What if…

What if… We design, innovate, and inform new forms of citizenship that create a healthy sustainable world?

What if… We design, innovate, and inform new forms of citizenship that create a healthy sustainable world?

This in-person (only) discussion is a call for designers, researchers, governmental and non-governamental organisations to provide citizens with the tools to create change that articulates shared visions of democratic societies

Our contemporary society needs to adopt more distributed means of governance and civic engagement to respond to health challenges, planetary health, and place-based governance. As communities, we can be stronger through tools that enact choices and make change.

The wider question provokes: How can civic engagement provide citizens with tools to pursue and practice shared visions of social and environmental democracy?

In this event, we discuss this question through civic design and scientific practice examples presented by Swiss and UK researchers.

These examples provide an invited audience of design, policy, researchers, and charity professionals with inspiration and guidelines for making citizens responsible actors of social and environmental change.

It will also connect RCA Design Futures (and other School of Design disciplines) with the École Polytechnique Fédérale deLausanne (EPFL) and the Scuola universitaria professionale della Svizzera italiana (SUPSI) to unpack opportunities for engagement between the health of our planet and our human health. This not only aligns a STEM to STEAM agenda(s), but also primes the potential for EU funding, diverse collaborations, normalise approaches, unite experiences and more.

Engaging strategies including: co-design, participation, collaborations, and partnerships are discussed through the speaker’s presentation(s) to identify practical and transferable principles and values that we, as society, want to deploy to shape our social and environmental commons. Examples present specific scenarios on sustainability and health where. For instance, design for civic engagement has been deployed to increase local communities’ resiliency to climate change, to inform samples of a population about antimicrobic resistance, to generate circular economies through regenerative and restoring design, or to support elderly in developing social connections. Or how AI is co-designed through medical expertise.

This is an interactive discussion where speakers present examples of civic engagement as a design practice to outline key practical takeaways the audience can learn from.

The event includes a live demonstration of MOOVE, the EPFL LIGHT participatory platform developed to tailor GenAI to medical professionals.

Supported by the Swiss Embassy