Co-Creation Lab
The increasingly complex sustainability issues (often called as “wicked issues”) such as climate change, biodiversity loss, health inequity have called for new approaches that go beyond traditional practice of producing and transferring knowledge from science to society. They challenge business-as-usual responses entrenched in disciplinary boundaries and sectoral silos and demand increasing interactions between different knowledge systems and values to co-create new ways of understanding possibilities and preferred pathways to more sustainable futures.
Against that backdrop, the Co-Creation Lab, hosted at SWEDESD, represents a strategic infrastructure to strengthen our transdisciplinary inquiry and capability to navigate wicked situations, enabling researchers and diverse societal actors to engage in processes of social learning, joint meaning-making, exploration and experimentation. The Lab is an initiative within the Mistra Environment Communication research programme and builds on research and practice in the former Campus Gotland ESD Learning Lab, and on our long-standing transdisciplinary research in the sustainability and transformative learning domains.
Overarching aims
- To transform the traditional view and approach to research, knowledge generation and translation
- To co-develop, test and evaluate innovative frameworks, tools and methods for co-creation
- To explore different kinds of experiences, knowledge and ways of knowing to co-develop new framings and understandings
- To critically examine and reflect upon co-creation practices and their potential to support learning and acting for sustainability transformations
On-going cases
Tools and Methods for Co-creation
The Lab seeks to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines and diverse stakeholders (e.g., policy makers, businesses, NGOs, citizens…) and employs a variety of methods such as transformative game design, storytelling and futuring to reduce social distances and create a safe space for improving dialogue, stimulating creative thinking, and facilitating deeper connections and meaningful collaborations across disciplines, sectors and stakeholder groups. Here, diverse knowledge systems and ways of knowing are surfaced and integrated to allow for new ideas and practices to emerge.