1) MA Design students from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts collaborated with stakeholders in Veitvet shopping centre to help revitalize the centre and make it a cultural hub for the local community. 2) The students engaged in participatory design processes, mapping the community's assets and creating pop-up interventions. 3) While the long-term impact is unclear, the project strengthened communication and engagement between local groups and provided insights into participatory design approaches.

1. Metadesigning spaces of
engagement & exchange
Co-designing ‘seeds’ to revitalise a multi-cultural shopping
centre in Oslo.
more on: http://www.socialdesignresponse.com/
HEI: Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) - MA Design
Main Partners: Veivet senter; Bydel Bjerke, Oslo Kommune;
Goldsmiths, University of London, Regents University London;
Solution Office; Kulturhagen; Place: Veitvet, Oslo.
Keywords: Community building; Public spaces; Social enterprise

2. The context (situation/ challenge):
Owners of Veitvet shopping centre, located in Groruddalen, a
suburb of Oslo, Norway, in partnership with the local authorities,
Bydel Bjerke, were seeking ways to revitalise the centre and
reframe its purpose and function as a ‘cultural hub’ for the local
residents. Students from the MA Design programme at KHiO
embarked on a four-week ‘socially responsive design’ project in
collaboration with local stakeholders. The aim of the project was to
develop ‘pop-up’ creative social enterprises within the centre.

3. Project Response:
The project set out to explore, map and synergise emotional, cultural,
social, economic and ecological diversities existing within a multi-
cultural shopping and community centre in Veitvet, Oslo. The project
made use of a range of metadesign tools to facilitate collaborative
and participatory processes with students and the local community.
The designers response was to engage disparate user groups in a
range of creative activities to develop the centre’s connectivity,
communications and identity and to put the shop owners and local
community at the centre of it’s revitalisation strategy.

4. LOCAL
RESIDENTS
KULTURHAGEN,
RESIDENT DESIGNERS/
ARTISTS
VEITVET SHOP
OWNERS
METADESIGN
FACILITATORS
BYDEL BJERKE,
LOCAL AUTHORITY
VEITVET CENTRE
USERS
OSLO KOMMUNE,
OSLO CITY COUNCIL
VEITVET CENTRE
OWNERS
KHIO MA STUDENTS
Project stakeholders

5. MA Design students, KHiO, Olso:
The collaboration with Veitvet provided a context for the student’s
‘Socially Responsive Design’ project brief. They were able to survey,
map and create a series of interventions within the shopping centre
using a range of prototyping, visualisation and communication
strategies. They also brought an outsiders perspective to the
revitalisation process. The students were able to experience the
value of engaging in participatory processes first hand. The students
identified how the revitalisation process had been held up by a lack
of involvement towards the end by the owners.

6. Veivet Senter owners:
Competition and changing needs in the area have challenged the
owners who have partnered up with the local authorities, Bydel
Bjerke, to seek ways reframe the centre’s purpose and function as
a ‘cultural hub’ for the local residents, alongside offering
commercial and public services. The owners of the centre
recognised the positive contribution that creative practitioners can
make in the transition towards a future vision for the centre.
The Veivet senter owners provided resources both in terms of on-
site studios and funding for prototypes.

7. Metadesigners Research Group:
The metadesign facilitators were able to get the students working
effectively in groups at the start of the project and to encourage
them to hold back from solving Veitvet’s problems, so as to fully
embrace the complexity of the people and place and to engage
more deeply with the issues and aspirations. The metadesigners
offered faclitation skills, collaborative tools and a process for this
to happen. The project provided a test-bed for the further
development of metadesign tools and processes.

8. Bydel Bjerke, and Oslo Kommune
The project manager, Trude Mette Johansen from the local
authority and a resident herself, identified a need to make other
residents aware that changes were in motion at Veitvet. They were
very keen to gather fresh input from the students and to include
their pop-up interventions into the centre’s main hall for maximum
exposure. She and her team provided a favourable situation for
the students to carry out their research by facilitating contacts with
the various stakeholders and providing resources.

9. Kulturhagen:
A one-year project (2011-12) initiated by Veitvet senter where a
range of designers, architects and artists were allocated free office
spaces in the centre in return for three days a month of work
towards the centre’s development and re-branding. Prior to the
student’s interventions, the creative practitioners working at
Kulturhagen experimented with using a grass roots and
participative approach to re-imagining Veitvet. This includes
setting up a community driven ‘open library’ and holding a local
photography competition entitled ‘My Veitvet’.

10. Shop-owners and users of the centre:
The residents want the center rehabilitated. They believe that it is
important for the area's reputation. They want the centre to move
away from being a mere shopping centre to a ‘sentrum’ a meeting
place for the community. The shop keepers had no union to
organise their efforts and the locals have a diverse range of ideas
for activities that already take place and could take place in the
centre in the future.

11. The metadesign process had four key stages: contextualising,
mapping, possibility seeking and seeding future visions. The students
collaborated in multi-disciplinary teams throughout the project and
worked co-creatively. We define this process as moving from ‘me’ to
‘we’, where teams develop their identity through cycles of individual
and collective action and reflection.
INDIVIDUAL
TEAM
PARTNERS
LOCAL COMMUNITY
GLOBAL COMMUNITY
REFLECTION
ACTION
ME
WE

12. Tools & methods: we applied six different metadesign tools
throughout the one-week process. Cultural Props: is used to
introduce all of the stakeholders to each other; Collective Story-
telling and Values Quest: guides the design students from an
individual design perspective to becoming part of a team; Holistic
Mapping: aims to engage with the local context and the emerging
complexity; Bisociating Diversities: moves into rapid prototyping
and idea generation; Future Scenarios: is about seeding
collective visions and the design of collaborative interventions.

13. Role of Design
Design strengthened the communications between different local
groups within the Veitvet centre, through creating small-scale
interventions that encouraged participation and conversation. The
students were introduced to metadesign tools and process which
they in turn facilitated, adapted and tested with the local residents
and shopping centre users. Here, ‘design as planning’ is replaced
with ‘design as seeding’ (Ascott cited in Giaccardi, 2005) and ‘design
as problem solving’ gives way to ‘design as possibility seeking’
(Mizuuchi, 2006) to envision a more creative and sustainable social
environment.

14. Project output and impact: The aim was never to provide final
solutions but to co-design ‘toolkits’ to facilitate engagement and
exchange that would be further developed by the centre’s
stakeholders. In terms of social innovation, three different proposals
were handed over to Bydel Bjerke: One focused on a joint venture for
local shops to self-organise; another focused on getting users of the
centre to engage in volunteering; and the last focused on a grow-kit
for the local kindergarden. The impact of the toolkits at Veivet is
difficult to evaluate, however the local authority worker said that the
toolkits developed by the students provided new insights into ways of
working with participation and that interventions had spurred more
engagement amongst the centre’s users.

15. Learning outcomes:
Students: Learnt how to focus on a process-driven, possibility-
seeking approach, rather than problem solving and therefore to work
with emergence. Also working in multi-disciplinary teams they
developed transferable skills and methods for collaborative and
participatory design. The value of contagious optimism!
KHiO: Gained access to holistic & creative methodologies facilitated
through a Metadesign process. Communicating ideas to a range of
stakeholders
Veivet Senter: How to focus more on bottom-up approaches and that
yet with simple means, change can happen.

16. Successes and Shortcomings/ Barriers and Enablers
The students learnt how to design with a local community and
understood the value and creative reward that comes out of this way
of working. The union for shop keepers was a key positive outcome
that emerged out of their collaborations. The spirit of the project, the
energy and the shared learning resonated after the event. The project
was only a four week experiment and could have gone further. The
Veitvet owners were a barrier as they were not very explicit about
their agenda. Whilst they didn’t attend the final presentations the
student’s identified that the community were committed to the
centre’s future – through empowering the community change could
happen
Key enablers:
• Our relationship with the local authority.
• Veitvet was a sympathetic test-bed as the centre had already invited
creative people in to re-imagine its future.
• There was a small amount of funding to develop an intervention