Science Summit at United Nations General Assembly 77 (UNGA77)

In this increasingly complex and interlinked world, understanding how to create safe spaces for engagement and co-creation can be difficult. Fostering innovation - be it social innovation, technological innovation, policy innovation or other simple or radical innovations requires the development of relationships, trust and co-creation of shared goals and shared language. However, too often such efforts rely mostly on “thinking”, which draws on science, planning, facts, and verbal capacities. However, according to Henry Mintzberg and Frances Westley (2001), there are at least two other modes that can be employed. One is seeing, which involves art, visioning, imagining, and the visual representation of ideas. The other is doing, which makes use of craft, learning through experience, venturing, and the visceral.
With this panel, enriched with activities involving all participants, we will explore how new tools are evolving and creative spaces are being developed that help to foster these safe and neutral spaces, bringing together arts, professional practice, and sciences. Using diverse modes of collaboration and communication they aim to empower a broad group of stakeholders to step outside their comfort zones and come together to build community around shared visions and work creatively towards common goals in a rapidly evolving global landscape riddled with wicked problems.
Join this session to broaden your imagination to what sustainability collaboration can look like based on unique, breakthrough application examples.
The session will be facilitated to engage participants in both “thinking” as well as “seeing”, and “doing”. A visual space will be created to complement discussed ideas, combining the input from a graphic designer with the ones from all participants.

Questions to stimulate thoughts:
How to use and apply social simulations, performances linking art and science, and other similar creative engagement tools?
How to live with and navigate complexity and uncertainty in governance while maintaining down to the Earth perspective?


Facilitation Process: engaging participants in “thinking”, “seeing”, and “doing”
Based on the panel discussion, a graphic designer will initiate a visual mind map in Miro. All participants will be invited to join by adding their own visual content - drawings, clipart, pictures - in their attempt to represent discussed issues.