The socio-ecological impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and globalisation are becoming increasingly evident locally and globally. While efforts are being made to sensitise citizens through environmental and ecological education, the impetus for their active participation in addressing growing socio-ecological problems is still lagging behind. In this context, this study presents the design and testing process of a citizen science workshop based on the HUMETAV model, as applied in the Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara. This is an initiative driven by Transition Design to raise awareness among youth about the socio-ecological importance of connecting nature and the city through techno-creative empowerment. We begin by presenting the visual representation of the HUMETAV model, which is crucial to understanding the scope of this development. This paper has followed the Design Process and Design Practice design methodology to define the HUMETAV–Citizen Science workshop to test the HUMETAV model. The findings of this study are that (a) the HUMETAV model can be applied to citizen science as a pedagogical tool; (b) the Design Process and Practice methodology is suitable for the development of educational training activities; (c) the Transition Design and Threshold for Citizen Science Projects framework effectively guides the design of citizen science proposals; (d) feedback engagement transforms participants into vital co-creators, mirroring citizen science practices; and (e) a student-teacher-mentor inter-group structure is a catalyst for long-term online workshop success by emphasising the importance of collaboration. The implications of this study for educational communities lie in the benefits of applying a model that empowers youth through a co-designed, interdisciplinary approach in real-world environments to improve socio-ecological conditions. Future research can build on these findings to explore the applicability of the HUMETAV model across diverse educational settings.

In the current definition of sustainability, project cultures promote a transition involving changes in production, consumption and lifestyle, taking into account the progressive integration of environmental, social, cultural and economic aspects. By analysing eleven design approaches for sustainable, responsible, and circular transitions and, in particular, the disciplines of Advanced Design and Transition Design, this paper introduces the new figure of the Transitional Industrial Designer, a future-oriented designer with a critical awareness of the social and environmental implications of industrial design, able to contribute to more sustainable and adaptable models in a changing context. The article introduces the methods and tools tested in an EU-funded project. Article info Received: 18/03/2024; Revised: 23/04/2024; Accepted: 01/05/2024

The article presents the results of the debate that emerged during the 8th International Forum of Design as a Process, organized in Bologna by the design units of three partner institutions: the University of Bologna, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Tecnológico de Monterrey (20-22 June 2022). In particular, the Authors were chairs of the New Education Pathways for Future Designers in a Changing World theme track. It focused on two complementary perspectives. First, how designers can apply their peculiar “productive thinking” to educational spheres or other forms of organizations

In the current context, designers are faced with ongoing uncertainties and complexities, particularly at social and environmental levels. Amidst these evolving circumstances, design can act as a catalyst to steer innovation towards enhancing quality of life, positioning itself as a tool for the enhancement of the well-being of the environment, community and individuals.In such complex contexts, it is crucial to highlight the importance of design's ethical responsibility not only concerning its role within a project process, but also in preserving the ecosystem, its resources and its interactions.From this perspective, the approach of Responsible Advanced Design (RAD) emerges, a method based on actions, tools and RI-oriented strategies aiming to support the development of new design models focused on creating products and services that consider the impact of design decisions from the initial stages and taking into account the diversity of the actors involved.In this context, the need to reaffirm the principle of design responsibility is underscored and, associated with the principles of sustainability and various dimensions of responsibility, leads to the pursuit of “Design Endless Responsibility” in design processes and designer training.This analysis brings forth a conceptual model that merges the dimensions of environmental and social sustainability with the RAD approach, useful both for interpreting complex contexts with a more integrated vision that is attentive to various aspects of sustainability and as a tool to promote more effective actions attentive to tangible and intangible factors of sustainability throughout the project phase.This conceptual model finds its first application in the context of Italian entrepreneurial culture (Made in Italy) and is currently being tested in a nationally-funded research project.

En los últimos años han surgido numerosas reflexiones sobre cómo las prácticas de diseño ofrecen posibles soluciones para responder a la transición ecológica.

Current global crises have generated profound environmental, social and economic instability, exacerbating the so-called “North–South divide”. To cope with increasing uncertainty and complexity, design has faced profound structural changes and reviewed its approaches. Design has come to the Responsible Innovation concept to define perspectives on how to develop products and services with a positive impact and create new forms of individual and collective knowledge. Based on ethical values of caring, Responsible Design focuses on ideas and practices that enable designers to address complex eco-socio-political wicked problems. At the intersection between Responsible Innovation and design cultures and practices, several examples of local and global initiatives can be identified. To better understand the state of the art and envision possible developments of Responsible Design, a selection of case studies was analysed, and action research was carried out. Thus, two perspectives emerge: 1) Design for Responsible Innovation; 2) and Responsible Innovation applied to Design. In both views, design becomes ethically responsible, empowering people to take care of themselves, their communities and the environment.

The research investigates the sector of the Cultural and Creative Industries, with a focus on their relation with identity, communities and territories. In contemporary times, a territorial disintegration has been observed, underlay by the after covid-19, which highlights an increasing tendency towards the digitization of processes. Within these dynamics, we can see how digital collaborative models dedicated to CCI still have considerable scope for design. This research proposes an analytical method that applies an advanced design approach to tools primarily used in anthropology. Through a morphological analysis of some selected spontaneous rituals, the research identifies categories and subcategories of design interest. The impact of these categories are then applied to the platforms dedicated to CCI with the aim of turning them into digital spaces capable of activating a closer collaboration between the actors and local communities involved.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is considered at EU level as a cross-cutting priority to encourage societal actors to work together during the whole research and innovation process, aligning results and outcomes with the values, needs and expectations of society. In order to investigate the relation between Design Cultures and the multi-level perspective of RRI principles, the Advanced Design Unit of the University of Bologna has launched the 2020-2021 Winter School “Design for Responsible Innovation” working on multiple ecosystems (Italy, Mexico and Chile) with their own territorial capital. The Winter School represented a first experimentation of a methodological approach that was gradually co-designed among the research groups involved, in order to work on an inclusive and non-hegemonic knowledge system. The relationship between the RRI dimension and the design disciplines has led to the creation of an iterative framework, in which the methodological approach has allowed to identify actions and tools to investigate and test how the processes and practices of Design, integrated with the RRI approach, could help to activate dynamic processes within social actors at transnational scale, and can facilitate the design of product-systems able to contribute to the big challenges of the present. The description of two experiences about Gender Equality topic, led the discussion about current educational design model that moves from local to the international dimension. The mutual exchange among teachers, young designers, and institutions creates new learning opportunities beyond territorial borders, introducing the Responsible Thinking and Education as a key to train future designers, able to take a role in mixed groups of interest and power

Community Design is the result of a natural and healthy evolution in the broader sphere of design. While on the one hand design today still directs significant attention, care and resources to the design of objects, services and consumer products, sometimes useful and sustainable, sometimes neither useful nor ethical, on the other hand there is a thriving investment by the youngest designers in virtuous cultural, environmental and social processes of mediation, reconfiguration and interaction between communities and the territories they belong to, with a more humanistic than technocratic approach. A field in which the designer cooperates closely and throughout the entire design process with local residents in multidisciplinary groups, enriched with new experts in the humanities such as philosophers, geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers. Through a couple of comparative case studies of projects run in Lebanon and Italy, the paper wants to discuss the importance for designers to use an anthropological approach for the development of new items, using the narrative tool to embrace the entire symbolic and rhetorical form of rural traditions in their projects. With regard to the narrative and experiential design approach applied in these projects, the anthropological concept that lies at the root of these experiments, of man as part of the environment, man understood as an organism within organisms, immersed in a continuous and swirling morphing of things, surfaces, volumes and therefore also of being, that can shape us too, and modify our work in a reciprocal relational interaction with the things themselves.