By TU Delft Team

The DESIGNSCAPES project has entered an exciting stage: the winners for our first Open Call have been selected, with some great projects for design-enabled urban solutions. There are a number of promising events in the coming months, for both the project’s consortium and selected first participants of the Open Call — and of course the second Open Call is accepting applications. But let’s rewind for a moment to the last months of the year that just passed.

On November 1st and 2nd, the TU Delft team facilitated a co-creation session with different consortium partners at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft, in the Netherlands. The main goal of the meeting was to ensure the alignment among the different ongoing project activities and discuss the next step in developing the Design Capacities Building Program that Designscapes will be offering to the participants of the Open Call.

During the session, the consortium elaborated on the content of the Designscapes Toolbox and Training Modules. One of the points discussed, for example, was that this content should adapt to the specific needs and background of its “users” (the pilot participants and other urban stakeholders), and that for its creation and update, the feedback from the Open Call participants should be taken into account, as well as their experiences from participating in the Designscapes Call and Training Program.

The result of the session was a shared, more detailed vision for the DESIGNSCAPES Toolbox and Training Modules, made tangible in a series of steps that we, the team of TU Delft, and other partners of the project have to take in order to ultimately offer the best possible Training program.

DESIGNSCAPES Consortium defining the DESIGNSCAPES Toolbox and Training Modules. Photo by TU Delft.

In the coming period, we will continue detailing the different elements of the DESIGNSCAPES Training Program, conducting research to answer several key questions such as: What are the skills needed to implement Design Enabled Innovation in the city?; How can we make sure that people from different backgrounds (from local activists to policymakers) can have a valuable learning journey with our Training Program?

Although we do not have all the answers yet, the DESIGNSCAPES consortium is keen to explore these questions along with the first group of selected initiatives, and learn from their previous experiences practicing design-enabled innovation in cities, and those to be created as part of their participation in the DESIGNSCAPES project.