Creagile Futures Literacy Living Lab – an interdisciplinary and experimental space for courageous pioneers

Result

The project will generate insights into how creative agility and futures literacy can strengthen students’ ability to navigate uncertainty and co-create desirable futures. Participants will develop future-oriented concepts, prototypes and reflective learning artefacts through interdisciplinary and international collaboration.

The Creagile Futures Literacy Competence Framework will guide the learning process and competence development. Participants’ self-assessments will be evaluated to explore perceived competence development, identify learning potentials and derive implications for lifelong learning and transformative higher education. The findings will contribute to the further development and validation of the framework and innovative learning formats.

Description

Have you ever wondered why familiar strategies and methods sometimes no longer work? Do you know the feeling of losing orientation in complex or unpredictable situations? How do you respond to questions for which there are no ready-made answers while still being expected to act, decide or communicate? – This on-campus interdisciplinary winter living lab addresses such real-world challenges through Creagile Futures Literacy. Students learn to remain action-capable in uncertainty, ambiguity and non-linear situations by combining creagile methods such as exploratory inquiry, iterative experimentation, narrative prototyping, perspective shifting and holistic creative reflection. Working in interdisciplinary and intercultural teams, participants explore how not-knowing, intuition, presence, diversity and open-endedness can be used constructively to shape sustainable, desirable and alternative futures. 

Typical questions we may work on include: How can complex and ambiguous information be communicated in ways that reach people from different professional, cultural and disciplinary backgrounds? How can dialogue be designed so that differences are respected and translated into inclusive solutions? Which creative techniques can strengthen resilience while expanding one’s own perspective? How can health and well-being awareness be promoted in ways that respond to the needs of patients while also supporting professionals and organisations? How can interdisciplinary teams be led so that diversity becomes a source of innovation rather than friction? 

This interdisciplinary and experimental space for courageous pioneers combines short inputs, creagile interventions, prototyping and collaborative inquiry. It invites participants to engage with complex societal, organizational and professional challenges in ways that are both systematic and experimental, evidence-informed and imaginative. Through the Creagile Futures Literacy process, participants experience interprofessional and intercultural collaboration, expand their creagile and future-oriented competence profile and co-design proposals for contexts such as health, social work, language and communication, entrepreneurship and innovation, organizational transformation, sustainability and responsible human-AI collaboration.

Target audience: The module is designed for Bachelor’s, Master’s/MSc and PhD students from ZHAW, the EELISA Alliance and other international institutions. It welcomes participants from diverse disciplines such as communication, language and media, social work, psychology, health sciences, management and business, engineering, sustainability, design, innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as related fields.

Bonus: In addition to collaborating in interdisciplinary project teams, you’ll benefit from the insights and experience gained by ZHAW through an inter- and transdisciplinary Erasmus+ project on “Creative Agility” (2021–2023) as well as the international follow-up project “CreAIgile Literacy” (2024–2026) with national and international partners from Switzerland, Germany, and the U.S. This way, you will not only gain important skills for your professional future but also expand your interdisciplinary network and actively help shape professional worlds in a sustainable and impactful way. 

Key data

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