School SOS works at the intersection of Higher Education after care, artist, designer and spatial practitioner development programme, advocacy work and community organising. It focuses on how we can collectively make the use and experience of space fairer for everyone. To do that, it helps artists and designers find where the use of space is having a detrimental effect, through exploitation, or violence, or abuses of power, and helps form approaches in tackling these issues.

We work as a collective to help artists and spatial practitioners develop and establish specific and financially viable approaches that centre on the sometimes challenging, and complex politics that affect minoritised groups.

Made in partnership with Arts organisations, community leaders, museums, galleries, and other public institutions, SOS is a free programme of guidance, peer networking, skills training, financial guidance, and project development for artists, spatial practitioners, and their communities. Using a set of principles, we guide the development of uniquely co-created spatial practices that address spatial injustice.
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SOS is joined by practitioners and groups of people who share an obligation to participate in practices that expose, alleviate, advocate and activate a response with communities experiencing spatial injustice. This is what we describe as Active Design.

We are not here to say what defines Active Design, or who is a community, or how we do justice. Instead, SOS asks its participants to co-discover these terms as an active member of their spatial practice in the interest of solidarity.

SOS believes in a set of design and research principles which inform how the school is run and the projects produced within it.
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