On March 5th – 8th, 2018, Valencia (Spain), Francesco Molinari — the coordinator of Designscapes project — participated in the Trans-making Spring Academy and introduced achievement of Designscapes project in the panel discussion under the theme of “reclaiming narratives of place making” in front of dozens of creative professionals, scholars and policy-makers from over 20 organisations throughout the world, including China, Chile, Turkey, Egypt, Slovenia, Cuba, Morocco, Italy, France, Poland, England and Bosnia, among others.
Francesco Molinari firstly introduced the project Designscapes with a brief description of its objectives, methodology and activities, followed by the explanation of the conception “design-enabled innovation” in terms of three dimensions of function, meaning and designer in the urban context. Finally, he forecasted the coming open call initiated by the Designscapes Consortium to support design-driven innovation pilot projects within the European Union.
Francesco emphasised that design is not only an important input but also vital infrastructural power of innovation to facilitate the process of technological, cultural and social innovation. Design-enabled innovation not only shapes but also changes the narratives of an urban environment and thus, creating a possibility to enact cultural democracy in our work and life nowadays.
Trans-making Spring Academy, supported by the H2020 project Trans-making and the Econcult of the University of Valencia, has the main objective to design, reflect and share a common language on the role of culture and creativity in social and economic innovation processes and the construction of a new citizenship from the contributions of cultural agents and citizenship.
By stressing the cross-sectoral collaboration in culture and creativity generation, the project trans-making gives priority to how creativity improves innovation practices in arts, culture, economy and society through international cooperation, which coincides with the proposition about innovation driven by design in the project Designscapes. Therefore, the presence of Molinari in this spring Academy has helped Designscapes to make itself visible on the global scene and to reach wider potential stakeholders at whom the project is aiming.
