INTRODUCTION

At DesignLab, our ambition is to bridge the gaps between society and science and open up new avenues to tackle societal challenges. The goal is to generate responsible change for a future worth living.

DesignLab is developing an approach, Responsible Futuring, that builds upon the designerly tradition of design thinking and combines trans-disciplinary practices, responsible design and social involvement for societal impact. The approach strives to enable creative collaboration and knowledge flow between engineers, social scientists, policy makers, and citizens. It values stakeholder’s expertise, yet it stimulates stakeholders to go beyond disciplinary domains to be agents of societal change.

Since the start of Covid-19, we have experienced how societal challenges are complex and interconnected. The worldwide population is facing a pandemic that brought about many challenges: healthcare, education, welfare, communication, and digitalisation challenges. Today’s challenges are more complex than ever because they are part of complex societal, technological, and environmental systems. Challenges are interrelated: tackling one today might raise issues tomorrow. Solutions that work in a context, might break into another. And this does not only apply to the Covid-19 crisis. Many other challenges plague our society. How to deal with our complex world, then?

Complexity is also related to the intricate network of implications, responsibilities, and impacts. Societal challenges have an impact on many people in society. Many people have a stake, but often do not have a say in the solutions. Collaboration between experts, policymakers, and citizens has never been so needed and yet so hard to arrange.

Let’s take the Covid-19 crisis as an example. The emergency of the situation called for emergency measures based on expert scientific knowledge. However, the complexity of the short and long-term socio-technical implications calls for broader disciplinary and societal involvement in the definition of measures.

The prime minister of the Netherlands and the WHO called for co-designing with younger and older generations to bridge the generational divide. Experts in the Netherlands and Europe have advocated to include experts beyond medical science to the discussion table. A fruitful dialogue is still hard to establish. How to involve all the relevant stakeholders to the table? How to enable their collaboration?

A possible way is to involve academics and citizens to join forces, as in the development of the Covid-19 app of the Netherlands, the Corona Melder.

In that case, stakeholders carried out in a collaborative way an ethical assessment, contributing to co-create the app, taking into account multiple perspectives.