Caption: Teams creating Futures Wheels in Future DiverCities Partners Meeting in Timisoara.

Could the very well-known design thinking actually be the new Pink for the impact assessment? Solving a systemic problem requires the ability to take on new perspectives.

It is typical for our current challenges that ecological and social needs and meanings cannot be separated. Creating new, boarder thinking requires more holistic, softer and embodied relationships with the world.

This article outlines the development of our prospective impact assessment and its process (PIAP) which are based on Design Thinking and the Frame Innovation Framework.

The development of impact assessment is part of the international four-year project (2023–2026) Future DiverCities (FDC) funded by the European Commission (Creative Europe) and implemented by European organisations seeking to re-imagine culture-led regeneration of urban empty spaces in an ecological way (NEB, 2023). The project has pilots in 9 European Cities. Each pilot has its mechanism which is believed to make change according to FDC’s Theory of Change. (FDC, 2021.)

Our design perspective is related to future-led work and helps to outline the activities and outputs of the project. The work stems from the need to perceive the impacts of a planned project as early as possible and to review the direction of the project as it progresses.

The Prospective Impact Assessment Process, PIAP, is a forward-looking process for recognising possible future impacts and proactively changing actions according to this understanding. It can be applied before and during a project to recognise potential impacts.

Background

According to the observations from the first FDC project and, as the New European Bauhaus states (NEB 2023), responding to complex challenges requires a transdisciplinary approach. As an interdisciplinary team of representatives from creative professions, we wanted to use our professional assets and bring our future-oriented way of design and creative thinking to the table (ref. Transition Design and Transformative Learning). (cf. Salonen & al. 2023.) (Autti, H., Pakarinen, L., Partio, J., & Eskelinen, T. 2024.)

It has been verified that it is typical for our current challenges that ecological and social needs and meaning cannot be separated (cf. Salonen & Salonen). To tackle today’s wicked systemic problems, development processes require more comprehensive knowledge. Transition requires new thinking and learning out of the old. (Irwin & al. 2022.) For this, we chose to base our PIAP on Frame Innovation by Kees Dorst (2015).

Design thinking as a way to understand the significant impacts leading to a sustainable transition

How would you know you are working towards a desired vision? In our view, reaching the vision requires looking at the plans through their potential impacts. We had a strong impression that we must first envision on a concrete level what is to be done (we call it framestorming) before it is possible to assess what kinds of impacts the project will eventually create (e.g. through Futures wheel). This simultaneous outline of impacts and plans is ideally suited to an open perspective related to design thinking.

At the core of Frame innovation is that everything must be kept open and under consideration. Frame innovation creates space for design thinking and for producing enduring, sustainable solutions that benefit as many stakeholders as possible. This approach fosters a reflective way of doing and helps to envision parallel futures, or – in our terms – impact scenarios, from which the most promising can be chosen.

Our suggestion is, that PIAP should be implemented already at the planning stage of a project, because there it will help write the recognised impacts in the project plan. This process is later repeated iteratively during the project. Done this way, it will help to check the direction of the project. Our vision is that PIAP can be utilised in any development process.

PIAP contains ideating concrete actions and outputs for a project and then assessing their impacts. The process is highly context specific and aims to be life-centric. We believe that our approach to impact assessment can offer necessary solutions for change and difference making, by integrating future-oriented design thinking and its methods, encompassing participatory, informal and holistic learning, into the process. During implementation of PIAP, a future scenario is constructed based on the planned measures, which are then used to identify the project’s potential impacts as comprehensively as possible. The goal is for this understanding to guide the project’s direction effectively.

In Dorst’s view, linking change to the needs of stakeholders reinforces change. In turn, we saw the concreteness of the planning, contained in Frame Innovation, as providing a better starting point for the prospective impact assessment: after creating concrete sketches of the project-related actions and outputs, it easier to envision their impacts compared to abstract project goals. This will produce an understanding of what actions and outputs are worth implementing.

The PIAP has been analysed (and also discussed in the conference paper) to make it more suitable for online implementation, fit a smaller time frame, be more ecological, and its results are more meaningful.

The PIAP is divided into three main phases:

In the Pre-phase, the core team maps out the project and its current situation by asking: What has been done so far? What kinds of paradoxes or conflicts existed between the stakeholders or their actions? In this phase, the team designs the PIAP participatory workshop together with us and agrees on its goals and the main topic.

In the Participatory phase, frame creation workshops are held together with the core project team, end-users, and stakeholders (a larger group of people, stakeholders of the pilots). During the workshops, the participants immerse themselves in the moment and ideate ‘What could be?’ and ‘How might we…?’ as planned in the pre-phase. The participants create and frame-storm new possible futures, recognise prospective impacts, and create impact scenarios. At the end of the workshop, they evaluate the prospective impacts they have recognised.

In the Post-phase, the core team of each pilot uses the participatory workshop results to plan out the next steps for the pilot project and ask: What would be the most effective next steps?

While this process involves some degree of imagination, it is crucial to substantiate the proposed pathway with scientific justifications. Throughout the method, the objective is to uncover underlying assumptions that, if unaddressed, might hinder the realisation of the goal. It is important to define the goals as specifically as possible, as this enables a clearer understanding of the pathway and facilitates the assessment of its feasibility. Concrete goals also facilitate the creation of metrics that can be used to monitor the project’s progress and success.

(Autti, H., Pakarinen, L., Partio, J., & Eskelinen, T. 2024.)

The FDC pilots have been (Londa, Athens, Kuopio and Timisoara) and are being used as testbeds for developing the impact assessment process. We find PIAP as a flexible process and set of tools, which could be applied based on needs, situation, context and the pace of each development process.

The development of PIAP is currently underway. The next steps are to concentrate on the post-phase of the project and an online version of the process for future workshops.

We conclude the article with the notion that while PIAP has received an interested welcome within the Future DiverCities project, there is a need for developing it to enable comparison between projects. Through studying Transformation Pedagogy and Transition Design, we hope to develop the transformative potential of PIAP to build it into a process that supports change and change-making agency.

The PIAP has been presented in the UIIN conference. Please, find the conference paper here: https://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/866558/UIIN_Conference.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Read more: https://future-divercities.eu/

Authors: Autti, H., & Pakarinen, L. 2024.

References

Autti, H., Pakarinen, L., Partio, J., & Eskelinen, T. 2024. Prospective Impact Assessment Process (PIAP) in Future Divercities Project (FDC). In Academic and Practitioner Proceedings of the 2024 UIIN Conference series: Challenges and solutions for fostering entrepreneurial universities and collaborative innovation, Madrid, Spain, 142–153.

Dorst, K. (2015). Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: The MIT Press.

FDC. Future DiverCities project plan. (2021) PROPOSAL_101055943-FD-CREA-CULT-2021-COOP-PART_B_Section_1.pdf

Irwin, T., Tonkinwise, C. & Kossoff, G. (2022) Transition Design: An Educational Framework for Advancing the Study and Design of Sustainable Transitions. [online] available from http://www.scielo.org.ar/scielo.php?pid=S1853-35232022000400031&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en [20 March 2024].

NEB. (2023) [online] available from ps://new-european-bauhaus.europa.eu/system/files/2023-01/NEB_Compass_V_4.pdf [20 March 2024]

Paldanius, K. & Kajanus, M. (2021) FDC Evaluation report final.pdf

Salonen, A. O., Laininen, E., Hämäläinen, J., Serling, S. (2023) ‘A Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy’ In: Educational Theory, Volume 73, Number 4. pp. 615–637. Wiley Periodicals LLC. [online] available from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/edth.12588 [20 March 2024]

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