Prototyping while participating in a format that is a prototype itself When I was asked to join the Beyond Waste | Circular Resources Lab in spring 2018 I felt two emotions: Excitement and doubt. Excitement about the opportunity to finally have the chance to be part of a practical experience of what I had learned...
The U process helped me to learn and integrate a group working theoretically on another thematic than my work under the WasteWater Reuse Exchange but in fact working exactly on the same willingness to empower disadvantaged populations and understand with them how we could change some unacceptable status such as precarious lives, self-exclusion to certain...
After three months, six full days of workshops, several half-day team meetings and countless Skype calls, interviews, Slack posts, reading and reflecting — nothing like a cold, rainy Sunday to take a step back and think about the whole Beyond Waste | Circular Resources Lab experience. Two important insights come to my mind first: how...
It was all there, just around me, just inside me, and yet, it took me another 20-ish people to find it: the conviction that everyone has the power to change things if he/she listens – and then act! It all started by accident…Of course, I had and have always been caring about the environment: nature...
The U-Process facilitates the transition from an individual viewpoint (ego-system awareness), to a collective one (ecosystem awareness). For one who has never experienced this shift, it may sound like a vague claim full of social innovation jargon like “collective intelligence”, “transformative learning” and “ecosystem co-creation”. You can appreciate the concept at an intellectual level, but...
As an artist and activist, I generally operate outside the mainstream – my peers tend to be on the radical side, clear-eyed, angry, frustrated fighters against the status quo that by now threatens human life on the planet. I admit I harbour a vague unease with the idea of connecting business and social innovation. However,...
What do you get when you take someone who is obsessed with traditional processes and idea-making and thrust them into an innovative social lab experience? As it turns out, letting yourself go and trusting others to lead you through a new experience can allow you to connect to the issue – and yourself – in...
Have we succeeded as citizens, as humans? Are we satisfied with the state of our country, of our world? Have we reached the end of our “development”? These are the questions we must ask, not to rank each other, but to shake ourselves from the lethargy we are in. This is not the peak of...
This blog is about the personal journey involved in the design, implementation and hosting of Sustainable Living Lab, a social lab whose purpose is to catalyse cross-sectoral collaboration for sustainability innovation. I know it sounds like a mouthful, but we can break it down. What is a social lab? A social lab is an approach...
