The Ocean needs you - the Ocean Ambassador.

The Ocean is fantastic, but today it is undergreat pressure. It needs humans who can createawareness of its needs and guide other humansto turn the tide. It needs humans to develop anew Ocean culture and learn how to live with theOcean in a more symbiotic way. Promoting that isyour role as an Ocean Ambassador.

The Ocean starts here…

This document is a guide for the development of local co-design activities, produced within the project Bauhaus of the Seas Sails (Project ID: 101079995). It aims to provide indications and support for howto conduct codesign locally, addressing the important aspects to consider and questions to reflectabout. It starts by identifying and defining four core principles for the development of thedemonstrators (sustainable, inclusive, aesthetic, and locally grounded) and then introduces how co -design engages with these four principles. It overviews the different actors involved and a generaltimeline for the co-design process. Further, it provides specific suggestions on how to develop thecodesign practice locally and with relevance to the area in which you are introducing it.

Increasingly many Participatory Design (PD) researchers and practitioners engage in urban and public contexts, which surely are about participation and democracy, but not necessarily with a main focus on technology development. These engagements are often a part of dealing with complex societal challenges such as sustainability. Today, many different but partly overlapping denominations are used to capture these participatory practices such as: community-based PD, emerging publics, design for sharing, commons and commoning, transition and transformation design, public and social innovation, PD and urban living labs, etc. As a group of PD researchers, the "Boundary Brigade", we have engaged in this kind of work for soon a decade. At this dialogue-based hands-on workshop, we invite others with similar interests in further articulating: (1) what characterizes applying a PD approach in urban and public contexts, (2) how to understand "urban" + PD, (3) lastly, whether it is fruitful to articulate, as a more overarching concept, the (sub)domain of Urban Participatory Design. Practically we will do this through collaborative mappings with cut-ups of "personal positions", discussions and by co-producing arguments as video stories.  

We seem to be approaching the end of the era we know as Industrial Civilization. If this is the case, we will leave a stable period of progress and growth and enter into a long period of decline where many of our systems and support structures will collapse. From the perspective of how we are accustomed to living our lives and the narratives we live by, the future looks dark. How will this affect an optimistic, creative, and future-making discipline like design, a discipline which emerged out of the industrial revolution? What can design offer in the transition from industrial civilization to a new society where we can survive and thrive? What is the task of design if not to design for the market economy? What possible futures will designers then propose? Designers will need to learn to navigate future paths: those that will likely lead to sustainability and those that will likely lead to collapse. In this thesis, I explore the two paths, or scenario storylines, of Great Transition and Conventional Development. I consider the space between these stories—the space between sustainability and collapse—as a design space with many possible futures to explore. I propose that designers not only address societal challenges with the belief that we can solve them and live in a world that is both sustainable and resilient, but also consider what it means to fail and address the prospect of societal collapse. What kind of world will we end up in then? And what can we do to avoid a collapse or else prepare ourselves for a life in a world of societal breakdown? In the search for the answers to these questions, I explore design things and how values and frames as well as stories and design fictions can be used by constellations of concerned citizens when exploring possible futures.

In recent years, design for social innovation has emerged as a new research field. Design has been acknowledged by public agencies and NGOs as one of the tools to tackle the complexity of social issues. However, critical voices have also been raised about the limits and gaps of design applied in this field, emphasizing the need for connections with other disciplines involved in social innovation. These critiques stress that designers engaged with social issues need to reflect on their weaknesses in order to avoid to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and being naive. With a background in participatory design we have developed some practical approaches that we present in this article as a possible way for dealing with the weaknesses of design when applied in social innovation.

During the past five years design has been recognised as a powerful innovation driver. Design methods and tools have also been applied in new fields. One of them is social innovation, which is aimed at developing new ideas and solutions in response to social needs. While different initiatives have demonstrated how design can be a powerful approach in social innovation, especially when it comes to systemic thinking, prototyping and visualising, some concerns have been raised regarding the limitations of applying design in this field. Through a specific case, this paper will discuss and suggest some approaches and concepts related to design for social innovation. Coming from a participatory design tradition, we focus on the idea of infrastructuring as a way to approach social innovation that differs from project-based design. The activities that are carried out are aimed at building long-term relationships with stakeholders in order to create networks from which design opportunities can emerge. We also discuss the role of prototyping as a way to explore opportunities but we also highlight dilemmas.