Creating Bridges in the Transdisciplinary Work of Circul’arts through Systems Thinking, Co-creation, and Learning
an introduction to WG6 overall developments 2nd COST year
Breanne Pitt, Christian Roth, and Rahmin Bender-Salazar

Working Group 6 takes a systems thinking approach to the diverse content, research, art, and practice embedded within Circul’arts. This presentation updates the members of the COST Action on the work of WG6 in the second year of Circul’arts. The Working group continues to work with other working groups to create engaging, accessible, and impactful, resources and online content to share key insights, best practices, and inspiring stories from the project.

It’s All About the Vibes: Embedding Creativity and the Arts
Gilberto Morishaw

Short presentation summary:
This workshop provides capacity building to help researchers present their research in a way that sticks by using storytelling, music, and the arts as a way of building rapport and making presentations memorable and actionable. Setting the tone and creating a vibe is imperative. How can we make use of the power of vibes in bringing our research to life? How do we make people feel something? And how do we leave them with a desire to use this in real life? In this workshop participants will receive a short training and opportunity to put it into practice.
Presentation Abstract:
As researchers, we are trained to revere data. We spend months, sometimes years, rigorously gathering facts, assuming that presenting a logical, evidence-based conclusion will naturally compel our audience to listen and care. Yet, often we are disappointed in the realization that facts don’t always matter. In fact, facts rarely matter. We see this phenomenon happening all around us whether it is in politics or in business and even when we are confronted with existential threats like the climate crisis and war.

Human cognition relies heavily on motivated reasoning, a process where individuals evaluate information in ways that protect their preexisting beliefs and social identities (Kunda, 1990). When confronted with contradictory facts, audiences frequently deploy cognitive defenses rather than objectively updating their knowledge. Furthermore, directly correcting misinformation can sometimes trigger a "backfire effect," causing individuals to actively strengthen their original misconceptions (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). Consequently, relying solely on data-heavy presentations often provokes defensiveness, rendering audiences unreceptive to the research being shared.

The truth does not matter until you can feel it. Foundational neuroscience indicates that emotional engagement is inextricably linked to rational processing and decision-making (Damasio, 1994). Within science communication, scholars emphasize the necessity of affective engagement, observing that audiences invariably interpret data through emotional and cultural frameworks (Davies et al., 2019). Integrating the arts into presentations allows researchers to bypass the cognitive barriers often erected against clinical statistics. This artistic integration establishes a resonant environment, transforming abstract concepts into tangible experiences and rendering research both memorable and actionable.

In this workshop we will briefly explore a few methods and techniques that allow researchers to enhance the effectiveness of of their presentations by imbuing them with cultural elements. By making use of learnings from music, storytelling and improvisation we bring the vibe that makes the substance accessible.

Contested Circularities: A Collaborative Digital Exhibition on Socio-Technical Systems
Freyja van den Boom

Short presentation summary:
This presentation proposes a collaborative digital exhibition platform for COST members. Integrating art and research, it critically examines circularity as a systemic phenomenon, exploring the intersections of material, digital, and legal systems including the sustainability impacts of AI infrastructures, to identify transformative leverage points for change.
Presentation Abstract:
This presentation proposes the creation of a collaborative digital exhibition platform designed to integrate artistic works and short research contributions from COST members. While circular economy frameworks increasingly shape European sustainability policy, recent scholarship warns against reductive or technocratic interpretations of circularity. Such narrow views often obscure critical social, ecological, and geopolitical asymmetries. To counter this, systems thinking gives essential conceptual tools to analyze feedback loops, leverage points, and unintended consequences across complex socio-technical systems. However this risks managerial abstraction if they are not deeply grounded in situated, embodied, and critical perspectives.
In this context, we propose that digital exhibitions can function as vital epistemic infrastructures for fostering alternative socio-technical imaginaries. Simultaneously, we must critically engage with the reality that digital infrastructures themselves pose significant sustainability challenges. These include issues of data extractivism and energy-intensive AI training challenges that increasingly intersect with contemporary regulatory developments, such as the European Artificial Intelligence Act.
By positioning circularity as a contested and systemic phenomenon, this proposed exhibition platform will explore the friction between policy, technology, and ecology. Specifically, it will address the following critical questions: How do material, digital, legal, and affective systems interact and conflict within circular transitions? Whose labor, resources, and territories remain externalized or rendered invisible in these frameworks? Finally, how can artistic practice serve to identify crucial leverage points for systemic, transformative change? Ultimately, this platform aims to bridge the gap between abstract systems theory and grounded, interdisciplinary critique.

Workshop Design for Disseminating Working Group Outcomes in Circular City Contexts: A Rapid Prototyping Approach
an interactive session - Banu Yücel Toy

Short presentation summary:
This session introduces an interactive design activity supporting WG6’s dissemination goals in circular urban contexts. Working Groups create rapid workshop prototypes by combining randomly assigned target groups, places, and methods. The activity promotes participatory engagement through a critical pedagogy lens and offers a transferable framework for collaborative, community-oriented workshop development.
Presentation Abstract:
This presentation aims to provide a flexible, practice-based framework that members can use to design impactful workshops, strengthen engagement, and promote collaborative learning across diverse environments. To achieve this objective, the session introduces an interactive design activity developed to support WG6’s dissemination goals within the context of urban design and circular cities.
Participants will collaboratively generate a concrete, hands-on workshop prototype aimed at disseminating their Working Group’s research outcomes (Annex1&2). They will work within their respective groups and randomly select one card from each of three coloured envelopes representing: (1) a target group (WHO), (2) a workshop place (WHERE), and (3) a participatory method (HOW). These randomly assigned elements function as structured creative constraints, encouraging innovative thinking, reflexivity, and cross-disciplinary dialogue.
Within a five-minute timeframe, each group will develop a rapid prototype that meaningfully integrates these three components. The resulting workshop concept is expected to foreground active participation through a critical pedagogy lens, positioning learners as engaged contributors rather than passive recipients. Each group will then briefly present its prototype to the other participants, enabling collective reflection and knowledge exchange.
The session is designed to demonstrate how simple yet intentional design constraints can generate transferable workshop models applicable to public spaces, educational institutions, and varied community settings. By shifting the emphasis from content delivery to participatory engagement, the activity fosters adaptable dissemination formats that can be implemented across national and local contexts. Beyond idea generation, the activity serves as a micro-model for collaborative dissemination planning. It invites members to explore how urban learning environments, artistic interventions, and participatory methods can foster citizen empowerment, social inclusion, and shared responsibility in support of circular urban transitions. Ultimately, the session offers a scalable framework that can inform future COST activities and interdisciplinary collaborations within WG6.

Creating Resonance with Audiences: Igniting sparks of Curiosity in Research and Practice
Christian Roth

TBD

Creative workshops for systemic risk literacy: An open pedagogical methodology for dissemination
Jonathan Millie


Short presentation summary:
CIRCUL’ARTs provides an opportunity to rethink dissemination as a shared learning process,grounded in diverse forms of knowledge and critical pedagogies. This proposal contributes to Working Group 6 by exploring how creative, locally grounded workshops can support systemic risk literacy and the co-production of context-sensitive insights, while drawing on principles of plural schooling and inclusive learning developed across the Action.

Presentation Abstract:
Urban sustainability initiatives increasingly recognise the need to address systemic risks such as climate disruption, resource dependencies, ecological degradation, and social fragmentation. However, these risks are still largely approached through technical indicators and expert-driven frameworks that remain weakly connected to lived experience, territorial knowledge, and cultural practices. Moreover, the question is no longer whether there is a problem with climate change, but how to respond to it and how to develop collective capacity for action in the face of these challenges. As a result, dissemination processes and the recommendations that emerge from them often struggle to resonate with practitioners, artists, and citizens, limiting their capacity to support meaningful and lasting transformation. CIRCUL’ARTs provides an opportunity to rethink dissemination as a shared learning process, grounded in diverse forms of knowledge and critical pedagogies. This proposal contributes to Working Group 6 by exploring how creative, locally grounded workshops can support
systemic risk literacy and the co-production of context-sensitive insights, while drawing on principles of plural schooling and inclusive learning developed across the Action.

The project proposes the joint development of a workshop-based pedagogical approach, grounded in case studies of creative and circular practices developed in both European and non-European contexts. A first stepping stone of this approach has been carried out through the documentary project Into the Rewild, developed in Patagonia (Latin America), which explored how rewilding practices, territorial narratives, and ancestral relationships to land and resources can support collective sense-making around systemic change. Building on this experience, the workshops bring together systems thinking, artistic practice, and local exploration. Rather than passing on predefined knowledge, they function as spaces of shared exploration in which researchers, artists, practitioners, and citizens examine how systemic risks, resilience, and egeneration are experienced in their own contexts. Through activities such as place-based observation, collective storytelling, and creative mapping, artistic practices; visual, narrative, performative or material are mobilised as methods of knowledge production, enabling participants to understand interdependencies, feedback loops, and trade-offs that are often difficult to grasp through conventional analytical approaches.

Methodologically, the workshops are organised around three flexible stages: (i) engaging with a place through observation and storytelling; (ii) translating insights into shared creative forms; and (iii) developing locally grounded, provisional recommendations based on what participants consider meaningful and feasible. The design of these stages is informed by
insights from neuroscience, helping to create learning environments that integrate diverse perspectives and value systems, and that maximise pluralism and collective engagement. The proposed methodology is conceived as an open pedagogical “recipe” that artists and facilitators can adapt and reuse across different territorial and cultural contexts. By prioritising learning processes over predefined outputs, this contribution offers Working Group 6 a replicable dissemination framework.