D.Centre - EU Design Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation

Ambra Trotto, Caroline Hummels (Editors)

March 16, 2023

Context

“Design for Societal Transformation” is a Strategic Topic Group of the EIT Culture and Creativity. As such, it gathers actors around a strategic area for supporting funding and partners mobilisation. It is a work led by RISE, Research Institute of Sweden and the TU/e, Eindhoven University of Technology. Its aim is to set up a community of practice and learning that works with design as a process to integrate different logics in society. It uses aesthetics and creative powers as wedges for a regenerative transformation. The movement to set up this community of practice and learning is called d.centre|EU (Trotto, Hummels et al. 2021).

One of the activities carried out by the task force is the process of shaping an EU Design Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation. It contains expert recommendations to feed the future strategy of the EIT Culture and Creativity.

Values

This process of shaping the agenda is open, iterative, dynamic and transdisciplinary. The foundational values are those of the New European Bauhaus: beautiful, sustainable, together (European Union, n.d.). Starting from multi-actor ecosystems, the movement of d.centre|EU redesigns the practices that society relies upon through developing experienceable future living. It promotes a regenerative transformation, where the lives of all beings are respected and actions to heal the planet are taken towards a horizon of collective thriving.

Purpose

This agenda has several purposes:

• the first is to sensitise policymakers and influence policy regarding the potential of design processes to integrate Culture and Creative forces into other logics and sectors in society;
• secondly, the agenda is used as a tool to influence financial and funding strategies and streams, at regional, national and international levels;
• thirdly, the inclusive process of shaping the agenda is an effective way to form and empower a pan-European, open community of practice and learning regarding the topic of inclusive and sustainable societal transformation.

Process of shaping the agenda

The EU Design Agenda was developed as a tool to operationalize the area of Design for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation within the EIT C&C.

As of February 2023, it involves more than 400 people and more than 180 organisations.

The agenda has been developed through various activities:

• Working sessions between the management team of the EIT Culture & Creativity, RISE and TU/e
• 2 hands-on workshops organized by RISE and TU/e, one in Eindhoven (NL) as part of the Dutch Design Week 2022, and the other one in Umeå (SE) within the ECIS23 conference.
• A hands-on workshop held during the national meeting for the Swedish NEB network, on 19th April 2023.
• A digital workshop organised by the internal NEB coordination project at RISE, held on 2nd of May 2023.
• Working sessions with the field to analyse the challenges, develop an impact pathway and start building the community of practice and learning.
• Researchers of TU/e and RISE combining their research findings on societal transformation from the past decade with insights from the workshops and working sessions.

Multi-actor ecosystems

In the face of complex societal challenges such as climate change, energy crisis, wars and terrorism, multi-actor ecosystems are emerging to transform how we work and live better. These ecosystems include actors from government, academia, creative SMEs, business and civic bodies and they cluster to explore and innovate current practices to create inclusive, sustainable and thriving communities. These ecosystems can greatly benefit from learning and integrating design approaches to maximize their potential and effectiveness. Design approaches are particularly well-suited in addressing concrete, complex and situated societal challenges.

Practices to fuel Societal Transformation

The EIT Culture and Creativity Design Agenda aims to create a shared roadmap for working with multi-actor ecosystems in the field of Design for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation. To achieve this, four key practices were identified during the process of shaping the agenda. These practices will serve as a guide for operationalizing the agenda and fostering collaboration across sectors. The core of each practice will be presented to provide concrete insights for practitioners and policymakers.

MAKING THINGS

Tackling societal challenges to create a transformation economy requires meaningful context-specific interventions, based on multistakeholder collaborations and value sharing that build long-lasting profitable, ethical and fair businesses (Brand and Rocchi, 2011). Design is effective in transformation, because, through making and prototyping, it can give a tangible and experienceable form to transformation. Everyone involved in the process can viscerally understand how the future might look, taste and feel like. Furthermore, design allows to make with and render the future in a collective way, including, among others, non-humans and minorities. Through creativity and design, it is possible to imagine and prototype new societal value propositions, including products, services, policy instruments and arrangements, systems and everyday practices. The aim is not only to provoke discussions, but also to realise propositions for societal transformation, transform practices and scale impact. Through making and prototyping, design provides insights, means of understanding, evidence and inspiration to explore different ways of organising (within, across) silos and reimagining the concepts of 'strategy' and 'implementation' in policy making. It therefore also provides ideas and arguments to overcome the tenacious barriers between strategy and implementation. Making things is therefore crucial in the process of figuring out how to create practices to sustain a resilient and meaningful society.

(UN-)LEARNING

Working across organisations in multi-actor ecosystems, on the one hand, demands us to unlearn old practices that hinder collaboration and that do not contribute towards sustainability, regeneration and collective thriving. It also requires, on the other hand, learning new competences that empower us towards a shared purpose. These competences encompass knowledge, skills and attitudes.

There is a heartfelt necessity for creating and consolidating practices of exchanging knowledge and skills between different ecosystems working in different places of intervention. For creating this exchange, for formalising knowledge and for developing these new competences, it is necessary to create and cultivate safe and welcoming spaces – a playground for (un)learning. These inclusive playgrounds allow for exploration and reflective practice, embracing attitudes such as vulnerability, courage, risk-taking, ambiguity and openness. They make it possible for motivated actors to deal with complex challenges in their respective sectors and professional settings, but also foster personal development and transformation. By taking part in these inclusive playgrounds for (un)learning, actors within multi-actor ecosystems can develop the competences and attitudes needed to drive sustainable, regenerative, and collective thriving.

MAKING THINGS POSSIBLE

Through design, current practices can be transformed into sustainable ones: design proposes possible futures (as explained above) and facilitates processes of shared reflection and learning within the ecosystems. These activities are carried out in physical and digital playgrounds (see above). For these playgrounds to thrive, there is a need for an organisational infrastructure, a “kitchen” where the right conditions for transformation are prepared: financial structures, governance, (leadership) culture, tools and techniques, vocabulary, networks, contracts of collaboration, etc. This kitchen formulates forms of governance, fosters (self-)leadership practices, and forms shared decisions and policy-making practices, ensuring that the infrastructure affords inclusion of a wide range of human and more-than-human actors, and that it stimulates open-endedness, unpredictability, experimentation and imagination.

EVALUATING AND POLLINATING

By embedding the use of cultural, creative and imaginative power into shaping our future societies and the way that we relate to our planet, we create practices that explore possibilities, rather than defining solutions. This asks for new ways of assessing progress and impact. In particular, when working in the frame of transformation, it is problematic to predefine what to measure since what is to be measured will transform along the process. The necessity of exploring dynamic evaluation assessment processes is evident.

This dynamic approach should be complemented by a collective discussion and agreement on what constitutes "success" or impact, without compromising the creative and open-ended process of societal transformation.

This goes hand in hand with the necessity of working in parallel on communication and pollination: creating shared discourses, across multi-actor ecosystems, and reaching out to the wider public, private and civic communities. How to make the experimental practices actionable and scalable for a broad audience, including businesses, civic bodies and non-human actors? However, scaling in this context should be approached differently than in a traditional sense of amplified replication. It is essential to establish an organic process of knowledge-translation and sharing among various actors, scaling is a careful study of what can and cannot be transferred from one context to another, and thus, creatively translated (Huybrechts et al., 2021). By embracing this adaptive and dynamic approach to scaling, we can better understand, reimagine, reorganise and ultimately transform society.

If you want to reference the EU Design Agenda, you can use this formulation:
Trotto, A, Hummels, C. (Eds.)(2023) EU Design Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Societal Transformation. Internal document for the EIT Culture and Creativity. 
As of February 2023, the process of shaping the agenda has involved more than 400 people and 180 organisations.

The EIT Culture and Creativity

About EIT Culture & Creativity EIT Culture & Creativity is the ninth Innovation Community by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union. It is designed to strengthen and transform Europe’s Cultural and Creative Sectors and Industries (CCSI) by connecting creatives and organisations to Europe’s largest innovation network. It takes a holistic and open approach to innovation – from tech to artistic driven innovations, from business to citizen driven – and reinforces the appreciation and anchoring of European values and identities. EIT Culture & Creativity will unlock latent value from a multitude of small CCSI stakeholders through technology transfer, improved cross-sectoral collaboration and their effective integration in production value networks. EIT Culture & Creativity will support technology and business innovation; artistic innovation and social innovation. It will also harness the unique position of the CCSI to facilitate the Triple Transitions in Europe – green, digital and social.

References

Brand, R., Rocchi, S. (2011) Rethinking value in a changing landscape. A model for strategic reflection and business transformation. Philips Design.

Huybrechts, L., Devisch, O., & Tassinari, V. (2021). Re-Framing the Politcs of Design. Public Space.

European Union. (n.d.). Beautiful, sustainable, together. New European Bauhaus. Retrieved March 23, 2023, from https://new-european-bauhaus.europa.eu/index_en

Trotto, A., Hummels, C. C. M., Levy, P. D., Peeters, J. P. A., van der Veen, R., Yoo, D., Johansson, M., Johansson, M., Smith, M. L., & van der Zwan, S. (2021). Designing for Transforming Practices: Maps and Journeys. Eindhoven University of Technology