Pointer Project with ReGen North

In this article Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius speak to Javier Esteves and Emil Winther around a new initiative Kaospilot is a partner in called ReGen North, situated around youth inclusion, democracy, participatory design and city development.

This article is the first in a series highlighting key #pointerprojects Kaospilots are enabling.

So, Javier and Emil, please tell our community about yourself, who you are,
where you come from and what you are up to?

Hello KP galaxy! We are Emil (Kaospilot alumni and project developer) and Javier (Social
entrepreneur and co-founder of C-Cube), project leaders of ReGen. Originally from
Tversted and Buenos Aires, but monogamous to Aarhus, we dream of making our city
more youthful, weird and inventive. We want to help citizens to increase their collective
creativity and have a deeper social impact. That’s the base of ReGen💥

ReGen is a three-element grassroots project, led by and for young people, and aimed at
having cross-sectoral impact

Talk to us about the project, what drew you in this direction and how did it
come about?

ReGen is a three-element grassroots project, led by and for young people, and aimed at
having cross-sectoral impact. The first element is bottom-up research, which is based
on creating a research prototype (survey, interviews, etc.) curated and promoted by 15
young people living in Denmark, Greenland and Norway. The topics, style and intentions
of it will be determined by them, according to their collective sense of priority and
curiosity.

The second element is an insights portal, created out of the cycles of data we manage
to get from as many young people within those three countries as possible. The portal
will be a source of beautiful visualizations and high-quality UX, where the data has been
transformed into useful information. This cloud will feed from future cycles of
data-collection, especially as more communities join ReGen in the near-future.

Finally, and in parallel to the portal, we have a project lab, which will harbor initiatives
either inspired or boosted by the insights we harvested from the research. The lab will
be a space of action, discovery, tinkering, and serendipity. For many, it will be the most
tangible aspect of the project; an exciting tip of the iceberg! For us, it will also be a
platform for civic reinvention, where citizens of all backgrounds and mindsets can scale
their creative confidence, and contribute to their communities with effective originality
and personal inventions.

It is no longer enough to be ”smart”…now,
you’ll need to be inventive

Why is a project like this needed as you see it?

Let’s be provocative for a second: in the near-future, either the ”average citizens” get
much more creative, or they will suffer. And this correlates to the world of automation
and wicked problems we are embedded in. The lifestyles we were used to trust on for
decades have been time and again disrupted, be it at the job market, in education, the
governmental level, or the corporate world. It is no longer enough to be ”smart”…now,
you’ll need to be inventive.

Moreover, to be inventive, you need not only to be creative, but to have confidence and
a community, since it will be difficult for you to persevere and invent by yourself, even if
you are a lonely genius. In that sense, ReGen aims at prototyping an emerging vision of
the future, where we nail the models, designs, placemaking and philosophies that make
inventiveness contagious, infecting as many people in the world as we can!

We bet on ReGen as a platform that facilitates inventive self-esteem in young people,
for them to start earlier than previous generations…

Where would you like to see it going?

We see ReGen as a habit-changer in how people use data collectively. We start by
working with young people because they bring the drive to re-explore ways of creating
value through new forms of decision-making. Young people also tend to be at the
bottom of almost all societal decision-making (how systems work), which we see as a
possibility for them to create new visions of society that work better in the future.

We bet on ReGen as a platform that facilitates inventive self-esteem in young people,
for them to start earlier than previous generations in asking meaningful questions
across their peers, towards paving platforms and weaving networks that turn the
answers they get into sustainable initiatives. ReGen is meant to serve as an
environment for this kind of growth.

Talk to us about the partners engaged – who are they, what do they do and
what motivates them to be part of this?

Our partnerships layout in three layers:

. Denmark/ We are working with UngdommensKulturHuset, the municipal youth
culture house. They support us by being a connection to Aarhus Municipality and its
funding programme, InnovationsMotor. We partnered with Jane Kunze from Dokk1,
who was the lead of a program called ”Data Democracy”, aimed at boosting data-culture
awareness across citizens.

. Greenland/ We partnered up with Inuusuttut Nukittoqatigiit-inua, the youth branch of
the Red Cross in Greenland. They are strong advocates for youth well-being, delivering
mental health first aid workshops across the country to inspire hope and community in
young people. They are our sherpas in exploring, understanding and respecting
Greenlandic culture.

. Norway/ Tvibit is an outstanding cultural powerhouse for young people living in the
far north of Norway. Their record in securing funding to create infrastructure for
youth-led programs and activities is just inspiring. They burn for ReGen, also because
they see an Arctic youth perspective in it!

As the project is still very much in the making, what are the steps ahead of us?

The concept needs to be alive and fine-tuned as we move on. And a big part of it has to
do with the 15 teammates we are recruiting. By the last week of April, we will host two
workshops with them to create a Map of Community Experiences. This will increase our
understanding of the energies and insights present in the team, and what the outskirts
of our common experience are. Then, we’ll host a bootcamp in Aarhus in May, where all
participants will meet and work in person for the first time. The goal will be to come up
with the research prototype that leads to the first data-collection campaign. Afterwards,
by late May, we will have the last two workshops to normalize the data, ponder on the
whole experience, and visualize the future design of the Insights Portal and the Project
Lab.

As of now, we are working on securing funding to move on with the prototyping of the
portal and the lab between the third quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2023. By
then, we also expect to go through the bottom-up research phase with new
communities!

How can be people who find this important and want to be involved beengaged?

ReGen is (and will still be) designed to have multiple entry points. In Social Design terms,
ReGen is meant to be a Replicable Format of Cooperation. This means that, as soon
as we condense enough of the guidelines, practices and tools that amount to an
effective implementation of ReGen, the purpose will be to enable it to as many
early-adopters as there are in the world. Before that, we rely on our first team, partners
and patrons to help us reach that turning point of realizing and condensing a ”replicable
ReGen”. After that milestone is achieved, it will also be up to the new stakeholders
joining in the future to help us understand how to facilitate ReGen in their communities,
and expand the program.