Publications
7 results found
Angheloiu C, Vora S, Tennant M, 2023, Navigating knowledge systems to address resilience challenges: contributions of communities of practice, Handbook of Transdisciplinarity: Global Perspectives, Editors: Lawrence, Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, ISBN: 9781802207835
Minerva’s owl always flies at dusk is the old saying – wisdom always emerges in hindsight. This paradox has crippling effects in dealing with the challenges posed by the urgent need to persist, adapt, and transform in the face of increasing effects of climate change and to strengthen individual, household, community, institutional, or system-wide resilience. The term resilience is a broad umbrella concept that connects traditionally disparate disciplines, such as engineering, psychology, urban planning, ecology or community development. While its meanings are still under construction, the use of the term has skyrocketed and has led to increasing gaps between resilience knowledge and its implementation. There is a pressing need not only to investigate how these gaps emerge, but to develop interventions to address them. This chapter charts the proliferation of communities of practice (CoPs) in transdisciplinary contexts such as resilience. We present two case studies – the Resilience Knowledge Coalition and the Urban Resilience CoP – and explore their evolution to date, lessons learnt, and limitations. Our discussion focuses on cross-cutting issues and tensions, such as the connection between the depth and breadth of scale, impact evaluation, issues of power and trust, as well as the persisting challenge of valuing and integrating practitioner, local and traditional knowledge.
Angheloiu C, Tennant M, 2020, Urban futures: Systemic or system changing interventions? A literature review using Meadows' leverage points as analytical framework, Cities, Vol: 104, ISSN: 0264-2751
Urban-led change for sustainability is a key site of intervention in delivering the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals. Within this broad discourse, four umbrella concepts have emerged in recent decades: urban sustainability, urban transitions, urban transformation and urban resilience.This literature review aims to offer a qualitative assessment of the types of interventions currently being advocated for in academic-led literature. Firstly, the paper presents an overview of the concepts and summarises current gaps; secondly, it uses Donella Meadows' Leverage Points as analytical framework to categorise and discuss interventions supported in the literature.Our findings indicate that although the literature advocates for systemic change towards sustainability as an outcome of a large palette of urban interventions, less consideration is given to the means of achieving these. The findings highlight the need to focus on processes as much as on outcomes when advocating, devising or implementing interventions. This requires a process of understanding and negotiating trade-offs and the different worldviews and values that underpin them. Addressing this entails going beyond technocratic skills through cultivating reflexivity, effective communities of practice and new forms of organising for knowledge production, as well as interrogate our roles and agency as urban researchers.
Angheloiu C, Sheldrick L, Tennant M, 2020, Future tense: exploring dissonance in young people’s images of the future through design futures methods, Futures, Vol: 117, ISSN: 0016-3287
The lack of progress in the face of complex sustainability challenges has in part been attributed to a lack of imagination, rather than awareness. Nurturing and surfacing pluralistic alternative futures, as well imagining the pathways that might get us there, are key processes in bridging this imagination gap. The emerging field of design futures provides methods and tools to develop narratives as well as tangible artefacts depicting products, services and experiences set within alternative futures. These methods build on long-established interdisciplinary inquiries into how and why people develop images of the futures. The present research aims to explore young people’s images of the future (set in 2068 and 2038) through design futures methods. This paper presents the outcomes of a series of workshops in which over 70 young people (aged 16–17) imagined a series of alternative futures and developed artefacts that support the pathways towards these futures. The results reveal that while design futures methods are effective in developing and interrogating collective future imaginaries, deeper challenges rooted in the homogeneity of dominant Western imaginaries and the hyper–individualistic turn of late–modernity remain.
Chambers R, Hart N, Ranger S, et al., 2019, The Marine CoLAB: Taking a CoLABorative, Values Based Approach to Connect People to the Ocean, Frontiers in Marine Science, Vol: 6
With growing complex and systemic challenges facing the ocean, there is an urgent need to increase the scale and effectiveness of approaches to marine conservation, including protecting and recognizing the value of all of its services. Stronger multi-sector networks of organizations are needed, sharing knowledge and working in unison to create a common narrative for the ocean and the solutions to its protection. In an innovative experiment, the Marine CoLABoration (CoLAB) brings together nine non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to explore collaboratively how to communicate more effectively. The CoLAB hypothesizes that communicating the full value of the ocean in all its rich diversity connects with people’s deeply held, personal values and leads to more impactful ocean conservation. Through horizon scanning with the wider sector, the CoLAB determines experiment themes to test this hypothesis. These are based predominantly in the United Kingdom and include #OneLess, Agents of Change and We are Ocean. The CoLAB’s work demonstrates that by effectively building and promoting an understanding of the full value of the ocean, it is possible to trigger a wider range of human values to catalyze engagement with marine conservation issues. A joined up, interdisciplinary approach to communicating why the ocean matters, engaging a wide range of actors will be crucial in effecting long term, systemic change for the ocean. The need for greater United Kingdom ocean literacy has also been highlighted across the CoLAB and its experiments and presents an opportunity for further work.
Angheloiu C, Sheldrick L, Tennant M, et al., 2019, Future tense: harnessing design futures methods to facilitate young people’s exploration of transformative change for sustainability, World Futures Review, Vol: 12, Pages: 104-122, ISSN: 1946-7567
The research starts from the premise that as the world is changing rapidly and in nonlinear ways, we are educating future practitioners for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to work for and with uncertainty to be able to grapple with the scale and pace of emergent change. The fields of design and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools, and frameworks for prospective and systemic explorations of alternative futures. The emerging field of design futures can be framed as ways to develop and deploy prompts, artifacts, and narratives to critically interrogate tomorrow’s societal debates today; as such, it is intentional from the outset in its pursuit of preferable futures and therefore social and environmental justice. The process of imagining the future is an active, values-laden social practice, which requires a layered approach to a methodology to surface and challenge dominant patterns—making it an ideal approach for training the young people who will shape our future. This article reports on the design and delivery of participatory workshops that employ design futures methods to facilitate the exploration of transformative change for sustainability. These workshops were conducted with young people aged sixteen to seventeen to equip them to develop and explore alternative futures. The results suggest that design futures methods can facilitate participants from non-design backgrounds to develop alternative futures and artifacts that might sit within them. It was found that developing a sense of ownership was key to enabling participants to effectively reflect on alternative futures and their implications. Finally, the study highlights the potential for these methods to inform both design and sustainability pedagogy.
Angheloiu C, Chaudhuri G, Sheldrick L, 2018, Alternative futures as a method for equipping the next generation of designers and engineers
This paper discusses how futures methods could be used to help emerging generations of designers and engineers to be better prepared for the demands of a rapidly changing future. Science and technology have a pivotal role in realising a better world; however, as the world changes increasingly rapidly, we are educating future engineers and designers for jobs and contexts that don’t yet exist. They instead need to be equipped to identify and exploit new opportunities by working across disciplines and considering multiple intervention points - from hard systems transitions, such as mobility or energy, to soft systems transitions, such as culture, identity or narratives. The fields of design pedagogy and futures studies bring significant insights to this challenge, including an array of methods, tools and frameworks for problem framing and problem solving through divergent and convergent thinking. This paper describes an intensive week-long workshop that used alternative futures as a prompt for teams of secondary school students (aged 16-17) with an interest in studying medicine, science and engineering. This week was part of Imperial College London’s Global Summer School and was one in a series of workshops run by the authors to build and test these methodologies by employing alternative futures to develop products for, and eventually in, the future. The results of this latest workshop suggest the potential for experiential learning to explore new ways of working and enable students to reflect and test their dominant assumptions about the future. Finally, the study highlighted the need for further research to better understand how students can embrace the dissonance between their stated preferred futures and the range of possible and probable futures.
Angheloiu C, Chaudhuri G, Sheldrick L, 2017, Future Tense: Alternative Futures as a Design Method for Sustainability Transitions, DESIGN JOURNAL, Vol: 20, Pages: S3213-S3225, ISSN: 1460-6925
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