TRANSFORMING SPACE CANVAS

The Transforming Space Canvas was commissioned by the Zurich Center for Creative Economy (ZCCE) in 2022 for the first convention on Creative Economies and Cultural Heritage. It was conceived as a flexible design tool to support collective reasoning and decision-making in complex design contexts.

The canvas provides a shared spatial structure in which goals, priorities, and actions can be articulated and progressively aligned. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive framework, it operates as a temporary device for the transfer and organization of knowledge across participants and phases of a project.
The process is typically structured in short, time-boxed cycles. Participants are first invited to formulate goals through free-flow writing. These goals are then clustered into related groups and translated into diagrammatic representations. Based on this visual organization, operative tasks are defined and iteratively refined.

The canvas is conceived as a repeatable instrument throughout the design process, supporting cumulative knowledge acquisition over time. When used within teams, multiple canvases can be compared to reveal differing expectations, approaches, and problem-solving strategies. For this reason, the canvas is often used with tracing paper overlays, allowing successive versions and transformations to be documented without fixing a single, final state.

Mediate designates the transfer and structuring of knowledge through a shared spatial and diagrammatic device.

Activate refers to the translation of this knowledge into coordinated actions, tasks, and temporal sequences.