CIMULACT stands for “Citizen and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon 2020” and was a European research project funded under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, running from June 2015 to March 20181. CIMULACT engaged citizens and a wide range of stakeholders in jointly redefining the Research and Innovation Agenda for the Horizon 2020 programme, with the goal of making it more relevant and accountable to society. The project delivered 23 research topics to the European Commission, as recommendations for future research and innovation policies. The consortium included 29 partners to represent 30 Countries across Europe. The Politecnico di Milano participated in the project through the POLIMI DESIS Lab of the Department of Design. The core of the project lies in the involvement of the citizens. The main driver of CIMULACT was to make the future more accessible, widely shared and extensively discussed among citizens. The challenge was to transform a research agenda from a topic for experts to a public conversation for a greater democracy.

CIMULACT was organized into the following activities:

1. National Citizen Vision Workshop
In the first stage of the project, more than 1000 citizens from the participant countries were involved in workshops to co-create visions of desirable futures, starting from their wishes
and concerns. All the partners involved carried out national workshops with around 40 of their own citizens.This was a first face-to-face consultation and it was aimed at collecting the main desires and concerns of European citizens about the future. The outputs of this workshop were collective visions of possible futures, that the citizens elaborated in groups. The visions included a very broad range of perspectives on the future.

2. Social Needs Clustering Workshop
The main goal of this workshop was to identify the needs underlying citizens’ visions of the future. To accomplish this task, the core partners of the consortium met in Paris with 10 invited experts that played the role of “challengers”. These “challengers” brought an external perspective on the topics that were emerging, attempting to mitigate some of the biases generated by the consortium. The citizens’ needs that emerged from this analysis were eventually clustered into 12 so called “social needs” that ultimately determined the directions to be investigated during the following consultations.

3. Co-creation Workshop
This session had the objective of producing a first draft of the research programmes in the form of scenarios; starting from the social needs identified in previous stages. Several stakeholders were gatherd together in a workshop to contribute to this task: representatives of the citizens who had contributed to the original visions, alongside experts and the partners of the project. Citizens had the role of witnesses and guarantors of the wishes and concerns expressed in their visions. Experts were crucial to bring their vertical knowledge on the different topics and give scientific accuracy to the scenarios. Finally, consortium partners were essential for several reasons: to ensure the continuity of the project, to bring their specific knowledge and experience and to connect experts with citizens. The process was outlined by the POLIMI DESIS Lab team in collaboration with the consortium partners. Based on a scenario-building and future studies approach, it was conceived as a journey to guide the participants along a challenging set of steps leading towards the design research scenarios.

4. Codesign Workshop
This session was held in-presence, in each country of the project, and was tailored to different target groups. The whole consortium involved citizens, policy makers, and many other specialised stakeholders, in order to enrich and validate the research scenarios produced in the previous phases. Different countries adopted different consultation approaches according to their specific targets. Partners from different countries also defined their own methods for the consultations. POLIMI DESIS Lab, conceived and developed an ad hoc process to codesign with designers.

5. Online Consultation
In order to reach a larger audience and a quantitative relevance, the research scenarios have been collected in an online platform and spread to almost 3500 people all over Europe, to ask their opinion on the contents. In this way, scenarios were enriched with inputs coming from citizens and experts from all over Europe.

6. Pan-European Conference
The last consultation was held 18 months after the beginning of the project. The aim was to transform the research scenarios built so far into research topics for the next round of calls of Horizon 2020 . During this very last stage, the European Commission’s project officers, some invited experts, and CIMULACT partners joined in an interactive creative dialogue aimed at reflecting the needs, concerns, and visions of European citizens into the research programme calls.