To represent the idiosyncratic nature and breadth of what we do as commissioners, we have created an arboreal map of our activities, shaped by format, context, and tempo. We outline our process here; below, you can see the its branching forms.

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.

Take a gander

Going deep and fast
Deep Dives
Intensive, collaborative engagements with knowledge networks

2020

The Rise of the Nightlife Advocacy Movement

Online

How 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 Kingdom

This 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.
Collaborator: Dark Matter Labs

2019

Trees as Infrastructure

London, United Kingdom

The 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, Belgium

An 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, Denmark

An 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, Italy

Working 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, France

This 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, Copenhagen

Senior 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

Going steady
Technology, Data, Platforms
Digital systems that support conversation and connection

2018-2021

Sophisticated Matchmaking

Online

Finding 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
Europe

SenseMaker 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.
Collaborator: Cognitive Edge

2019

Revision I.O

Berlin, Germany

A 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, Spain

This 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

Going further afield
Performances, Festivals, Exhibitions
Arts-based practices and cultural inititatives as agents of change

2026

Hope Project

Online + Onsite

This 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, Finland

Co-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

Online

An 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
Online

A 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

Online

An 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

Online

A 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
Online

An 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, Germany

This 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, Netherlands

A 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, Sweden

A 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, Hungary

A 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

Going astray

Other Formats
Activities that defy categorisation

2024 - ongoing

8 Parameters

Online + Onsite

A 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

Online

A 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

Online

Aggregating 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

Online

We 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, Poland

This 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

Online

Development, 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 Kingdom

Tapping 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

Going deep and slow

Research, Strategy, Publications Scientific, communication, and business methodologies

2025 - ongoing

In the Name of Public Good

Online

A 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

Online

We 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

Online

We 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

Europe

In this project we built a community strategy, and all of the associated models underneath it, for more than 450 organisational members with different locations across Europe, a wide range of sectors and differential organisational types — universities, cities, businesses, NGOs, start-ups and alumni associations.
Host: Climate-KIC

2020
TransformU
Paris, France

The 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

2020

Branch

Online

An online magazine to uplift fresh thinking for how to green the web technically, aesthetically and politically. This project built new sensibilities around climate into the very design of websites and introduced the G.O.L.D. standard for tech professionals.
Host: Climate-KIC
Collaborators: Mozilla Foundation, ClimateAction.Tech

2019

Talking Climate

Online

We created an evidence-based, practical guide to help make difficult climate conversations easier and more meaningful — and to help people come out of them feeling inspired and connected.
Collaborators: Climate Outreach, EIT Climate-KIC Alumni Association

2019 Movement Building
Rimini, Italy | Amsterdam, Netherlands

We 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