Thursday, 23 September 2021

All times are CEST

Futures thinking for social innovation

Speakers meeting link: https://bit.ly/36uVRwF  | Meeting attendants: Facebook live at https://www.facebook.com/designscapesproject/

  • 17:45 -17.50 Welcome and introduction
    (Ingrid Mulder, TUD)
  • 17:50 – 18.15 Presentation on Future thinking and designing for societal challenges
    (Alicia Calderon Gonzalez)
  • 18.15 -19.15 Co-creative activity on strategic tools for future oriented action
    (Alicia Calderon Gonzalez, Lizet Espinosa de la Rosa)
  • 19.15 End

Our speakers

Ingrid Mulder, PhD is an expert in transformative and social design. Her background in policy and organization sciences (MA, University of Tilburg) and behavior science (Ph.D., University of Twente) together with an early-stage research career anticipating future technologies impacting society within the national Top Technology Institute on Telematics has reinforced her ongoing transdisciplinary research addressing complex societal challenges at a systemic level. She has been (co-)principal investigator in a dozen of national and European projects that share their focus on design methodology in relation to digital, social or urban innovation and established among others the European Network of Living Labs and the Designscapes capacity building program. Currently, as an Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology and director of the Delft Design Lab Participatory City Making, she further builds design capacity in the public realm through local design experiments and developing methods and strategies for social sustainability and systemic change.

Alicia Calderón González is an strategic designer and researcher with a BSc in Industrial Design Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and a MSc in Strategic Product Design at the Delft University of Technology. For her MSc thesis, she developed a new design toolkit that combines strategic design and futures thinking methodologies to help designers propose new business concepts to tackle societal challenges. As design researcher at the Delft University of Technology, she collaborated in developing a design capacity-building program for urban innovators for the European Commission project DESIGNSCAPES. In addition, she has lectured and coached bachelor students on strategic design and innovation courses at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, as well as on master courses and graduation thesis as part of the team at the Delft Design Lab Participatory City Making. In her design practice, Alicia is interested in exploring the strategic capacity of design for facilitating (social) innovation and the processes and methodologies that can help deploy it.

Lizet Espinosa de la Rosa is a mexican experience designer and user researcher, passionate about considering people at the center of design through co- creation and participatory methods. She has nine years of experience as a strategic designer in the corporate, academic, entrepreneurial, and social sectors. In 2014 she founded Folc, a strategic design consultancy based in Mexico City, focused on creation and consolidation of Small and Medium Enterprises. She has taught and facilitated Design Thinking courses at highschool and university  at Tec de Monterrey, as well as hackathons for Startup Weekend. In 2017 Liz started the Design for Interaction MSc programme at TUDelft and graduated in 2019 within the Participatory Citymaking Lab, designing a participatory tool to foster democratic dialogues within citizen initiatives. Liz is interested in how design can contribute to more just and equitable futures, and is currently Project Coordinator at ONE.WHY, a social enterprise working to unlock the strength and skills of social innovators to drive social change in their communities.

Addressing complex societal challenges requires going beyond reacting to the issues at hand. To ultimately stir social innovation and long-term change processes we need to work strategically towards our desirable futures. That said, adopting a future-oriented approach in everyday social innovation practice, may not be so straightforward. That’s why, as part of the DESIGNSCAPES Un-conference, TUDelft has organized a session to explore how to adopt a Futures Thinking approach in social innovation practice.

In this session designers and researchers Alicia Calderon Gonzalez and Lizet Espinosa de la Rosa will introduce you to the highlights of the Futures Thinking approach and a related set of activities that can be implemented in innovation practice.

Afterwards, a co-creative activity will be held with the participation of several international social and urban innovators, – among which also some of the selected pilots from the DESIGNSCAPES project Open Calls. With them we will discuss and learn also from their perspective, the value of future thinking activities and their practical application as strategic tools in the work of innovators.