But you look again and wonder: where are the people whose lives are supposedly being transformed?

Of course, they’re nowhere to be found. While represented in photographs and case studies, their stories have been carefully curated to support whatever narrative is being told; they’re not actually here, and it’s clear they have had little say in how their stories are being told.

This experience represents a deep, structural problem in how professional spaces approach engagement. The same choreography repeats across climate summits, urban planning conferences, and design showcases: passionate presentations about community needs, networking sessions filled with wine and good intentions, and heady claims of communities just waiting for all the wisdom on display to somehow trickle down to them and solve their problems. 

These eager community members, the supposed beneficiaries of all this expertise, are typically absent from the spaces that prize and capitalise on their stories, reduced instead to convenient case studies in someone else’s portfolio. While their voices are “presented and represented”, they are never actual participants in “the discourse” about their lives and futures.

This disconnect led us to some fundamental questions:

• What if the people these ideas are meant to help could actually participate in shaping them?
• What if essential and meaningful conversations didn’t require intimidating conference halls?
• What if we could make complex ideas accessible without sacrificing their substance?

We at CS Studio, the African Centre for Cities, and various partners wanted to produce not another conference or exhibition, but a fundamentally different approach to how ideas circulate and take root.

SHIFT emerged as our response.

SHIFT is a portable system designed over three years by a team of researchers and activists, policy wonks, graphic and product designers, journalists and illustrators from across the global South and its diaspora. What we created together defies simple categorisation: it’s part educational tool, part community organising kit, part gaming and strategy tool. It is also beautifully designed, because we believe in the symbiosis of form and function. Most importantly, it’s designed to work anywhere—in a community centre, a classroom, a public square, or your living room.

The beauty of SHIFT lies in its simplicity. It brings the tools for meaningful conversation directly to the people who need them. Communities can use it to tell their own stories, to imagine different futures, to plan concrete actions. Educators can build new curricula around it, and engage their students in novel ways, challenging them to think about context, history and new ideas. Activists and organisers can use it to plan and build together. Even those glossy professional firms will find prompts, challenges, ideas and tools they can use to better engage with communities.

SHIFT connects back to older traditions of community-driven practices, and sits alongside the work of other people-focused contemporary organisations. We believe that centring the needs of people—not rapacious corporations or vogueish gatherings—can make a comeback to become one of the defining markers of design and the built environment in this era of unprecedented urbanisation, inequality, climate anxiety and technological change.

The first edition, themed Emergence, contains 48 different tools—games, case studies, music, provocations—organised around four types of activities: Explore, Think, Adapt, and Play. Each item is designed to work on multiple levels, accessible to a curious student and a seasoned policy expert alike.

Focused on urban issues, Emergence is our first experiment in creating the tools for a people-focused practice that empowers communities to creatively figure out ways to address the challenges they face, with hints and suggestions on how they might be used, but also room to play around with them.

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about SHIFT is what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t provide answers or promise to solve anything. Instead, it offers something we believe is more valuable: the tools for people to have better conversations with each other, to connect with ideas that have been forgotten, and to visualise their challenges in new ways, and to imagine solutions that actually fit the shape of their lives.

Every two years, CS Studio and our collaborators will launch a new edition, with different themes and fresh tools, each one designed to strengthen what we’ve almost forgotten how to do: think together, dream together, act together.