The world is rapidly transforming. Economic, ecological and technological developments transcend existing boundaries and challenge the way we innovate. The challenge we face is to reinvent innovation as well, changing the way organisations and industries innovate and cooperate. Only with a new approach we can design a better future: an approach where stakeholders from government, organisations, companies and users participate in new ways of collaboration; an approach where solutions are realised that makes our society future-proof. Participatory innovation means that the innovation team changes: expanding beyond the boundaries of the own organisation. For organisations and companies, this is a huge step. Every partner must be willing to think and act beyond their own borders and participate in a joint effort. Participative innovation is a new way of working, where new challenges are encountered. In the field of urban lighting, this transformation is strongly felt. This paper will further explore the challenge and describe a rich case study where participative innovation is used to rethink, redesign and realise the solutions to transform urban lighting from functional lighting to improving social quality.
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This text is structured as follows. Section 1 concerns the background to this public lecture: the fact that social participation is becoming increasingly important in our society. This is evident, for example, from the way we are evolving from a protective welfare state into an activational, participative society. This development has consequences for the social sector and therefore also for the professionals who work in it. Social work professionals are not necessarily expected to identify or solve participation problems; they are seen as intermediaries who enable citizens to take responsibility themselves. Social work professionals are therefore expected to provide the individual applicant with less direct support and to focus more on strengthening the social networks of people and the social contexts in which they find themselves. Section 2 connects sections 1 and 3, but may also be read independently. It is about the fact that social work professionals are not yet in the habit of providing systematic insight into the results of their actions, while policy makers, for example, are increasingly looking to them precisely for this. First of all, I set out the reasons why it is so important to make the products of their interventions more visible, not only to policy makers, but also to social work professionals themselves and to the customers/citizens who depend on them. Secondly, I set out how the results of social interventions can be made more visible than they are at present; and what research can contribute. In this, I advocate a change in thinking: from thinking in terms of the evidence to thinking in terms of the evident. This argument forms the basis of the type of research that is being taken up from within the research group. In section 3, I describe a number of research projects that will be conducted during my tenure. I also set out the main proposition of this address, which states that social work professionals should do more with the knowledge that peoples behaviour is determined to a significant degree by contexts. In particular, social contexts could play a bigger role in promoting citizen participation. At present, social work professionals normally intervene directly in peoples behaviour, such as with therapies for combating problem behaviour. Interventions in a broader, social, context are rare. Why is this? And couldnt citizen participation be more effectively promoted by these means than through direct behavioural interventions? I put forward four propositions in this regard, and explain each of them in reference to one of the current research projects within the research group. With this, in combination with the general outlines of the research presented in section 2, I hope to provide a clear and inspiring overview of the research that will be carried out within the research group in the coming years. Finally, in section 4, I will discuss the significance of the research group to the faculty of Society and Law at Hogeschool Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, and to parties outside of Hogeschool Utrecht University of Applied Sciences.
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The purpose of the research was to provide academic staff with insights into their own information behavior and to motivate them to refer to relevant, accurate and reliable resources in their own course materials. To achieve this we used a participative research approach. Six participants assessed course materials created by themselves or by colleagues from their own department. It was found that in the course materials for the undergraduate ICT program of a university of applied sciences, in-text citations are often missing. If references are made, they are mainly references to general information sources like handbooks and popular or semi-scholarly websites. We discussed these findings in a focus group. An important additional benefit was the experience acquired with the participative research approach for improving the staff’s own information behavior.
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From the article : "Based on a review of recent literature, this paper addresses the question of how urban planners can steer urban environmental quality, given the fact that it ismultidimensional in character, is assessed largely in subjective terms and varies across time. A novel perspective of urban environmental quality is proposed, simultaneously exploring three questions that are at the core of planning and designing cities: ‘quality of what?’, ‘quality for whom?’ and ‘quality at what time?’. The dilemmas that urban planners face in answering these questions are illustrated using secondary material. This approach provides perspectives for action. Rather than further detailing the exact nature of urban quality, it calls for sustainable urban environmental quality planning that is integrated, participative and adaptive" ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ) DOI: 10.1002/eet.1759 - Preprint available for free download.
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from the article: Abstract Based on a review of recent literature, this paper addresses the question of how urban planners can steer urban environmental quality, given the fact that it is multidimensional in character, is assessed largely in subjective terms and varies across time. The paper explores three questions that are at the core of planning and designing cities: ‘quality of what?’, ‘quality for whom?’ and ‘quality at what time?’ and illustrates the dilemmas that urban planners face in answering these questions. The three questions provide a novel framework that offers urban planners perspectives for action in finding their way out of the dilemmas identified. Rather than further detailing the exact nature of urban quality, these perspectives call for an approach to urban planning that is integrated, participative and adaptive. ; ; sustainable urban development; trade-offs; quality dimensions
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This paper proposes a framework for designing human resource development interventions that facilitate change in professional organizations through promoting learning at the individual and group level. The framework proposed is based on a theory of organizational learning developed by Etienne Wenger (Wenger, 1998) that proposes learning takes place in the context of communities of practice. Communities of practices (CoPs) are groups of professionals that come together in order to build knowledge and practice in their specific field (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002). At first glance CoPs might appear to be like other, more traditional groups found in organizations, but this is misleading (Bood & Coenders, 2004; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). The major differences between traditional groups and CoPs are that the latter are self-organizing and self-governing (Dekkers et al., 2005; Saint-Onge & Wallace, 2003). In the private sector, CoPs are recognized as an exceptional human resource development (HRD) method for organizations wishing to stimulate learning, promote innovation and facilitate change processes among its employees (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). In this paper I lay the theoretical groundwork for developing CoPs generally, using the case of higher educational organizations as an example where they could be initiated. In order to design these interventions, I propose a model that employs a multi-disciplinary, theoretical approach that bridges the context of the public and private sectors. Furthermore, I report on some preliminary observations of two communities of practice; one that formed during a HRD project specifically centered on communities of practice, and one that was formed as a result of an organization-wide initiative to stimulate employee empowerment during a merger.
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This article provides a description of the emergence of the Spanish ‘Occupy’ movement, Democracia real ya. The aim is to analyse the innovative discursive features of this movement and to connect this analysis to what we consider the innovative potential of the critical sciences. The movement is the result of a spontaneous uprising that appeared on the main squares of Madrid and Barcelona on 15 May 2011 and then spread to other Spanish cities. This date gave it its name: 15M. While the struggle for democracy in Spain is certainly not new, the 15M group shows a series of innovative features. These include the emphasis on peaceful struggle and the imaginary of a new democracy or worldview, transmitted through innovative placards and slogans designed by Spanish citizens. We consider these innovative not only due to their creativity, but also because of their use as a form of civil action. Our argument is that these placards both functioned as a sign of protest and, in combination with the demonstrations and the general dynamics of 15M, helped to reframe the population’s understanding of the crisis and rearticulate the identity of the citizens from victims to agents. In order to analyse the multimodal character of this struggle, we developed an interdisciplinary methodology, which combines socio-cognitive approaches that consider ideological proposals as socio-cognitive constructs (i.e. the notion of narrative or cognitive frame), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the analysis of discourses related to processes of social imagination and transformation. The socio-constructivist perspective is used to consider these discourses in relation to their actors, particular contexts and actions. The use of CDA, which included a careful rhetoric analysis, helped to analyse the process of deconstruction, transformation and reconstruction that 15M uses to maintain its struggle. The narrative analysis and the discursive theoretical concept of articulation helped to methodologically show aspects of the process of change alluded to above. This change was both in terms of cognition and in the modification of identity that turned a large part of the Spanish population from victims to indignados and to the neologism indignadanos, which is a composition of indignado and ciudadano (citizen).
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To improve people’s lives, human-computer interaction researchers are increasingly designing technological solutions based on behavior change theory, such as social comparison theory (SCT). However, how researchers operationalize such a theory as a design remains largely unclear. One way to clarify this methodological step is to clearly state which functional elements of a design are aimed at operationalizing a specific behavior change theory construct to evaluate if such aims were successful. In this article, we investigate how the operationalization of functional elements of theories and designs can be more easily conveyed. First, we present a scoping review of the literature to determine the state of operationalizations of SCT as behavior change designs. Second, we introduce a new tool to facilitate the operationalization process. We term the tool blueprints. A blueprint explicates essential functional elements of a behavior change theory by describing it in relation to necessary and sufficient building blocks incorporated in a design. We describe the process of developing a blueprint for SCT. Last, we illustrate how the blueprint can be used during the design refinement and reflection process.
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In my view, organisations are playing an ever-larger role with and in these changes. This is why we need organisations that are not afraid to express and give concrete meaning to their innovative views on economic and social themes. These are organisations that dare to break out of the old thought and behavioural patterns in order to create room for change and renewal. They are guided by an innovative philosophy and mode of thinking, and show this leadership by translating this body of thought into concrete actions and results. This is why, in the professorship, we call these organisations ‘thought leaders in a society of change’.
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In the midst of continuous health professions curriculum reforms, critical questions arise about the extent to which conceptual ideas are actually put into practice. Curricula are often not implemented as intended. An under-explored aspect that might play a role is governance. In light of major curriculum changes, we explored educators' perspectives of the role of governance in the process of translating curriculum goals and concepts into institutionalized curriculum change at micro-level (teacher-student). In three Dutch medical schools, 19 educators with a dual role (teacher and coordinator) were interviewed between March and May 2018, using the rich pictures method. We employed qualitative content analysis with inductive coding. Data collection occurred concurrently with data analysis. Different governance processes were mentioned, each with its own effects on the curriculum and organizational responses. In Institute 1, participants described an unclear governance structure, resulting in implementation chaos in which an abstract educational concept could not be fully realized. In Institute 2, participants described a top-down and strict governance structure contributing to relatively successful implementation of the educational concept. However it also led to demotivation of educators, who started rebelling to recover their perceived loss of freedom. In Institute 3, participants described a relatively fragmentized process granting a lot of freedom, which contributed to contentment and motivation but did not fully produce the intended changes. Our paper empirically illustrates the importance of governance in curriculum change. To advance curriculum change processes and improve their desired outcomes it seems important to define and explicate both hard and soft governance processes.
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