The Human Skills Lab

Name: The Conflict Lab on Tuesdays
Start: 2026-07-28T23:00:00.000Z
End: 2026-07-29T01:30:00.000Z
Location: Tompkins Square Park

About us

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual—but being human is a skill we can learn, and improve.

The biggest challenges we face aren’t separate crises. They’re different expressions of the same underlying human crisis. Whether we’re talking about loneliness, mental health, polarization, climate, inequality, democracy, or AI—beneath them all lies the same question:

How do humans relate—to ourselves, to each other, and to the systems we create?
The Human Skills Lab explores that question through events, workshops, games, clowning, and social experiments. Together, we’ll practice the skills that no one teaches but everything depends on: communication, conflict, empathy, curiosity, play, creativity, belonging, and genuine connection.

Because if our greatest challenges are ultimately human crises, then becoming more skillful humans isn’t a distraction from solving them—it’s where solving them begins. If you’ve ever wished school had taught you how to communicate, build relationships, navigate conflict, understand yourself, or connect more deeply with others, you’re in the right place.

Come curious. Leave a little more human.

Featured event

8 seats left

The Conflict Lab on Tuesdays

Tue, Jul 28 · 7:00 PM EDT

Tompkins Square Park, Tompkins Square Park, Lower East Side, New York, NY, US

Weekly on Tuesdays in the Tompkins Square Park.

The entire world runs on tension. Quite literally. In physics, nothing works without it. It keeps bridges standing and it’s how guitar strings sing. Yet when it comes to human relationships, we’ve convinced ourselves of the opposite. We use nice words like “keeping the peace,” when often, we’re simply avoiding the discomfort conflict evokes.

But challenges don’t go away just because we ignore them. They just change form and/or cause more downstream problems, much like the ones we’re facing now after decades of pretending avoidance worked. Ghosting culture. Echo chambers. Polarization. Passive aggression. Relationships that fracture instead of deepen. All of which brings us to a place where Democracy itself is at stake—not because people disagree, but because they don’t know how to disagree. Or even that it’s ok to.

The truth is, conflict is one of the greatest acts of hope we can offer one another, precisely because it’s challenging. In a world where it’s so easy to move on, having conflict says: 1) I care enough. 2) I believe you care enough. 3) I believe you’re capable of doing this challenging thing.
The problem isn’t conflict—it’s that so many of our experiences have been awful and we were never taught to do it well. We never learned how to disagree without becoming defensive, or how to repair after hurt.
We also weren’t taught to discern where/when healthy conflict simply isn’t possible. The Conflict Lab is a place to learn those skills.