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

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