"The Civic Empowerment Toolbox" is out!

Jap Sam Books and Ben Schouten are excited to announce the newly launched publication The Civic Empowerment Toolbox, a playful approach to civic empowerment.

The influence of media, big data and artificial intelligence on our daily lives is becoming increasingly tangible. The Civic Empowerment Toolbox focuses on the design of active citizenship and citizen participation, offering many examples as well as opportunities to kickstart your own initiative.

Together, the six cahiers, including the introduction, offer a complete overview of design for civic empowerment where practice and theory come together, resulting in design recommendations, examples and future opportunities. for research and education. The book is an analogue read from start to finish, but you can also read it crisscross, starting with any of the book’s key concepts, subdivided in twenty themes, allowing you to delve deeper into the fascinating elements of civic empowerment.

The twenty themes offer a wide variety of different angles for societal change, illustrated with many examples such as hope, bottom-up instead of top-down approach, power and scale, the role of community, data, the possibility to fail, value & care, online platforms and offline rituals, and storytelling.

The book is intended for (future) designers, scholars, students and policymakers as well as those interested in design for and with the (local) community, but above all, for those that want to change the world for the better.

Ben Schouten will deliver his farewell speech on December 2nd 2022 as professor of Playful Interactions at the Department of Industrial Design at TU/e after almost 12 years. Copies of the The Civic Empowerment Toolbox will be presented to the deans of the AUAS and TU/e during this event.

To celebrate the publication of the toolbox, Ben Schouten, together with Jap Sam Books and Pakhuis de Zwijger, has planned a special book event on January 18th, 2023 at Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. More info will follow.

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