COL-Lab

Strategic Context

New York City holds one of the densest concentrations of universities in the world. The poster above lists more than thirty colleges and universities, from The New School, Parsons, NYU and Columbia to Pratt, Cornell Tech, Cooper Union and CUNY. Between them sit designers, engineers, strategists, artists and business students who will probably never work together.

The COL-lab (The Cross-Organizational Learning Lab, pronounced “the Collab”) is a student-led organization at The New School built to change that. It is a registered student club, and it is also an engagement engine: it creates structured sprints, hackathons and collaborative projects that pull students out of their major and into rooms with people from other disciplines and other schools, working on real problems brought by founders and organizations.

The Problem

Even at a school as interdisciplinary as The New School, students spend years inside one major, one classroom, one bubble. Most “collaboration” stays surface-level. At the same time, founders have the opposite problem: real, pressing questions and no fast, affordable way to get fresh thinking on them.

Five failures sit behind it.

The Idea

The COL-lab runs on two connected levels, set out in its constitution.

At the center is one simple unit: curated rooms. A two-hour session with forty people adds up to eighty hours of thinking, and an organization can tap into all of it with one real challenge.

Who it serves

How It Works

A sprint, from both sides

1. 01 · Founder

   Share the challenge

   • Bring a real problem: product, growth, design, operations, research or brand
   • Scope the sprint in a short call
   • Optionally offer a prize, stipend or internship pathway

2. 02 · The lab

   We sprint

   • Cross-disciplinary teams from The New School, NYU, Columbia, Pratt and beyond
   • Several independent teams tackle the same brief in parallel
   • A hackathon or focused sprint format

3. 03 · Outcome

   Walk away with solutions

   • Multiple concepts, prototypes or strategies
   • A first look at rising design, tech and business talent
   • A team member or mentor on sprint day to guide the room

1. 01 · Student

   Join a sprint

   • Sign up for a hackathon built around a real founder's problem
   • No prior hackathon or industry experience required

2. 02 · Student

   Team up across majors

   • Get matched with students from other majors and schools across NYC
   • Maximum of two teammates from the same major

3. 03 · Student

   Build, pitch, connect

   • Walk away with real work, new friends and a wider network
   • Work is captured and attached to a profile

Four design principles

The Platform

Alongside the club, I designed a platform prototype that runs the whole loop: briefs in, strike teams formed, work captured, talent surfaced. It has separate workspaces for students, founders and organizers, and four modules for the sprint cycle.

Names, counts and amounts in the screens are sample data used to show how the platform would work.

1. 01

   No resumes

   • School-email sign-in
   • Five skill tags and a persona 'vibe'

2. 02

   The 90% nudge

   • An AI agent routes high-fit sprints to the right talent

3. 03

   Strike team

   • Interdisciplinary lock: at most two teammates from the same major

4. 04

   Proof-of-work

   • Prototype is captured and attached to the profile

5. 05

   Watchtower

   • Founders observe teams and harvest 5–10 prototypes

6. 06

   Quality gate

   • Admins monitor, adjust matching and trigger local events

7. 07

   Silent hiring

   • Founders bookmark standout students and offer credible opportunities

Building the Organization

The COL-lab is also a governed institution. Its constitution sets how it runs and keeps it open to every New School student.

Optional standing committees (External Partnerships, Events & Programming, and Research & Documentation) can be formed or dissolved by a board majority as the organization grows.

The Pitch to Organizations

For organizations, the offer comes down to one line: bring us a real challenge, and let’s explore it together. The format is flexible: sprints, hackathons, storming sessions, user research, and anything else that helps. Organizations bring a real problem, someone to brief and mentor the teams, and openness to unconventional, early-stage thinking.