Current literature argues that the lack of skills for users to engage in Open Data ecosystems is a primary barrier to expanding the benefits of Open Data in society. Although schools have been identified as potential actors in promoting Open Data literacy goals, educational approaches to support this aim have not been clearly defined. Our previous research on Open Data skills definition indicates that focusing on data literacy and real-world problem-solving is crucial in Open Data Education. In the current study, we apply a design-based research methodological framework to investigate how learning designs for building Open Data competencies in elementary school can be developed and what educational design elements are relevant. Design-based research proposes iterative cycles including problem definition, design, intervention, analysis and redesign. An exploratory cycle from problem definition to the first intervention with an educational open data design has been conducted. Central design elements, including elements of game-based learning, are identified by reviewing the domains of data literacy and real-world problem-solving. An educational design was tested in a Danish school with 39 pupils aged 15 to 16 in 9th-grade and five teachers. Following a thematic network analysis methodology, the results provide a contextual understanding of the competencies and skills for using Open Data in elementary school, how to keep students interested and engaged, and the importance of authenticity for Open Data learning designs. We propose a game design, making a parallel between learning and game design elements. The game design uses Open Government Data, and authentic Open Data practices for engaging elementary school students in developing Open Data competencies. Our study contributes to the understanding of social contexts and new technologies in the Open Data field showing the value of real-world applications and public value generation using Open Government Data.

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Open Data (OD) is defined as digital data that is made available with the technical and legal characteristics necessary to be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone, anytime and anywhere. Although OD can be seen as a commons, citizens often face challenges in accessing, using and making sense of available open datasets. Current literature identifies a lack of data expertise as one of the main barriers and emphasises the importance of strategies for training and teaching the appropriate competencies. Furthermore, a clear definition of OD skills and learning approaches is missed. A two-sided systematic mapping review with a focus on the educational domain was conducted to identify relevant OD skills and the approaches facilitating the development of these competencies. The results section presents a map of OD skills and learning approaches, while the discussion section elaborates on the potential of OD in education to empower students with skills and competencies to better understand their context, act in their everyday life environment and address future challenges. The current contribution is an OD literacy framework that puts OD at the centre of competence-based education, fostering responsible citizenship necessary for addressing today’s societal challenges.@en

Data-driven domains such as public administration, health or mobility have adopted a so-called 'data ecosystem' perspective to unify the socio-technical aspects fostering data-driven collaboration. While a data ecosystem is technically able to collect and merge their different datasets, it is yet relatively unable to facilitate meaningful forms of collaboration between actors. Based on previous research on value creation in data ecosystems, we hypothesize that this inability is mainly due to ecosystems not reflecting actor values, i.e. aspects which are important and imply a desirable behavior, often related to goals, objectives, motivations and decision making. This paper therefore proposes a reflective approach to reveal the values in data-driven collaboration by answering the following research questions: What role do values play in the process of developing a data ecosystem? And how can value-led participatory design support data-driven collaboration? We attempt to answer these questions through an exploratory study based on 5 interviews with consortium members of a garden data ecosystem currently in development around a citizen science initiative in Flanders, Belgium. We discovered that the explicit use of values and frictions has the potential to augment the collaboration between actors. This approach can thus be useful to future practitioners who aim to expand the societal impact of their work.

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Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language Theory (PLT) has been recognized as a valuable methodology to understand complex systems. It has been applied across domains through a variety of different approaches. This article reviews exist-ing approaches to PLT application and reflects upon the differences between them. We find that application generally differs across four components: artefact, activity, roles and tools, informed by practitioners’ diverging values and needs. We elaborate on how consciously navigating the dimensions that these components consist of can help to broaden the application of PLT in practice. We report on the development of a set of conceptual tools that aim to support this process. The resulting “activity kit” has been applied in a Dutch housing renovation project to support homeowners in communication and decision‐making to illustrate the applicability of our methodology. It can be concluded that the “activity kit” is a promising approach to broaden the use of PLT and contributes to the methodological repertoire of researchers and practitioners to address complexity in today’s societal challenges.

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Participatory designers have taken inspiration from other practices like the social sciences to develop socially just and horizontal processes to collaborate with communities. In the current work, we take the premise that designers do not have enough means to address concepts of power and politics in design practice. Therefore, we elaborate upon how designers could develop horizontal
relationships within participatory design practices. Informed by the legacy of Paulo Freire, a research-through-design study exploring new ways of engaging and interacting with the community has been conducted. The study setup allowed for reflection upon the changing role of the designer in a community context. We conclude with a series of propositions and discuss their contribution to power-balanced relationships in participatory design processes.@en

An increasing number of social innovators are leveraging cities as urban learning ecosystems in order to experiment with design approaches to tackle societal challenges at a local level. However, the scale and complexity of these challenges force them to constantly acquire new capabilities to advance the local experimentation towards systemic change. We introduce co-design as a transformative community-driven design method to facilitate innovators to continuously identify, connect, co-define, and share with other peers their learning journeys to build capacity over time for addressing societal challenges. The current article elaborates upon a capacity-building framework that not only resulted in elaborate training activities for urban transformations, but also fostered a community of practice that was instrumental to self-sustain a learning network. Results highlight the importance of developing a collaborative learning infrastructure capable of expanding the pool of societal actors contributing to the further diffusion and co-creation of knowledge for urban transformations

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Design is generally accepted to provide valuable contributions to addressing complex societal challenges. Even though design and engineering professionals show increasingly capable of making societal impact, it is not straightforward why some creative practices are more impactful in fostering systemic change, let alone what additional capabilities they pursue to be distinctive. The current study introduces a capabilities framework highlighting a set of advanced design capabilities expanding the conventional skillset of designers and engineers towards enabling the adoption of local innovation at a systemic scale. Afterwards, the developed capabilities framework is used as a pedagogical framework
to design a learning environment to prepare the next generation of design and engineering students to respond to today’s societal challenges. We close with a discussion on the professional and pedagogic role of design and engineering as agents of change@en

Wicked societal problems, such as environmental issues and climate
change, are complex, networked problems involving numerous intertwined issues,no optimal solutions, and a wide range of stakeholders. Cities are problem owners and living labs for finding solutions through design-enabled innovation initiatives. However, to reach collective impact, it is paramount that these initiatives can learn from one another and align efforts through collaborative sensemaking. In the MappingDESIGNSCAPES project, we piloted a participatory collaboration mapping approach for cross-case sensemaking across design-enabled urban innovation initiatives. We used the CommunitySensor methodology for participatory community network mapping together with the Kumu online network visualization tool to help representatives of three urban prototype cases share and collectively make sense of their design lessons learnt. In this second of two papers, we build on the participatory mapping foundation introduced in [1]. We describe the collaborative sensemaking approach used, then present the core collaboration patterns and
common perspectives that form the sensemaking scaffolding. We show how we
collaboratively made sense by first taking individual perspectives, then making
common sense together. An extended discussion puts our findings in a larger context of how an approach like MappingDESIGNSCAPES can be used to move from collaborative sensemaking to collective impact in design-driven urban innovation.@en

Circular economy has gained traction within companies resulting in many exploring new product and business model combinations. Yet, to transition towards a circular economy on a societal level requires going beyond new product and market-based opportunities. To enable societal level change, ecosystem-level innovations are important and so collaboration plays a key role. Cities are considered in this paper as hubs of innovation playing a key role in transitioning to a circular economy. They are responsible for 80% of global resource consumption, with a high concentration of capital, data and talent spread over a relatively small geographic area; making them an important part of societal level transitions. The current work stresses the need to understand and support collaborations in transitioning towards a circular economy. This paper explores what factors influence collaborations and how organizations collaborate for a circular economy in the context of cities. An initial literature review resulted in a framework for exploration, which informed the set-up of the questionnaire. This helped in conducting semi-structured interviews with people ranging from founders, designers to engineers from six circular start-ups, which operate and utilize the resources in cities; to understand how different organisations collaborate in cities. Results showed they focus on operationalizing their innovation through engagement with various stakeholders. As they increased their visibility in cities showcasing their value, increasing the ways and number of engagements, the organisation engaged with people and organisations having similar values and grew by scaling through engagement. This paper elaborates the idea of scaling through engagement as a way for circular organisations to scale.@en

Knowledge on how design practices evolve and become part of the daily practices of public organisations is still lacking. Prior to embarking on this research, we asked ourselves how this phenomenon should be studied in the context of public organisations. In the complex system of an organisation, practices are in constant flux, making it difficult to understand how a practice evolves based on certain factors such as leadership, legitimacy, or organisational culture. Adopting an alternative approach, including ‘time’ as an analytic element, we attempted to understand the evolution of design practices through a sequence of relevant past events. In a series of case studies of local government, we collected data through publicly available organisational documents related to design practices and visualised these data in a timeline. With the results, we constructed a narrative on how design practices have evolved over time in these organisations. This paper describes one case study at Kent County Council in the UK showing how this document-based, process-oriented research approach allowed us to capture the evolution of design practices in a public organisation over a 12-year period within a short research time and with greater objectivity. In conclusion, we argue that this longitudinal research method can be a new approach for researchers conducting studies on design practices within public organisations.@en

Design is generally accepted to provide valuable contributions to addressing complex societal challenges. Even though design and engineering professionals show increasingly capable of making societal impact, it is not straightforward why some creative practices are more impactful in fostering systemic change, let alone what additional capabilities they pursue to be distinctive. The current study introduces a capabilities framework highlighting a set of advanced design capabilities expanding the conventional skillset of designers and engineers towards enabling the adoption of local innovation at a systemic scale. Afterwards, the developed capabilities framework is used as a pedagogical framework to design a learning environment to prepare the next generation of design and engineering students to respond to today's societal challenges. We close with a discussion on the professional and pedagogic role of design and engineering as agents of change.@en

Scaling is a motif describing the proportionate growth of innovation. Over the past decade, scholars have adapted the original idea of scaling from business to differentiate different ways to scale that are more appropriate in the context of social innovation. Scaling is sometimes thought of as a panacea: it is the end result, purpose, or answer to what we are trying to achieve. However, scaling remains ill-defined in systems change: we do not have a commonly agreed-upon language for what we are scaling, where we are scaling, or how we are scaling change in social systems. Instead, systemic designers refer to a mix of jargon from (social) innovation, design, systemic change, and/or transition design. Although these fields share similar ambitions for scaling, we argue that systemic designers need advanced scaling strategies for systemic innovation. The complexity of issues addressed by systemic design requires a better understanding of how scaling systems change happens and demands building capabilities for designing for these different dimensions and directions of scale. The context of the study is a Master-level course building the capacity designers need to understand when maturing systemic social innovations. Students demonstrated a richness in their scaling strategies distinguishing different dimensions and layers of scale. The current work unfolds dimensions of scaling and scaling strategies necessary for systemic scaling and elaborates upon a 2 multi-level framework for scaling literacy. We conclude with a call for scaling literacy to further advance systemic design’s methodological practices and expand the capabilities and action repertoire of future generations of systemic designers.@en

In recent years, governments have increasingly pursued innovation by embed-ding design into their organizations. One particularly common approach to em-bedding design in government organization is to establish public sector innova-tion labs. These labs are described as contributors and facilitators of innovation in policymaking processes; however, less light has been shed on the role of in-house designers (including these labs) in fostering and managing the changes made by design practices within government organizations. In the current study, design management has been used as a theoretical lens to study the strategic activities of in-house designers in a Dutch municipality to embed design within the organization. The findings show the importance of strategic activity by in-house designers to foster design practice and resulting organizational changes and the need for participation of more organizational members in this activity. We conclude with setting an agenda for more research and practices on strategic activities to foster design practices and organizational changes in government.@en

Bottom-up initiatives of active citizens are increasingly demonstrating sustainable practices within local ecosystems. Local urban farming, sustainable agri-food systems, circular supply chains, and community fablabs are exemplary ways of tackling global challenges on a local level. Although promising in accelerating towards future-proof systems, these hyper-localized, bottom-up initiatives often struggle to take root in new contexts due to embedded socio-cultural challenges. With the premise that transformative capacity can be co-created to overcome such scaling challenges, the current work addresses the identified gap in scaling bottom-up initiatives into locally embedded ecosystems. While how to diffuse such practices across contexts is not straightforward, we introduce a three-phased approach enabling knowledge exchange and easing collaboration across cultures and ecosystems. The results allowed us to define common scalability criteria and to unfold scaling as a multi-step learning process to bridge identified cognitive and context gaps. The current article contributes to a broader activation of impact-driven scaling strategies and value creation processes that are transferable across contexts and deemed relevant for local ecosystems that are willing to co-create resilient socio-economic systems.

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Open data can support the creation of new services, facilitate research, and provide insights into everyday issues affecting citizens. Although public administrations are making efforts to create sustainable and inclusive open data systems, there is limited capacity to identify suitable datasets, clean, release, and reuse them. Serious games offer a possible solution for data capacity building and have already been used to train civil servants and citizens on the topic of open data. This research presents a review of serious games and discusses their potential for data capacity building. The games selected in the review are classified and described according to their different learning outcomes, formats, and type of media. Most serious games found in this review can be categorized as teaching games and are designed to raise data awareness, which is only a limited aspect of building data capacity. We found a lack of design games, research games, and policy games. Given their success for ideation in other fields, design games offer a particular opportunity to build data capacity by generating new ideas about how to reuse open datasets.@en

“Off to new shores!” is a two-hour, interactive online workshop, participants will sail together to common ground and co-create a shared understanding of central concepts regarding a provided case. Participants learn and apply the concept of fruitful friction and use the metaphor of sailing. Fruitful friction is a concept that deliberately triggers people to express their implicit perspectives to create openness and awareness about different aspects that are usually not put on the table.@en

Over the past years, a growing number of local initiatives are generating solutions for societal challenges in their cities. However, the scale and complexity of these challenges force urban innovators to constantly adapt and learn, having to acquire new capabilities that will help them advance towards systemic change. In the current work, we take the premise that these urban innovators need to be able to utilise the urban context as a learning ecosystem in order to push their interventions beyond the boundaries of small innovative niches. In keeping with Schön’s reflective practice, we envisage reflection as a core competence for these urban change makers to grow and present a reflective process supporting urban innovators in framing their professional learning journey to succeed in their projects. A series of online sessions have been conducted to investigate how to scaffold a reflective process enabling innovators to better identify challenges in their projects and the corresponding capabilities they need to acquire. In the proposed paper, we present reflective activities as a tool supporting urban innovators in self-defining their learning journeys and elaborate on the insights gained. It can be concluded that the reflective process we developed was valuable to urban innovators in unveiling new learning needs for their projects, while further research is needed to more effectively translate these learnings into actionable steps to sustain innovators’ self-development.@en

“Are we on the same page?“ is a framework and toolkit that enables social innovators and their stakeholders to reach common ground by applying the concept of Fruitful Friction. This is the process of causing deliberate friction to engage people in a fruitful sense-making activity that makes people realize that others have a different perspective. This in turn allows the person to reflect on their own point of view. Increased awareness is one step to enable a transition in people’s mindsets, values, and beliefs. The toolkit’s centrepiece is an online workshop in which social innovators and their stakeholders apply fruitful friction to reach common ground in a co-creative way. @en

Contributing to the broader concept of a sociable smart city enabling a transforming society into a more participative domain where innovation takes place, the chapter addresses the economic revitalization of Middellandstraat, a multicultural shopping street in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Through a growing influx of immigrants, Middellandstraat has evolved into a unique multicultural neighborhood with a similar mix of shops. This chapter aims to push the current envelope of the smart city debate by adding a culture-sensitive design perspective on placemaking. This elaborates upon learnings from a local contextually grounded design project in the context smart city revitalization challenge and promotes design as a means to improve and revitalize the street. After presenting the rich insights of the contextual study, the chapter describes the findings of the culture-sensitive design approach following its four stages and the resulting concept, called SmaakReis. Next, barriers and enablers of culture-sensitive design are discussed along five themes that are found key in designing for the revitalization of the shopping street and reflect on the value of design and cocreation. Based on the lessons learned, the chapter concludes with ten guidelines for smart urban design and implementation. It can be concluded that SmaakReis was helpful in codesigning futures with the local stakeholders and enabled them to act on the designed smart city vision in aligning their strategic activities. Interestingly the implementation of the SmaakReis concept in one of the local restaurants stresses the importance of capacity building and the relevance of the guidelines for cultural and local embedment@en

Over the last decades, values have been re-addressed in planning, policies, businesses, heritage and education. While these fields seem to agree on the importance of values, it is often unclear what actors mean by values, and how they use these values to shape decisions. A decade after a global financial crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic, and on the eve of global climate emergencies, difficult choices need to be made to safeguard a sustainable future. These choices call for value-driven deliberations, especially in the globally connected, multi-problem environment of the port city. To do that, however, stakeholders need to know what they mean when they talk about values, and how to deliberate them. In other words: they need to be value literate. In this article, we study the concept of value and values in the context of port cities in the past, present and future. After an analysis of historical uses of values in port cities, we assess six projects that explicitly and implicitly deal with values in port cities, to explore methods or strategies that can help to elicit values in different phases of decision making processes.@en