Fostering Valuable Participation in Shaping Spaces and Societies: Towards Creating an Ethical Meta Level in the Model Design for Innovativeness

Abstract

The approach of an education for innovativeness aims to enable pupils to participate in shaping societies in a mature manner, which includes the appropriation and designing of spaces. This approach is useful for educational and practical concepts such as Spatial Citizenship, which promotes the use of digital geomedia for individual and collective appropriation and re-shaping of spaces. However, encouraging innovativeness may also seem to foster participation in questionable inventing processes with trivial –or even harmful –intentions. Including an ethical meta level in the model design for innovativeness would generate reflection on the purpose of the novelty. In this paper, we look first at theories that address the term ‘problem’, social innovations andapplied ethics, in order then to develop a first attempt at creating an ethical meta level in the model design for innovativenes.