Designing the “Futures of” Sustainability at Dutch Design Week, October 2021

How do you set up a constellations of projects and partners that can have a societal impact? What are the right ingredients to play with? How will we measure impact? How might your see your own contribution in it?

In a workshop experience during the Dutch Design Week, we played with different lenses and tensions to make a first sketch about how these programs could function, focusing on a specific one, as a concrete case.

During this event, d.centre|EU founders launched "Maps and Journeys", a collection of infographics that is a visual journey through the development, the application, and the communication of the approach in designing for transforming practices. It is a collection of perspectives: how do we view and shape societal transformation through a dialogue across different standpoints?
While the work is grounded in design research as the driving tradition of knowledge production, the collection embraces multiple kinds: disciplinary, cultural, social, and organisational perspectives. It respects the systemic nature of the act of transforming. The purpose of the upcoming pages is not to propose clear-cut solutions regarding how to achieve societal goals, but rather to sketch a landscape of learnings, experiences, and opportunities for a specific kind of transformation to happen. One could see this collection as a teaser for a bigger journey through uncharted territories of transforming practices. Buckle up and we hope you enjoy the journey.