Un-conference2021-10-03T14:48:23+02:00

DESIGNSCAPES UN-CONFERENCE

July-September 2021

About

The 4-year long Designscapes project is coming to an end, but the future of Design
enabled Innovation in Cities remains very bright….

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Why an “un-conference”

We felt a project about design and innovation should end up with something original if not
uncommon, and in line with our times of change. The Covid-19 crisis…

read more

Contents

The appointments for August and September are being
defined and will be published shortly.

About

The 4-year long Designscapes project is coming to an end, but the future of Design enabled Innovation in Cities remains very bright. During this un-conference, completely free and fully online, we will showcase the outcomes and impacts of dozens of pilot initiatives out of the 99 co-financed by our international consortium, using the €1.5 million cascade funding budget received from the EU in 2017. We will also delve into the success story of the Valencia World Design Capital 2022, awarded with a concept directly borrowed from our project’s. And ultimately contribute with original meanings and proposals to the New European Bauhaus initiative – incidentally, the Designscapes experience has been declared eligible to running for its Prize – as well as to the prospective EIT KIC on Culture and Creativity, both searching for innovative ways to create European communities and cultivate/fertilise them.

Why an “un-conference”

We felt a project about design and innovation should end up with something original if not uncommon, and in line with our times of change. The Covid-19 crisis has had many serious implications, which would be unjust to compare to our situation as a EU funded consortium. However, one of the difficulties we experienced during the pandemic was to find the “right” format for our final event. Initially we thought of a rather conventional 2-day conference in presence, rich in quality speakers and with several parallel sessions and interactive working groups, being attractive to many guests and also webcasted live to multiply its effects. For a long time, we hoped to meet each other in person again, here in Florence, as foreseen in our initial project plan, but this proved too risky even to be firmly set on the calendar, while the contagion curve was still at its peak in so many countries.

On the other hand, when moving the whole event to the online format, we realised we were all a bit tired of this lifetime spent in video meetings and became hesitant about offering an event of the expected duration of 2 full days, certainly too long to be compatible with online gatherings. So we decided to split the agenda up into small sessions, each lasting no more than 2 hours, and yet to be advertised collectively as parts of a single “un-conference” thread but leaving far more freedom of attendance over a period of about three months. Also, we decided to allow some local events to be held in the native languages of the host countries, bearing in mind the EU vision of “united in diversity”, which also extends to cultures and idioms. If everything goes well, we suspect this format will become increasingly adopted for the time being. Anyway, we are ready to draw lessons from it when preparing the final reports of our project to the EC, in October-November 2021.

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