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These commissions are initiated, cultivated, and produced both independently and within organisations. Whenever the commission is born inside an organisation, we name them as the host. While our work has grown in many directions, the DNA of these commissions is inextricable from the partnership of Carys Boyle and Ilona Puskás within the Social Activation and Experimentation team at Climate-KIC, and the support of Dr Kirsten Dunlop, CEO of Climate-KIC, who consistently championed this work.
Take a gander
Deep Dives
Intensive, collaborative engagements with knowledge networks
2020
The Rise of the Nightlife Advocacy Movement
OnlineHow do we express the value of nightlife culture to those who have never set foot in a club? A close look at governance of the night time city and an exploration of nightlife culture as a catalyst for creativity, innovation, equality and empowerment.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: VibeLab, Creative Footprint
2019
Smart Covenants
London, United KingdomThis project aimed to redesign the land economy by recognising that public goods create private value. This initiative envisioned a platform that brings together smart contracts, measurable civic data and a diverse network of lodgers to more fairly allocate the public value generated by private land investments—building more sustainable communities.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Dark Matter Labs
2019
Trees as Infrastructure
London, United KingdomThe project aimed to acknowledge and reconnect the contribution and living power of natural assets (such as trees, which are currently considered costs) in our cities to develop a citywide model for nurturing urban forests as living public infrastructure.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Dark Matter Labs
2019
Economics Sci-Fi Seminar
Brussels, BelgiumAn exploration of how science fiction authors and creators—highly skilled in visioning the future—could work with policy makers to bring together an unlikely but highly complementary combination of expertise, much needed when considering alternate economic near-futures ten to thirty years from now.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: EdgeRyders
2019
Artistic Participatory Methodologies for Global Change
Copenhagen, DenmarkAn exploration of artistic methodologies to enable engagement with climate-related work across hyper-local, site-specific approaches and bridge it over to globally engaging projects.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Museum for the United Nations — UN Live
2018
Next Generation of Citizen Participation
Bologna, ItalyWorking with leading-edge practitioners of citizen participation from all over Europe, we created space for deep peer-to-peer learning and the exploration of what next-generation citizen participation could look like.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Democratic Society
2018
Applying Behavioural Insights to Environmental Policy
Paris, FranceThis initiative sought to understand how to generate and apply behavioural insights to inform policy, improve public services and deliver results for citizens and society. Learnings were incorporated into multiple projects across the organisation.
Collaborator: The Nudge Unit
2018
Time Perception and Financial Markets
Denmark, CopenhagenSenior government leaders around the world have called for paradigm shifts in financial markets if we want to move to a sustainable financial system. One major area of focus is the market’s obsessive focus on short-term investing and returns. This project brought together experts from different backgrounds to explore the concept of time perception on the financial markets.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Global Cultural Districts Network, Redstone, Sail Ventures, South Pole, The Long Time Project 00
Technology, Data, Platforms
Digital systems that support conversation and connection
2018-2021
Exaptation:
Sophisticated Matchmaking
OnlineFinding complementary differences and bringing them together is one of the key drivers of transformative innovation. This project created opportunities for matchmaking between people, projects and large innovative programmes by utilising the power of artificial intelligence, large data sets and machine learning.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Exaptive
2018-2020
SenseMaker Survey: Collecting Micro-Narratives from Our Community
EuropeSenseMaker is a tool for conducting narrative-based research and data collection to identify patterns in the viewpoints of large communities. This information helps uncover root causes of issues, detect emerging trends, identify possibilities for change and vastly improve decision-making in innovation processes. It bridges qualitative and quantitative data-collection methods.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Cognitive Edge
2019
Revision I.O
Berlin, GermanyA platform that activates an accountability mechanism within a network, aiming to de-risk emerging technologies from social, economic and environmental perspectives. It operates as a peer-to-peer accountability experiment and immersive festival.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Armatos
2019
Data Dragon
Debagoiena, SpainThis project developed a tool to manage large amounts of data using deep listening for citizen engagement and real-time policy responses.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Fagor, Agirre Lehendakaria Center
Performances, Festivals, Exhibitions
Arts-based practices and cultural inititatives as agents of change
2026
Hope Project
Online + OnsiteThis project aims to deconstruct “hope,” stripping away overinflated clichés to examine its honest, nuanced reality. Made up of recorded conversations, an interactive audio-sculpture installation and a book of transcripts, the project explores hope through the clarifying lens of loss, an idea that is intimately connected to global change and transformation facing society today.
Host: Independent
Collaborator: Artist - Lulu Wolf
2020
Untitled Festival
Online | Helsinki, FinlandCo-design and co-delivery of the festival that initiated a ten-year programme seeking to collectively reimagine our society, create an agenda of societal transformation, and experiment with executing it with pioneering thinkers and doers from across sectors that come together to form unlikely alliances and to initiate real-world experiments.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Demos Helsinki
2020
Pillow Talks
OnlineAn intimate conversation around liberating ourselves and each other from expectations to unlock deeper and personal imaginaries.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Untitled Festival, Demos Helsinki
2020
Dialogues for Action
OnlineA two-day online event with the core focus of reaching a broad audience across many different centres of climate-change issues and creating links to social and societal issues, designed to enable citizens to participate either as presenters or as participants.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Nowkinnco
2020
Sound of Care
OnlineAn interdisciplinary exploration of ways in which the medium of sound—novel to climate discourse—carries and creates social and cultural experience. The work culminated in an online roundtable at the #LearningPlanet Festival.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: BBC Media Action, Institute for Sound and Music, Learning Planet Institute, Museum for the United Nations — UN Live
2020
Travelling w/o Travelling
OnlineA participatory performance based on embodiment exercises aiming to increase empathy and understanding of interspecies relations, ease planetary fear, and explore more sustainable and collective ways of being. Exercises showed simple and accessible ways in which we encounter one another in remote settings by visiting “other spaces”.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Other Spaces
2020
Lapse
OnlineAn exploratory roundtable into momentary lapse as the corrosion of a previously built sense in which lies immense possibility. It can instigate behavioural change by setting a new precedent and revealing new pathways. Instead of stigmatising lapse as instability and weakness, the work explored the positive side of it, where it enables impact and transformation.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Various artists, dancers, neuroscientists, journalists
2019
Biomimicry and Creative Placemaking
Berlin, GermanyThis workshop introduced biomimicry and systems thinking into the core values of art organisations that do not have physical spaces but that aim to create public spaces in the future.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Institute for Sound and Music, Biomimicry Frontiers
2019
Consult the Performance Artist on the Climate Crisis
Amsterdam, NetherlandsA commissioned performance art piece tailored to the organisation by performance artist Olof Olsson, inviting reflection on “What we talk about when we talk about the climate (and why we should laugh more while doing it).”
Host: Climate-KIC
Artist: Olof Olsson
2019
Museums Facing Extinction
Berlin, Bremerhaven, Germany | Vilnius, Lithuania | Paris, France | Adelaide, Australia | Härnösand, SwedenA multiyear programme with a goal to turn museums and their local communities into climate leaders and to accelerate climate action through museums’ infrastructure, exhibitions, a unified voice, neighbourhood, local partners and civic stakeholders.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: We Are Museums
2018
Green Sziget
Budapest, HungaryA series of immersive experiences, workshops and awareness activities that sought to empower participants to act by shifting focus from the climate crisis towards climate action by creating a positive mindset.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Sziget Festival, EIT Climate-KIC Alumni Association
Other Formats
Activities that defy categorisation
2024 - ongoing
8 Parameters
Online + OnsiteA short-form format that condenses the Thinkers in Residence ethos into a programme that can be applied in more contexts, with a shorter timeframe. Designed for collaborators dealing with social impact challenges, who want to bring new perspectives (namely the strange and unusual) into their current problem solving.
Host: Independent
2023
Thinkers in Residence - Climate KIC Au
Online
Designing and creating a residency program designed to spark systemic change by challenging conventional mindsets. By intertwining diverse worldviews with technical climate expertise, the residency aims to empower visionary thinkers to dismantle old hegemonies.
Host: Climate-KIC Australia
2021
22 Mirrors
OnlineA set of drama developed to represent the systemic nature of the climate emergency, presented in the form of an oracular bot that juxtaposes images with textual content. It belongs within artistic research formats.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: The Digital Witchcraft Institute
2020
Moments Matter
OnlineAggregating and celebrating actions from people and organisations that sit in the space between politics and protest, we aimed to counter the increasing fear and anxiety around climate change by introducing positivity, lightness and creativity to the climate conversation.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Agirre Lehendakaria Center, BBC Media Action, Community Arts Network, Exaptive, Learning Planet Institute, Mozilla Foundation, Museum for the United Nations — UN Live, I80 Kingsday, Tate Modern, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, VibeLab, We Are Museums
2020
Thinkers in Residence
OnlineWe convened a group of non-like-minded people who had never met before to ideate on climate-related topics and create projects and initiatives for making change. It is a community-building experiment.
Host: Climate-KIC
Participants: BBC Media Action, Exaptive, Institute for Sound and Music, Learning Planet Institute, Mozilla Foundation, Museum for the United Nations — UN Live, I80 Kingsday, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, VibeLab, We Are Museums
2019
Central Eastern Europe Community Lab
Warsaw, PolandThis action-oriented network and co-creation lab aimed to leverage the potential for local projects to be connected with broader global initiatives. The work explored the interdependencies between the local CEE Lab and how best to connect this effort to the Europe-wide focus of EIT Climate-KIC.
Host: Climate-KIC
2019
Participatory Decision Making
OnlineDevelopment, testing and implementation of a range of models, methods and processes to shift decision-making power to the impacted communities. The approach was applied to three main areas: choice of project, allocation of funding and protocols around leadership, and governance and representation. It is a comprehensive methodology design.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Social Change Agency, EIT Climate-KIC Alumni Association
2019
Planet Super League
United KingdomTapping into the existing community spirit and healthy rivalry of football clubs, this project sought to explore how this energy could be harnessed to drive climate-action initiatives. Fans from one club competed with fans from other clubs in activities that sought to cut emissions and save water or materials.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Avocet
Research, Strategy, Publications Scientific, communication, and business methodologies
2025 - ongoing
In the Name of Public Good
OnlineA series of interviews with change makers from across the world, to explore and deconstruct concepts that underpin how we think change happens within social impact initiatives. Many of these concepts are akin to sacred cows, allowed to roam unimpeded and unquestioned by those who use them. The “In the Name of Public Good” series pokes at one such sacred cow.
Host: Independent
2025 - ongoing
Digital Landscape for False Parameters
OnlineWe have transposed a decade of experimentation into a digital landscape, inviting others to explore both the soil and the fruit of the work. This living archive distills ten years of cultivation into a functional shorthand, bridging past inquiries with future possibilities through ever evolving practice, processes, and outcomes.
Host: Independent
Collaborator: Anahat Studios
2023
Small Nations Alliance
Arantzazu, Basque Country
Twenty global social innovation leaders from Europe and Canada gathered to build a collaborative ecosystem, aimed at exploring the possibility for an alliance of small nations to develop future-facing governance models and impactful social impact solutions.
Host: Arantzaulab
2023
Arantzazulab Research Fellowship
Online
As part of Arantzazulab’s inaugural research fellowship, we explored the future of collaborative governance. The research examines how planetary ecosystems could be rooted in local cultures to create future-fit institutions and funding models. We advocate for moving beyond theory into honest, collaborative experimentation, reflecting on the practical realities required for genuine social innovation.
Host: Arantzaulab
2021 -2022
Strategic Thinking, Design and the Theory of Change
OnlineWe were invited by researchers at Aalborg University and Tavistock Institute to contribute a chapter to their book, for which they were compiling academic approaches to and practitioner experiences of theories of change.
Host: Independant
Collaborator: Aalborg University and Tavistock Institute
2022
A Long Conversation
Online
A book written to capture the ethos, journey, projects as well as individual moments of learning and connection during our time together in the Social Activation and Experimentation team. It’s a reflection of how large institutions and partnerships can approach change-making by working with the Un-Like Minded.
Host: Independent
2021
Community Model
EuropeHost: Climate-KIC
TransformU
Paris, FranceThe development of systemic solutions to support the transformation of higher-education institutions to prepare students, researchers, teachers and staff for the world of tomorrow. This includes interdisciplinary working modalities and project-based approaches to solve challenges in the framework of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. This is a pilot programme.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborator: Learning Planet Institute
Branch
OnlineHost: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Mozilla Foundation, ClimateAction.Tech
Talking Climate
OnlineCollaborators: Climate Outreach, EIT Climate-KIC Alumni Association
Movement Building
Rimini, Italy | Amsterdam, NetherlandsWe worked with an existing alumni community that had ambitions to create an action-based and self-organised movement of empowered climate-change actors, and sought to leverage the immense energy within their circles to mobilise their largely passive community into a movement for change. This is a research and strategy development project.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Social Change Agency, EIT Climate-KIC Alumni Association