In the last decades, more and more complex societal and environmental challenges are rising. Social Innovation is an emerging and promising framework to tackle complex global challenges at the local level of urban contexts. These projects are socially, culturally and contextually embedded and highly dependent on the local ecosystem of resources. Due to their reduced size and non-profit driven structure, social innovations lack financial resources and the needed capacity, hindering them from scaling and achieving a larger impact. Hence why these small-scale and hyper-localized projects often struggle to take root in new contexts. Design capabilities are exponentially considered a fundamental enabler of innovation processes (Scott, 2018), and recently the awareness toward design tools in supporting bottom-up, local innovations increased. Initiatives such as the Designscapes project are examples of a design-capability building program aiming to foster innovation through design by helping these small-scale urban initiatives to scale and achieve impact goals. Although design has great potential to enable innovation, the design process stops at the implementation stage, failing to provide innovators with the needed tools to achieve large-size impact. Therefore, the current project explores how design could support social innovations to scale and achieve impact by unfolding the scaling journeys of Designscapes initiatives. In addition to the research goal, understanding the scaling process of social innovations through design, the project aims to develop a framework/tool-kit enabling small-scale urban initiatives to overcome challenges and develop strategies to scale from one context to another. Several design elements have been used to carry research throughout an iterative double-diamond design process to respond to the project goals. Theoretical knowledge has been applied and used as an exploration mean to conduct empirical research within the practice of Designscapes initiatives. The research findings led to the development of the 'Scaling Framework,' which presents the crucial steps and criteria to scale social innovations. Even though scaling is a complex matter and one single solution to scale does not exist, network formation resulted, from research, being an effective strategy to scale. It allows social innovators to mobilize the resources necessary, align demand and supply, to have a desirable and viable solution implemented in the new context. However, to form networks and replicate the project from one context to another, these small-scale social initiatives have to overcome two main challenges, identified as the cognitive and context gap. Therefore, to overcome those challenges, Social Innovators will capture what to scale by acknowledging differences and similarities between the local context conditions, re-framing their value proposition to match the local resources and people's needs, and defining how to scale by articulating impact-driven strategies. The research outcomes have been turned into a 'Scaling Tool-Box' to make the scaling framework and process actionable and operational, hence useful for its intended users (social innovators). The final result of the project, 'a design tool-box to support Social Urban Innovators scaling from one context to another, facilitates small-scale social initiatives bridge the gaps and develop strategies to form local networks. In conclusion, scaling is like a learning process where social innovators have to learn What and How to adapt to the local context conditions. Because of the value of design in building capacity and functioning as a framework guiding a particular thinking process, independently from the domain or stage of application, design demonstrates being a relevant tool enabling innovation to scale. Furthermore, the final result still has opportunities for improvement, and future research is seen as necessary to expand the tools and outcomes beyond the initial steps of scaling. Indeed, the tools focus only on one part of the scaling process identified and defined through the (theoretical) framework. Moreover, because of the small-scale study conducted in this project, further exploration to validate the tool beyond its context scope (Designscapes initiatives) could help open up and generalise the results to a broader audience.

The current project started with the intention of exploring how design could support initiatives in their complex challenges trying to bring innovation in cities. The scale and complexity of such societal challenges, force urban innovators to constantly adapt and learn, developing new capabilities that can help them succeed in a multi-level process that forces them to create valuable propositions for several actors in the system. The opportunity for the current project was seen in exploring how design could be used to support these initiatives in developing their own capacity building process throughout their complex challenge of embedding innovation in cities. The goal of the project is, in particular, to investigate how to design a methodology that supports urban innovators in framing their capacity building steps, in order to foster their continuous development of capabilities for their innovation processes.
After initial explorations through theories on transdisciplinary and reflective approaches, combined with designed interventions with master students, a clearer research direction has been identified to answer the following research question; How can a reflective tool enable urban innovators in developing their own Designscapes capacity building trajectory in order to facilitate continuous improvement and diffusion of capabilities? The project takes a research through design approach, articulated in five iterative design interventions. During the interventions, prototypes are designed and evaluated with urban innovators from Designscapes project, leading to the final proposal of a reflective tool for DEI initiatives. Through five iterations, insights are generated regarding how reflective processes can better facilitate the identification of capacity building needs in DEI projects. Simultaneously, each intervention informed as well the requirements for the design of the reflective tool as final outcome of this project. The final result of the project, a reflective tool in support of DEI initiatives’ capacity building journeys, contributes to facilitate urban innovators in embracing a reflective approach in carrying out their projects and identifying new capabilities they need to develop to succeed in them. The final result still has opportunities for improvement and further research is seen as necessary for its implementation in real context constraints of initiatives projects.

Children's participation in society is still limited without the establishment of appropriate areas, and the possibility to access the spheres of urban activism, children risks to remain invisible citizens. While children don't get the chance to unleash their creative talents in the innovation playground society is turning into, society lacks their contribution as playful and constructive disorganizers of the world. Based on those background premises, the current project focuses on exploring how children can participate in society without a top-down involvement and how they can be supported in the process of empowerment as active agents in their social and urban context. The opportunity for the project inquiry was found in collaboration with a children center in the outskirt of Bari (Italy), a frontrunner of the Urban civic networks project aimed at promoting urban and human regeneration in a neglected context, where the sense of powerlessness over positive transformations is handed down to children. A research through design approach was utilized to achieve the project goal: design a tool that enables 6 to 12 years old children to undertake an activation journey to take action towards prosocial challenges meaningful for themselves and their community. In the initial research cycle, desk research and comparative analysis of 6 different case studies of toolkit and programs were performed to unveil how children's empowerment could be supported by design. The resulting map of ideal empowering strategies allowed to identify some pillars of children activation process to inform the following cycles. Among those, the community perception, the unlocking of I can mindset and opportunities for action were the object of the research through design interventions, together with the open endedness of the activation process disclosed along with the two iterations. The insights collected converged into children's intuitive, creative activation journey, including gaps, enablers, and needs they experienced along it. They also contributed to enriching the requirements list for the tool's design. During the ideation the leading research outcomes were embodied in the final tool proposal "Il Priscio", activities set for young positive change-makers, that propose them a child-led activation through 5 main steps: raising I can, finding relevance in opportunities for change, becoming protagonists, powers-driven ideation and practicing courage. The tool suitcase board contains 14 activity cards with open-ended steps to perform and additional materials to support the experience, such as a platform to practice courage by sharing the results of the powers-driven ideation. The partial test of the tool in the context of the Urban civic network, set up as a third design intervention, acted as a launchpad for children self-activation. Although the implementation in the context of civic associations is envisioned, the tool opened up further research direction about children's self-esteem, the communicative potential of their imaginative interventions, constructive communication with policymakers, and the addition of levels of ambiguity to the tool journey.

A circular economy is a means to an end of achieving a sustainable world, a lot of traction has been gained in the recent years into the concept of a circular economy and many new products and business models have been created around the concept. But most of the exploration of the concept lies in the possibilities of new product and market opportunities, this makes the concept difficult to move towards a societal level change, where circular economy becomes the norm. To enable this societal level change, ecosystem level innovations are important and collaborations play a key role in enabling eco-system innovation. This is what this project tries to explore, collaborations for a circular economy, in the context of the urbanspace. The findings suggested that a shared vision is important for collaboration to take place but the organisations did not actively pursue for having a shared vision and values with their various collaborators, instead the thing that they focused on for operationalizing their innovation was engagement. They focused on engagement to showcase the value of their organisation’s offering beyond the end product. As they increased their visibility in the urbanspace and increased their ways and number of engagements, the organisations grew and people with similar values collaborated with the organisations. They scaled through engagement. Scaling through engagement is a mindset for growth of the organisation based on engagement as opposed to the linear model of thinking of making more. The final design, tried to enable organisations operating in the urbanspace to scale through engagement. This was pursued by creation of an online tool-kit for circular organisations operating in the urbanspace, which aimed at creating awareness into the concept of scaling through engagement, it’s relating ideas and also help organisations create ideas around scaling through engagement for their own organisation. In conclusion, this project is a step in the right direction away from scaling by making more and towards scaling through engagement. Apart from the tool-kit, the findings from the research add valuable insights into how circular organisations operating in the urbanspace innovate and collaborate in a circular economy. On a broader perspective, this project gives a glimpse into how societal level transitions for a circular economy could take place and what it would mean in practice.

Public management field needs to keep pace with contemporary and evolving problems, and therefore invest in and harvest capabilities to meet future scenarios. It is crucial to have a clear vision on the back end of social advising and a staff who is aware of the wideness of its impact. Public managers need to advocate for critical discussions between them, with the organisations they are cooperating with and with people who are going to benefit their decisions. By exploiting typical Participatory Design paradigms, such as a thorough exploration of the problem space, collaborative approach, and iterative development, the dASAP Learning Environment aims at adapting the design practice to the public management domain. The main goal is, therefore, to strengthen the foundation of the public management approach by reframing Design as a new policy competency. The Learning Environment is the result of a participatory and iterative process, carried out in a team setting. This endeavour to create a safe space in which sharing and nurturing capabilities provides a view on the potential of setting up and running a Design-Enabled Innovation process, while also creating an environment that supports innovation within the public domain. The dASAP Learning Environment does not only provide an array of tools and methods, but it goes beyond them by focusing on underlying factors such as values, knowledge, skills and attitudes, creating appropriate conditions for methods and tools to work.

Universities in the Netherlands are challenged by the changing campus development landscape, as the number of students is outpacing the public funding and the role of universities is shifting towards a city. Universities could function as a city, or even become the city (Heijer and Magdaniel, 2012). The changing role of campuses challenges Delft University of Technology(TUD) to function as a city, governing and addressing its citizens in the same way as the city does. The recent trend in public development is citizen participation. The central government of the Netherlands promotes a collaborative way of working between citizens and local authorities. Several participation related projects have been presented, such as Omegevingswet, Delfts Doen!. Corresponding to the need for a collaborative process in public development, TUD has to ensure to involve its citizens, students, and employees in the campus development. However, to involve citizens in the campus development process is not straightforward. This study aims to design a comprehensive implementation plan for the Campus & Real Estate (CRE) division of Delft University of Technology (TUD) to promote citizen participation in campus development. The initial research question was formulated: ‘How to involve the citizens of TUD in the campus development process?’. In this context, citizens mean people who work, study, and live on campus. The main methodologies applied are literature review, interview, and research through design. The research result shows that participatory design (PD) is relatively new to real estate domain. Several challenges of implementing PD were discovered. The TUD campus development process has limited citizen involvement, as it uses a conventional real estate management approach. The prominent challenge is the misconception about the concept of users, as well as the difficulty envisioning the value that PD can bring.Therefore, the demonstration of participatory design conducted aims to deliver two values; to get CRE closer to citizens and foresee the value of PD through experimental cases with CRE. The experiment cases brought CRE closer to users and showed how citizen participation could help CRE create a a program of requirements in a relatively short time. The functional program that meets the needs and concerns of citizens can eliminate the chance to invest in the irreverent, undesirable spatial solution. The comprehensive participation plan was developed to foster the implementation of citizen participation in CRE over a long timeframe. The ultimate goal of the plan is to gradually establish citizen participation in CRE. The plan consists of an implementation plan, participation framework, and participation toolkits. They provide a practical suggestion and guidelines to systematically follow. On the basic level, it is recommended that CRE use the plan to start implementing citizen participation. Further research and experiments are needed to complete a detailed plan in of every steps. It is advisable for CRE to follow the implementation plan and execute a couple of cases to determine if the PD is a suitable approach for the organization, if the value is worth the investment, and if the organization should sustain the PD in the future.

With the development of technology, in a city context , the topic of smart city has become more and more popular. Smart city can bring positive changes to citizens' lives but might also cause risk and conflicts. However, in most cases, the development of smart city is a top-down process that rarely involves citizens' opinions. Building upon the above background, this project aims at designing a playful experience to engage citizens in smart-city-related topics. In the research through design phase of this project, through conducting the generative session with citizens in Amsterdam, the project aim concretized into the design goal: To trigger citizens' awareness on the possible pros and cons of using the technology of data collection and analysis as a manner to make a city better, and further formulate their stands through more in-depth discussions on smart city topics that are more relevant to their daily lives in a playful way. In the ideation and prototyping phase of this project, two rounds of prototype test were conducted with Amsterdam citizens, and the insights generated contributed to the iteration of the design. The final concept: Future News Stand is a co-creatable opinion sensitizer which aims at engaging citizens in the discussions of the possible future scenarios in a city in a playful and speculative way. The design of Future News Stand consists of two parts. (1) Future News Co-creation Toolkit is a set of paper tools with instructions that help to imagine and generate future scenarios on a particular topic in a brainstorming session setup. (2) Future News Stand is a portable installation for evoking discussions about a particular future scenario with citizens on the streets. The combination of these two parts of design enables the co-creatable quality and the adaptability of Future News Stand. That is, the content on the Future News Stand can be easily changeable, and co-creatable depends on the (stakeholder's) purpose of usage. In this project, the future transport in Amsterdam was chosen to be the main topic for discussions. The final test with seven citizens in Amsterdam showed the promising abilities of the design to trigger citizens' interests in the future transport in Amsterdam and evoke discussions on it. Equally important, the experience was perceived as playful and enjoyable by the participants. Besides, the Future news co-creation toolkit is invited and has a high possibility to become part of "co-creation navigator" - Waag's online co-creation tool collection.