transform.NRW
Welcome to the future platform of the transform.NRW network project – creating sustainability through art, culture, and design.
Art, culture, and design have the potential to reveal prevailing structures in society, their impacts on our daily lives and production cycles, and to propose more sustainable alternatives, especially in collaborations with sustainability scientists. Inspired by this thesis, transform.NRW offers a hybrid platform that enables actors from the fields of art, culture, design, and science to enter into dialogue with the realms of business, politics, and civil society and initiate social and ecological transformations.
At the heart of this platform is a digital hub, a crossroads for creative exchanges where good practice models, methods, and toolkits can be shared and further developed in experimental settings. A database with around 100 good practice models makes knowledge and expertise on the topics of sustainability and transformation available for application in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations. Our objective is to promote innovative concepts for products, services, public spaces, and interventions that have the capacity to incite lasting change in existing perceptions and routines, from how we deal with people from different sociocultural backgrounds to our attitude towards natural resources.
Designers, artists, cultural workers, and scientists are addressed as the primary users of the platform. Together, with their extensive methodological, conceptual, and application-orientated knowledge and approaches, they are best qualified to achieve a transformative impact in cooperations with practitioners from politics, business, and society. Our aim is to transfer knowledge in a manner that encourages new ways of thinking and acting and to chart new paths for the future. To this end, the platform offers diverse access points and networking tools that open up a discursive space where dialogical knowledge production and joint learning foster a literacy in interdisciplinary transformation and sustainability.
The platform will be further refined and elaborated through intensive feedback and test phases in the framework of stakeholder meetings, analog design processes, workshops, and a symposium. The results will be presented in an exhibition in 2026.
Funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the transform.NRW network project will run until April 2027 under the direction of the Wuppertal Institute and the School of Art and Design of the University of Wuppertal in cooperation with 16 partner organizations from NRW.
We strive for the continuous growth of our network and knowledge base in the future. If you would like to become part of the transform.NRW network or share good practices with us, please contact us at hallo@transform.nrw