Involving various stakeholders in creating posters for Roskilde festival helps the Danish Hub to put responsible innovation at the top of its agenda.

Conducting Responsible Research and Innovation is all about involvement. Involving co-workers, involving citizens, involving people from different fields of science than your own and involving policymakers and other stakeholders.

But involvement can be difficult. How do you make people from different fields come together, talk and contribute in a way that makes sense to everybody? Sometimes we want to hear the voices of people who are so different that they – even though they use similar words – don't understand each other. And yet, we need them to work together to create shared visions for future research and innovation and participate in finding solutions to the great challenges of our society.

Finding the right tool for this is essential. Hence, in the Danish hub we have been exploring the method of co-design with a number of different stakeholders from all kinds of fields: education, research, business and policymakers.

Hands-on involvement

16 people showed up at Experimentarium on the 27th May for a day focusing on co-design and responsible innovation. The aim of the day was to learn about and participate in co-design through hands-on activities. At the end of the day we invited participants to create four future scenarios for posters to be presented at the annual Roskilde music festival. Roskilde Festival brings 130.000 participants together per year and it has a great focus on sustainability. Consequently we saw it as a great platform for displaying the work and visions of the stakeholders'.

To help us frame the day Professor Thomas Binder, from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools Of Visual Art, gave a theoretical lecture on the explorative, democratic and collaborative philosophy of co-design.

Playing design games

The 16 stakeholders then engaged in a design game specially designed for that workshop. Groups of stakeholders had to explain their view, experience and knowledge about the future grand challenges of the world to each other through physical materials. The materials included a board game, small figures of potential users, lego and speech balloons.

Stakeholders had to create a shared vision of how a chosen grand challenge might be handled by the Roskilde festival and its participants at Roskilde festival 2045 based on their explanations. The scenarios were presented in the form of small dioramas.

The workshop was a success. The stakeholders had lively discussions about the future scenarios of Roskilde 2045, despite their differences in field, background, age and gender. Several stated that the method of co-design was a useful and meaningful tool for involvement. The result was four great scenarios of what Roskilde 2045 might look like and out of which we had professional designers make into posters.

Come see the result!

Next step is to use these posters to involve even more people in the dialogue about future challenges and Responsible Research and Innovation at Roskilde Festival. The festival starts Sunday the 28^th of June and we are really excited. Stop by at "Roskilde 2045" if you are at the festival and see the posters, hear more about the method of co-designing with different stakeholder groups, engage with scientists and participate in discussions on RRI.

For more information about Roskilde 2024, you can find the Facebook page or the Facebook event.

Mai Murmann

Mai Murmann works on RRI Tools at the Experimentarium in Copenhagen, the RRI Tools Hub for Denmark.