Recently, the Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation asked VisionArc to help map out and illustrate the breadth of cross-council connections established through 5 of their initiatives during the last year. These included: a plan for a Design Innovation Policy, who’s aim is to create a new values system for design integration in the global community; a Visualizing Complex Systems initiative that creates tools to inform society through transparency and participation; a Reciprocal Design Index for sustainable social and urban design policy; an Environmental Index for creating a shared information platform for resource consumption awareness; and a Safe Water Project that entails the design of an inexpensive, hand-held filtration product to serve the needs for drinking water in environmentally challenged and under-served communities.

VisionArc’s mapping helped communicate the broad reach of design and its relevance, through the Design Council’s efforts, to the larger World Economic Forum community.

The BPL Central Branch is the main hub that sorts and distributes library material to the larger Brooklyn Public Library system. VisionArc studied the macro-system as well as the specific transfer nodes to identify challenges and opportunities within the materials handling process. A series of mappings and conceptual guidelines were developed to aid library administrators with system upgrades and architectural strategies as part of a larger capital project initiative.

The Council area is organized into 9 thematic clusters, each housing discussion areas for individual Global Agenda Councils. To better facilitate the interconnections between different Councils, VisionArc suggested various ways to curate the nine clusters and their respective Councils. Not only did the final layout of the Council area consider the optimal positioning of the nine clusters and their potential links, but it also incorporated more nuanced and interpretive groupings. Three guiding meta-themes were used to categorize each Council within the cluster- people, places and connections. These themes sought to find new synergies, concepts and the sharing of best practices for each Global Agenda Council within a flexible and transformative platform.