man… our generation was born and raised during the USSR… [where you were told] you need to be actually a good housewife.
But engaging the world with a kind of experimental curiosity, enables us to burst the bounds such expectations impose on us. We might create mushroom-derived furniture as her students did, or something else entirely. By doing so, we explore the unexplored possibilities on which the rest of us depend. In the process, we discover our own power and potential to effect change. Tune in to hear Bermet Suiutbekova on the power of education that enables us to take part in experiments of our own – and what it means to open up inclusive, connected spaces for global problem-solving.
What if Instead? is produced by Srijan Banik and the team at Social Impact Lab at BRAC University, which Banik founded.
Cohosts Mim and Alejandro’s One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution, is forthcoming from Emerald Publishing in summer, 2025.
