3.5 days re-treat, re-align and re-design – ktopia year II
Playful Food System Expedition Quests, pragmatic k.limate Utopias and mindful Living Lab Ecotopes for growing joyful Optimisms.
Here we have it! A wonderful, clunky sentence and essence of my self treated re-identity design retreat. As I compressed the vision and mission statement, as well as a tiny manifesto into that one clunky sentence, it’s pretty condensed and short. The golden nugget.
The 6 Services showed up in retroperspective after the first year since founding ktopia: Idea Scouting, Rapid Prototyping, Facilitating a multi-stakeholder quest coop in a living lab, Deploying custom self-hosted Open-Source Social Collaboration Tec, Myth Weaving an engaging story narrative, Designing the Narrative into an edutaining product and freely share with the commons.
If, so far it still sounds lofty and abstract. The concrete products out of this context show, that the deeper philosophy is also pragmatic with an effective outcome.
I founded Ktopia in January 2024 as a freelancer. In November 2023, during International Novel Writing Month, I wrote and published a climate fiction short story. It painted an alternative vision for my place of residence, the documenta City of Kassel, Germany.
Ktopia, the Smart Eco City version of Kassel, embraced both technology and practical ecology – especially through its abundant, close loop circular food system – its passion for creative urban gardens and gastronomy. My story was inspired by the novel Ecotopia, published by Ernest Callenbach a year after I was born.
“I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
—Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Inspired by the stories of Ecotopia, Ktopia, and Sir Arthur’s optimism as a guiding principle, I have also found great beauty in Pragmatic Utopias, betting on the same outcome: a possible, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Two months into Ktopia, I became immersed in its first project quest within the Wastelands, assigned by the city administration’s Smart City department. Over the course of 2024, this led to the creation of the Smart Waste Agency Game (The SWAG), an edutaining, open-source tabletop and card game about waste, recycling, and the circular economy. But something else emerged as well: a circular, cooperative model, as described in this article.
A year after its foundation, in January/February 2025, I have revisited Ktopia.eu itself again and reflected on its practical philosophy while redesigning the website to express the “today”.
Technically, Ktopia remains a social brand under my freelance status within the EU Small Enterprise / Business Owner scheme, dedicated solely to the common good. But I let it flow & grow organically. It might as well evolve into a non-profit org legal entity, that becomes a fellowship in diverse project coops for shared seasons.
On the re-designed website there is also a visual story, narrated by Grove Druid. It also tells about the essence of what playing with pragmatic utopias in ktopia means.