RECHARGE Diary

RECHARGE presented an overview of the work from the past 2 years at the Italian cultural economics and management international workshop entitled Rethinking Culture and Creativity, organised by the Universities of Chieti-Pescara, Torino (department of economics), Macerata, Firenze, Catania (department of humanities), and Campania Luigi Vanvitelli (department of economics). The title of this year’s workshop was Behavioural Impact of Cultural Production, which took place 3-4 October 2024 at the University of Chieti-Pescara. RECHARGE presented at the session on Models of Participatory Governance.

While the keynotes were in Italian, as well as several presentations, we were still able to connect with other relevant projects, including the Stronger Peripheries EU project, presented by Pedro Costa from the Instituto Universitario de Lisboa. RECHARGE learnt about their framework to assess the impact of engaging in participatory cultural activities for the various stakeholders taking part. The project’s toolkit is adaptable, qualitatively applied, constructed for specific needs, in specific contexts, and co-developed by the partners. RECHARGE will study the project’s model and explore potential application in our Living Labs.

Another speaker, Tiziano Antognozzi from the University of Chieti-Pescara, presented on games and their potential for behavioural change and solving complex social problems. His key premise was that cultural experiences, in a gaming situation, can challenge frozen behaviour and enable participants to explore new meaning making within the context of the game. RECHARGE will review their paper and incorporate their findings for the development of our Playbook and other tools for the Knowledge Base. We agree a game-like format for delivering content is highly efficient for our Living Labs process.

RECHARGE presented on the theoretical framework and preliminary evidence emerging from our first 2 years of work and received a couple interesting questions that will inform our future outputs. First question had to do with the challenges found specifically in rural areas, as opposed to urban areas, when engaging in participatory practices. The experience of our Living Labs cannot serve to generalise but we will be able to provide comparative perspectives to inform the rural setting. For instance, we already know from our experience in our Living Labs that the vocabulary widely use in cities may not be appropriate for engaging in smaller regions, and that the timeframe of an iteration, or participatory cycle, may be considerably faster in urban settings. Our future output will consider the rural/urban dimension when presenting results. The presentation is part of our RECHARGE RESEARCH page and can be acted here.

A second question had to do with the challenges experienced when applying theory into practice, as real life contexts are invariably more complex. Indeed, our Living Labs have all experienced a great challenge engaging with stakeholders to co-design, co-create, co-evaluate, and reiterate following a full participatory process. Organisations invariably encounter time limitations, mixed objectives, complexity of concepts, and a lack of clarity on the benefits when engaging in participatory business models for value capture. At RECHARGE we strongly believe that our output considers these challenges as we have considered a practical approach to our tools, which are being currently revised based on the experience of all our 9 Living Labs. Our goal is for all cultural heritage organisations to be able to experiment with our concepts and methods.

In addition, many participants requested access to our glossary to reuse our definitions of Cultural Living Labs, Participatory Cultural Business Models, and Cultural Value Chain, and this will be made available soon. RECHARGE also invited workshop participants to share their best practices of Living Labs, of participatory practices, and of cultural business models. A crowdsourced, geo-based, inventory will be launched in the coming period. Stay tuned !