Sara Ghione, Asja Aulisio, and Silvia Barbero
Organisations working in the creative and cultural sector today play a crucial role in sensitising and advocating on critical topics, such as environmental and social issues. They can talk to people more empathetically than scientists or intellectuals can. From this perspective, the research highlights the importance of working with them to involve communities and territories, understand their needs and perspectives, and restore valuable artefacts.
Therefore, applying a systemic and holistic approach to the project development can support these organisations in really involving territories, creating links between different actors, building interconnected networks of stakeholders which can work together to have a greater impact on society, and trying to understand which tangible impacts these productions can have on involved communities.
The paper reports a first experiment with a systemic approach in such kind of organisations, by designing a capacity building program to increase the level of systemic awareness among the project participants. The plurality of organisations involved, the variety of representational and operational languages adopted, and the breadth of topics addressed enabled a multi-perspective analysis of the programme’s outcomes, allowing them to be examined from a range of complementary analytical viewpoints.
This has been possible thanks to the collaboration of the research team with Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo, an Italian foundation which gives economic support to different kinds of projects through different typologies of calls. In the specific case of the STARTER call, organisations were invited to submit projects on the topic of communicating the ecological transition, with a priority focus on involving young professionals and artists, while also paying great attention to the social dimension and impacts of the projects themselves.
Keywords: Systemic Design, Creative Industry, Capacity Building, Ecological Transition