Elisabeth Haaland Sund and Nicolai Traasdahl Tarp
The water environment in the United Kingdom (UK) is facing increasing pressure from pollution, population growth, rapidly changing climate and as a result a majority of rivers currently fail to achieve good ecological status (House of Commons, 2022; Environment Agency, 2024; The Rivers Trust, 2024).
Addressing the complex and converging crisis currently facing river health requires an approach that acknowledges the relationality between water ecosystems, biodiversity, human way of life and governance structures.
River Deep Mountain AI (RDMAI) is an innovation project, funded by the Ofwat Innovation Fund (Ofwat Innovation Fund, 2024). From the outset, RDMAI has focused on the lack of shared ownership of river health. Grounded in participatory and systemic design we aim to break down existing silos currently slowing down impactful solutions and address the systemic challenges facing rivers across the UK.
The project brings together multiple diverse stakeholders to develop artificial intelligence (AI) aimed at improving river health. By releasing all AI models open source, RDMAI aims to democratise the use of AI in water ecosystems, and foster adoption, collaboration and continuous development beyond the project.
Through our presentation we want to provide a practical case study, showcasing how systemic design can be applied to cultivate shared ownership. Through our reflections we outline how we have fostered a shared vision for addressing complex challenges, inviting diverse stakeholders to “live the question together” (Wahl, 2022) and ultimately how this lays the foundation for informing effective action in addressing river health.
We highlight three dimensions essential for fostering shared ownership and driving systemic change in RDMAI: 1) Openness and transparency: The importance of sharing 2) Collective Intelligence: Bringing multiple diverse stakeholders together to identify leverage points and 3) Weaving: Creating meaningful connections between previously unconnected people and organisations. For each dimension we outline relevant framings from systemic design, methods and how they have been applied in RDMAI.
Conclusively, we discuss how cultivating shared ownership has become the foundation for how the RDMAI project is developing solutions and interventions aimed at improving river health. We end our presentation with a call for more projects and stakeholders to share similar practical case studies showcasing how applied systemic design and shared ownership can drive change in complex systems.
Keywords: river health, water ecosystems, collective intelligence, weaving, artificial intelligence, systemic design