Who is Dougald Hine? He’s a writer, former BBC journalist and one-time busker. He’s wild-haired, bearded and wiry. And he’s passionate about changing things for the better.

Over the past few years, Hine has dreamed up projects that have touched almost every aspect of society. In 2006, he co-founded School of Everything, an online platform inspired by countercultural peer-to-peer learning experiments from the 1960s. In 2009, he started the Institute for Collapsonomics, an ‘informal home for thinking about what works when the systems we grew up depending upon let us down’, as well as Space Makers Agency, a scheme that helps communities turn empty spaces into creative regeneration projects.

Next in his sights is the education system, which he plans to revolutionise by starting his own university, “that doesn’t look like a university”. So, what makes a guy like this tick? The Good Times visited his base at Hub Westminister, ‘an incubator for social entrepreneurs’, in a bid to find out.

You’ve been involved in so many independent projects, but you actually started out with a job in the BBC newsroom. That alone is a dream job for many people, but you left after a year – how come?
I don’t think I was cut out to be a journalist because I was too interested in the situations I was reporting on, thinking about how you could change things. Basically, my job was to take the raw experiences of people’s lives, often at times that were unusual and important to them, and turn them into a news commodity that was designed to be vaguely interesting to people for two minutes between the weather and travel. That’s a fairly cynical account of journalism, and there are wonderful journalists in this world, but I was never going to be one of them.

If journalism didn’t inspire you, what did?
What inspired me most were individuals and projects, and so I spent a long time in my twenties hanging out with people who were doing something that seemed interesting. One of those people was Charlie Davies, the last features editor at The Face magazine. After it folded, he set up a weekly email magazine called Pick Me Up that came out on a Friday afternoon. The idea was to inspire you to do something more interesting than checking your inbox at the end of the week. Anyone could write an article for it, but we had rules. Firstly, you couldn’t write about something that someone else was doing; you had to get involved in making something happen and tell the story from the inside. The second rule was that you couldn’t tell the story in a way that would make people go, ‘Wow, I wish I could do that,’ but in a way that would make people go, ‘Wow, I could do that.’

[From that] we stumbled into ways of using the internet to bring people together to do stuff that was fun and seemed more worthwhile than the stuff you were doing in your day job. [We thought], ‘How could you use the internet to find a person that lives two streets away who is into the thing you’ve just gotten into?’ whether it be existentialist philosophy or snowboarding.

Why is collaboration so important to you?
I’d go further than collaboration; I think it’s about friendship. All of the projects I’ve done have both come out of, and grown into, friendships. I think this is part of the allergy to ordinary working environments; life is short, I want to spend time with people I really enjoy being around.

When I was trying to work out how to make these things happen in the world, I was hanging out with all sorts of different people – activists, media, people in the policy world, think tanks and entrepreneurs – and trying to figure out what the common ground was between these different groups that try to bring new things into reality. The think tanks really interested me, because they seemed to be so close to the centres of power.

[But] there seemed to be these two classes of people: the people who did the research and came up with the big policy ideas, and the people who actually did stuff on the ground. That sat uncomfortably with me, because what you had were these experts who had never actually done anything. Most of them had come straight out of high-flying academic degrees, but very few of them had ever had the experience of building something from scratch. It seemed important to me to make thinking and doing things that coexist, rather than things that are done by different classes of people.

Your projects range from ecological culture to economics and education. What ties these things together?
I’ve always been a bit suspicious of boundaries and categories between these different things. There’s a great quote from the philosopher Ernst Fischer, one of the intellectual forces behind the 1968 Prague Spring: “The categories that we make between different aspects of our experiences are mostly created for the benefit of liars.” I remember reading that, and thinking, ‘Yes, absolutely!’ because I see connections between things all the time. I value working with people who are field experts in a particular specialist area, who have that depth and grounding of knowledge. But I’m suspicious of university faculties, or the division between the spaces of learning and the spaces of production – that never rings true to me.

If there’s a common thread between the things I do, it’s getting together with people to figure out the difference between the way we happen to do things, and the things we’re trying to do, so that we don’t put all our energy into defending the way things happen to be, when actually we could be doing it in a way that is better or more suited to the time and place we find ourselves in.

And now you want to start your own university. Why?
There are so many different things that interest me, so I have to keep coming back and asking myself what is closest to my heart. And I think what I realised about a year ago is that besides writing and telling stories, which I’ve spent my life doing by habit, the thing I really want to do is create a certain kind of space for learning. Bringing people together under unrushed, unhurried conditions in which we can think together, read together and pursue enquiries that matter to us in ways that require rigour and discipline, but also require the spirit of friendship and the joy in the intrinsic, rather than treating them as a means to an end. Universities have become a very productive, means-to-an-end environment, whose role is to equip students for the job market and increase GDP through research. Something that was essential to the heart of the idea of university seems to have been edged out.

Finally, what would you say to anyone who has an idea they want to bring to life?
Find some people whose judgment you trust, and who are different to you, and take them to the pub. Have a long conversation about it, but don’t let it stop there.

dougald.co.uk
Thanks to James Hearn, who responded to a desperate Twitter call-out for help and transcribed this interview at lightning speed.