Design for policy

Time is not a neutral backdrop to policymaking – questions of pace, timing and horizons have become central to what we govern. Learn more about our conversation at PolyFutures.

Our idea for this "off-site day" was simple: to bring those shaping EU policies and institutional processes into the same room as design experts working in innovation, human-centred transformation, and futures thinking.

We invited participants to engage in an unusual exercise: a conversation with young EU citizens from the year 2040.

If Europe is to navigate an age of overlapping crises, it needs to cultivate new cultures of governance, not just new tools. Here is how the PolyFutures event imagined them.

Space is often discussed as if its future were already mapped out: more satellites, more launchers, greater competition, higher performance. Yet this framing leaves little room to question how these futures are imagined in the first place.

When artists, scientists, and policymakers collaborate over time, new forms of sense-making become possible: weak signals are detected earlier, insights flow across disciplines, and the very definition of what counts as evidence broadens.

The EU Policy Lab launched a policy experiment exploring how a trauma‑informed approach can enrich ongoing work such as the Directorate-General for Agriculture work on Generational Renewal in Agriculture.

Across Europe, ambitious environmental policies have been multiplying, most notably under the European Green Deal. Yet translating these commitments into practical change is often uneven, slow, or incomplete. Read on to learn why this happens and can be done about it.

Its a wrap! After more than three years of research, experimentation and collaboration, we are proud to announce the publication of the Technical Proposal for an EU Harmonised Waste Sorting Labelling System.