(Daily) Delight~Disrupt
A chance to spark delight in our lives, while reconnecting with each other and nature #DailyDelightDisrupt
The problem
Contemporary social and environmental problems can feel complex, insurmountable and disempowering.
But what if we reconnected to turn these problems around? And we did so through simple, collective and delightful moments – with all our playful moments adding up to a massive shift in our attitudes and action toward each other and our planet.
Our strategy
(Daily) Delight~Disrupt cultivates a grassroots movement of delightful, repeatable and scalable weekly practices to generate massive social and environmental change through connection, commitment and care. These playful moments – focused through themed days of the week (e.g., Tree-hugging Tuesdays, Feast Fridays, Screen-free Sundays) – promote and experientially manifest creative and restorative ways of being, disrupting the destructive status quo.
“(Daily) Delight~Disrupt is a viral social movement of personal embodied playful actions that allows people to reconnect with each other and the places they care about.” - Dr. John Carr, project co-lead.
Our progress
The project team has developed a library of playful moments for each day of the week and an easy and fun platform for individuals, groups and organisations to spread delightful disruption.
“Every day of the week is an opportunity to grow the world we want while leaning into the pleasure of reconnecting with each other and our environment.” - Prof. Tema Milstein, project co-lead.
Our calendar of daily delights
#ScreenFreeSundays
A day for human and nature connections, not Wi-Fi connections. Unplug to reclaim your attention and time.
- Party platform – throw a no-screen dance party. Check everybody’s tech at the door. Let loose!
- Sunrise/sunset – watch with a friend. Take a mental photo.
- Look up! – make eye contact. Take out the ear buds. Put your phone away. Start a conversation with someone new. Scroll the sky.
- De-tech to reconnect - team up with friends. Add a screen-free hour to this day every week, until you have a whole day free to enjoy.
- Sleepyhead – think the internet is weird? Try what your brain comes up with when you nap. Enjoy the original, all natural, no guilt, hallucinatory
#MinimalismMondays
A day to indulge. Life has gotten too complicated - spend less, enjoy more, at no cost to you or the planet.
- Swap it out – host a workplace/neighbour/friend clothes swap. Refill your wardrobe with only things you love.
- Maintain & gain – give some love to a tool or object you use a lot. Clean, lubricate, decorate it.
- One thing – leave home with only one item, such as your phone or wallet, and experience a whole day footloose and fancy free.
- Give it away – gift one of your belongings to somebody who will use and appreciate it.
#TreeHuggingTuesdays
Reconnect and let nature recharge you.
- Barefoot break – grab a friend, go outside, take off your shoes, and feel the earth as it feels you back. Scientifically proven to improve mental and physical health. Reimagine – and relish – how we move within this big wide world.
- Time to smell/feel/taste/hear/see the roses – run your hands over rocks and bark of trees, dance in the rain, close your eyes and listen to sounds near and far.
- Surprise soil – throw seeds leftover from fruit into a soil pot in your kitchen or dig your food waste into the garden. See what grows!
#WayfindingWednesdays
Reimagine - and relish - how we move within this big world.
- Get lost – do a deliberate wander without a map. Notice where you are pulled (and go there) and repulsed (and don’t go there). Enjoy new experiences, ask people for directions.
- Transit lottery - jump on a bus/train/ferry you don’t normally use. See where it takes you.
- Delight in the new – each week, make a mental map of new-to-you delightful places (a pocket park, a funky alleyway). Today, go to one.
- Ditch the car – try a new transit mode, ranging from motor-free to public. Note how your experience deepens or broadens. Invite others for an alterna- commute party to work or school.
#ThankfulThursdays
Let's bliss out. Lean into gratitude for Earth and each other.
- Award season – think of somebody (or something!) you appreciate and thank them. Or give a stranger a sincere compliment.
- Insta-disco – find a place outside. Bring music. Dance freestyle with friends. Invite passers-by to join in.
- HumAnimal – befriend another animal, critter, or bug. Build trust. Enjoy being befriended back.
- Gratitude graffiti – chalk a positive message on the sidewalk (e.g. ‘Feel the love in every step’).
#FeastFridays
We all eat. Let's cook up delight beyond the meal.
- Stone soup party – collective cooking. Just a pot, water, and stove. Friends each bring one ingredient they already have for the pot. Funny and likely delicious.
- Forage – food is growing everywhere and goes uneaten. Learn to identify, respectfully gather, and cook plants where you live. Draw chalk signs with names and arrows to edible plants growing along the sidewalk to spread knowledge.
- Delight your neighbours – when you bake, make enough to share.
#ChooseYourOwnAdventureSaturdays
Here's your chance to freestyle. The sky's the limit.
Animated illustrations by Dani Kimball.
Our impact
The project team has grown from just two to more than fifty volunteers, partners and “(Daily) Delight~Disrupt” Club members at UNSW. The concept has been met with enthusiasm from industry, government and communities.
SBS invited the team to activate their employees for Earth Day and the City of Sydney Council invited them to activate people inside and outside Sydney Town Hall. And, partnering with more than a dozen campus organisations, (Daily) Delight~Disrupt helped bring their radically simple and fun way to enhance well-being to UNSW’s Mental Health Month.
Through volunteers and early adopters, the project has spread to countries as diverse as Germany, Iran and China. These events have further developed the concept and augmented its impact, informing plans to continue scaling up to enable systems change at national and global scales.
“I've been researching and teaching ecoculture jams for two decades. These embodied playful collective experiences enable a profound shift in people's belief in their ability to make positive change. The act of ecoculture jamming itself creates transformative experiences in which people co-create a better more caring and connected world.” - Prof. Milstein.
So, try out being a delightful disruptor! Pick a theme day and playful moment idea that delight you, and turn up the restorative disruption in your life or your organisation. Partner with this project to enhance your organisation’s connection, effectiveness and creativity.
Project team
Professor Tema Milstein
Project Co-Lead
Tema Milstein's work is in the field of environmental communication, a social science and humanities transdiscipline that understands communication as a powerful force at a time of human-generated ecological and climatic crises. She is particularly known for cultural approaches to studying how communication shapes ecological understandings, identities, and actions. Her work tends to discourses that otherwise go unnoticed, to connections between discourses and wider destructive or restorative practices, and to paths toward sustainable, just, and regenerative futures. Her research spans the globe, illustrating tensions between overarching and marginalised environmental meaning systems, examining ecotourism and environmental activism, and establishing the study of ecocultural identities. Milstein's Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (Routledge, 2020, co-editor José Castro-Sotomayor) gathers 40 international interdisciplinary authors to bring the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of the self. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and is the 2020 recipient of the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Architecture Dean's Research Award for Society Impact.
Dr John Carr
Project Co-Lead
Dr. John Carr is an urban and legal geographer whose work focuses on the intersections of urban geography, law, planning, and human and non-human environments. In particular, his research seeks to address the questions that can only be answered by bridging the gaps among different disciplines. Much of his research is based in community-based and participatory methodologies. In addition to his PhD in Geography from the University of Washington he also holds a law degree from the University of Texas School of Law. For more than a decade, he practiced law in the areas of civil rights and complex litigation before entering academia.
Nicole Suniary
Project Manager
Nicole Suniary is part of the Arts, Design and Architecture Faculty and works as a Faculty Operations Administrative Assistant at the University of New South Wales. Through the (Daily) Delight~Disrupt project, she is able to gain more experience and knowledge and involve the wider community with the focus of a seven-day-a-week movement. This movement of existing ecoculture jams will be showcased through the project in hopes everyone can feel empowered to be part of a change and make steps towards being part of the solution. She is excited about this opportunity to learn and bring more awareness to the environment, where everyone can do their part and contribute to making a difference in this world. She is passionate about the (Daily) Delight~Disrupt project as it is an exciting and fun movement that brings everyone together.
Michael Donahue
Lead Graphic Designer
Michael Donohue (MFA) is an award winning creative leader, working at the intersection of art, design and education where he is helping to shape the futures of the next generation of designers and creative thinkers.
Michael has extensive expertise in the spheres of design for cultural institutions, placemaking and publishing. He has received a multitude of awards including the Australian Graphic Design Association excellence in catalogue design and twice won the Australian Publishers Association Book Cover of the year. Michael was Head of Design at the Museum of Contemporary Art in sSydney for over five years and has held similar positions with The Australian Museum and the State Library of New South Wales.
Michael also has a wealth of knowledge in the placemaking/place activation arena, having written the brand/placemaking strategy for Sydney’s Darling Harbour, and the emerging 'aerotropolis' of Leppington.
Michael also maintains an ongoing art practice and recently completed a residency with The Ethics Centre in Sydney and was part of the Desert Equinox exhibition in Broken Hill.
Viviane Nguyen
Research Collaborator
Viviane Nguyen is a recent graduate of the Master of Environmental Management at UNSW, and a big fan of the program. Having pivoted from a biology and ethology background in Montreal, Canada, she describes the UNSW master’s program as a unique space to nurture passions for the more-than-human. Here, she was able to develop a lens through which she routinely examines and deconstructs worldly phenomena. Of particular interest are the awakening and growth of societal ecocultural identity, an important theory cultivated by Tema Milstein. Viviane has enthusiastically dived into examining the subconscious disassociation of the human self from its earthly surroundings in daily life, and how this detachment has founded the societal anthropocentric ways of being. With this new insight, she looked for all opportunities to delightfully disrupt the humancentric systematic status quo and apply learned theories toward sustainable worldmaking. The (Daily) Delight~Disrupt presented itself as an exciting, passion-driven initiative where she is flexing her newfound sustainability knowledge – she recognizes it as the best, beautiful way to scale ecocultural identity awakenings for real-world outcomes.
