As has been pointed out by anthropologists and sociologists, the present time has taken on an inflationary dimension which tends to overlap with the past and extends into the future, depriving it of its novelty and possible change: a formless and intrusive aorist that hinders the perception of the depth of history and the possibility/need for a different future. In this context, history has lost its role as the privileged key to interpreting society but, at the same time, the pandemic has highlighted the extreme fragility and uncertainty of a present that is anything but stable and predictable, furrowed by sudden fractures that open up disturbing trajectories. Moreover, a sneaking feeling of nostalgia for the pre-pandemic period and a recall to a presumed previous normality are all signs of how difficult it is to look straight at the heart of the current critical situation and imagine a possible new design for the future.In this condition, the crisis that has profoundly affected museums and cultural heritage as a result of the lockdowns runs the risk of being read from a reductive economic point of view, as the loss of an entertainment offer, the downsizing of a decisive asset of tourism, the economic damage by the suspension of activities. 

At this decisive point in time, the wider aim is to perceive museums as laboratories of innovation, fundamental for the harmonious development of society, and as reference institutions for the construction of contemporary knowledge that must now face new challenges. Only in this way will we truly give voice to what Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved on December 10, 1948 by the General Assembly of the United Nations, clearly reminds us. Research, scientific and technical innovation, heritage and society are inextricably linked, and from this relationship must spring the collective rebirth that, starting from solid cultural roots, is able to direct the path to a sustainable future.

The Egyptian Museum of Turin is leading in such innovations of the narrative of its contents and experimenting with new ways of relating to its public. Below is a brief description of some of the research guidelines inspired by the approach described above and the related actions that characterise the daily work of the museum.

An archaeological museum dedicated to Egypt runs the risk of being placed in a subsidiary temporal sequence—before the Greeks—but in an ancient geography, no longer related to contemporaneity. Precisely to prevent this possible interpretation, the policy of recent years has focused—also with promotional and marketing initiatives—on the relationship between the museum and Egyptian, Arabic-speaking and African communities in Italy and Europe, to allow opportunities for cultural recognition and pride, for in-depth studies of history and for comparison between places of origin and residence. Egypt is not only a region of history, or a place of excavation and scientific cooperation with which the Museum shares intense exchanges, but one of the most influential countries in the geopolitics of the Mediterranean and an inevitable point of reference for thousands of new citizens. An effective reception policy and the construction of an intercultural society are also based on the recognition of the cultural values of others, on their valorisation, on the possibility that cultural heritages can be reciprocally known and shared, negotiated in their implications and underlying values, and not used to build oppositional, exclusionary identity exoskeletons based on the denial of the other.

The design and development process for the Station of Being followed the Designing for Transforming Practices approach (Hummels, 2021, Trotto et al. 2021), which catalyses liveable ecosystems by transforming existing practices into truly sustainable ones through design. It does so by initiating and curating multidimensional synergies, driven by beauty, diversity and meaning. The scope is to imagine and propose sustainable futures, in which all beings are respected and actions to heal the planet are taken, thus moving towards a horizon of collective thriving. Those futures are populated by people living purposeful lives, in beautiful living spaces.

The process that led to the development of the Station of Being spans from the inception of a procurement process in 2017 for its construction to today being a functioning bus station in Umeå. This project triggered different levels of societal transformation grouped around four types of practices, as shown in the figure below. We saw transformations emerging in administrative practices related to the organisational and legal activities and procedures of all parties involved. Moreover, the Station of Being has brought about several transformations in the way one can be an active and engaged citizen, and in the way one can be a responsive municipality and community,

looking for meaningful experiences of public mobility. They involved passengers and bus drivers in designing and testing prototypes and mockups. At the same time, the team of designer-researchers found that an indoor bus station was not a viable option. The research showed that such a solution would not reduce carbon emissions, but rather it could lead to a potentially unsafe and difficult-to-maintain facility. The portfolio of design ideas from the students and the design research team pointed in another direction for reducing carbon emissions, namely increasing the willingness of people to use public transport more, by offering a pleasant traveling experience for passengers. Accordingly, the brief and the expectations of the municipality were transformed throughout the design process.

We are facing major societal challenges that call for multifaceted transformations, as illustrated by the example of Station of Being, including political, economical, social, technological, legal and environmental factors (also indicated as PESTLE) as well as demographic, ethical, ecological, intercultural, organisational and digitalisation factors (e.g. labeled as STEEPLED, DESTEP and SLEPIT) (Helmold & Samara, 2019). The escalation of tensions in our connected society—and the rebellion of the planet that has been exploited without any respect for its balance and the rights of all those inhabiting it—urgently demand new ways of working, fuelled by alternative value systems that are different from the status quo. These new ways of working together and inhabiting a planet in need of healing require transformations toward practices of mutual care, of repairing, experimenting, making and unmaking together. The Station of Being exemplifies some of these transformations.

in the here and now while simultaneously generating a long-term outlook for both the future and history (100 years and more), thus connecting past, present and future. By working on several time scales at the same time, we prepare ourselves for serendipity, emerging outcomes and wicked impact. Above all, we do so by engaging with a broad spectrum of stakeholders to evoke co-response-ability. 

With TP we want to contribute to a European Renaissance. In this new era, we are inspired and empowered to collaboratively explore processes and practices founded on care, trust and repairing. To be

Åström, M. (2020). Innovations in Urban Planning: A study of an innovation project in Umeå municipality (Dissertation). Retrieved December 02, 2021, from http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-171983Helmod, M. (2019). Tools in PM. In: M. Helmold and W. Samara (Eds). Progress in Performance Management: Industry Insights and Case Studies on Principles, Application Tools, and Practice, Springer. p 111-122. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20534-8_8

Hummels, C. C. M., Trotto, A., Peeters, J. P. A., Levy, P., Alves Lino, J., & Klooster, S. (2019). Design research and innovation framework for transformative practices. In Strategy for change (pp. 52-76). Glasgow Caledonian University.

Hummels, C. (2021). Economy as a transforming practice: design theory and practice for redesigning our economies to support alternative futures. In: Kees Klomp and Shinta Oosterwaal (Eds). Thrive: fundamentals for a new economy. Amsterdam: Business Contact, 96-121.

So, what is design? Wow, we could talk for 10 hours—for 10 years!— about this. But what we can say for certain is that design is always an opportunity to improve. And for the designer, opportunities abound—it’s just a matter of seeing them. Looking, for instance, at discussions around sustainability, we need to find new solutions and new ways to tackle problems in order to build a better world. We need to solve problems created by old systems. (Though imagine that we had actually tried to avoid the problems before they had turned into the big issues they are now…)The sort of design I’m interested in is inspired by the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was not just a school of design—it was away of working, of living, of being. One of my favourite aspects of the Bauhaus, a school of which László founded in Chicago, is the training that all of the students had to go through. Every student needed to know all of the machines in the workshops—not only how to use them, but also how to maintain them and how to repair them. Isn’t that wonderful? When you know how things are made, how machines work, it gives you power and freedom at the same time.

It is necessary to break down and redefine old ways of thinking. That is why we are reclaiming the narrative: A new generation of designers of African origin are rethinking contemporary „African fashion“. A self-confident self-image and an aesthetic from an African perspective is presented—beyond the (neo)colonially influenced thought patterns and beauty norms. This is the beginning of „Deconstruct Fashion“. That means the breaking open and reinterpretation of fashion. A new confrontation, historical and contemporary, guided by BIPoC (Black, indigenous and people of colour) perspectives. It is important to understand the origin of African indigenous fashion and the traditional aspects in order to interpret it correctly. Due to its universalist thinking, the previous design rhetoric excludes and ignores alternative productions of knowledge.

Actively and critically engaging with the history of colonialism will open our eyes to how power structures have shaped contemporary society and how they dominate our understanding of design and aesthetics. The realisation that capitalism is „an instrument of colonisation“ and therefore almost impossible to truly decolonise in Western society.

Our world is currently undergoing an enormous transformation. Above all, young people who are aware of the negative effects of today’s economic model are discussing new approaches to the world: The inequality between the first, second and third worlds meets with criticism and measures are demanded to stop the increasing destruction of our environment. A growing number of people are participating in social initiatives and working hard to make the world around them a better place.

Until about 30 years ago, the design process was neither interested in man nor environment; it was chiefly about achieving entrepreneurial success and profit maximization. However, from the turn of the millennium on, the idea gained popularity that the design process should take account of human needs and the capabilities and behavioral patterns of individual users. User-centered design came to be the new creed in the design scene.

As early as 1971, Papanek in his book “Design for the Real World” criticized the trend toward producing “useless, potentially harmful, irresponsible and questionable items of mass consumption” from an ecological point of view. He spoke out against irresponsible design and developed a radio for the third world based on an old tin can.

Designers must be aware that they are shaping ecosystems and not just individual applications. They need to look beyond the individual user and immediate financial success in order to develop the best possible solution for man, society and nature. “Society-centered design” is sourced precisely from that design context. It not only addresses users and business, but also society and environment and their various different interdependencies.

In order to do justice to society-centered design, we not only need a new mindset, but also committed strategies and augmented methods. Instrumental to the concept would be to additionally integrate the needs of non-human stakeholders – such as animals and the environment – in the design process. To that end, we require knowledge and creative technologies from human-centered design and usability, as well as from the realm of ecology, environmental sciences, sociology and philosophy.

The idea is as simple as it is provocative: It’s not about saving the world because the planet will outlive the human race—but the human race will not survive without creativity. Now, at this point we could maintain that things have always been that way, and that is, of course, correct. There is, however, one fundamental difference: Today, in the 21st century, we are aware of the situation. It is no longer about mere inventions that could make something easier, faster or bigger, but rather about avoiding man’s extinction. That may sound somewhat pessimistic, but a glance at today’s state of the world (climate change, a migration crisis, and so on) seems to justify this dramatic momentum. In view of that, many people, above all younger people, are no longer prepared to uncritically perpetuate the quasi-natural mechanisms of life and work. Hence, the above-mentioned change can only happen through us and it will only succeed if we—which at first glance seems to be a paradox—do not put man, the individual person, at the centre of considerations.

To that end, we are in need of design, but the kind of design that can shoulder the current challenges. Over the past 150 years, design has taken on growing social responsibility as a key player in the developments of industrial society. If design had previously been perceived as a predominantly aesthetic and visual amenity serving the financial success and profit maximisation of big business, towards the end of the 20th century it started to become a tool for human needs that accounted for the capabilities and behaviour patterns of individual users. So-called user-centred design was suddenly in the limelight, triggering a process of unprecedented individualisation and commercialisation that completely disregarded the political and societal dimensions of design. However, that met with prompt criticism. As early as 1971, Victor Papanek in his book Design for the Real World criticised the trend towards producing “increasingly useless, potentially harmful, irresponsible and—from an ecological viewpoint—questionable items of mass consumption.” He spoke out against irresponsible design and developed a radio for the Third World based on an old tin can.

Creativity and Creative Industries play a crucial part in that respect because they often allow unexpected solutions to unfold. Human creativity therefore makes the big difference, and again, it is not just about intelligence that could be made by a machine. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence will have an enormous impact on our future life. Creativity, however, is a profoundly human phenomenon that we should maintain at all costs. But precisely because is associated with a quantum of uncertainty, creativity—acting creatively—is rarely planable in a strict sense. We therefore have a dilemma. Creativity cannot be practiced to produce a solution, like an athlete training for a competition. For that reason, we are required not only to allow creativity to flourish on all levels, but also to actively promote it. Essentially, it is about augmenting the potential for creativity to a maximum and letting it permeate all areas right to the finest ramifications and niches of life. Maybe the solution for one of many challenges will originate from there. At the same time, it is a procedure of trial and error as well as creatio ex nihilo. The latter, i.e. creation out of nothing which is known from early Christian cosmogony, also found its way into modern physics: Stephen Hawking, too, argued that the Universe could have been created out of nothing—thus illustrating the principles of creative work. That would not only explain creativeness most aptly—it would also restore creativity to our lives as a maxim for future actions.