EXCENTRIC kicks off its Design Days setting the foundations for a responsible Accelerator

On April 21-22, led by project partner Museum Booster, EXCENTRIC launched its Design Days, marking a key milestone in the Accelerator programme and setting the tone for the months of collaborative prototyping, reflection, and experimentation ahead.

Held over two consecutive afternoons, the first Design Day brought together the EXCENTRIC pilots’ cohort for a deep dive into one of the programme’s most challenging and essential dimensions: how cultural and creative organisations, collect, process, and share data responsibly (legally, ethically, and socially). In the Accelerator, these questions are not treated as abstract constraints, but as active design challenges, in line with the Responsible principle in the ARCHS framework.

ARCHS places responsibility, transparency, and human-centred data practices at the core of digital transformation in the cultural sector, framing ethics, law, and social impact as integral to everyday organisational decisions rather than external compliance layers. As such, the Design Days positioned responsible data practices as inseparable from the values, ambitions, and daily practices of cultural organisations.

Why Design Days matter in the EXCENTRIC Accelerator

Design Days are part of a series of different event formats within the EXCENTRIC accelerator program, ranging from individual check-ins to collective mentoring sessions and more. They are crucial moments where theory, practice, and policy converge, allowing pilots to collectively take the time to test assumptions and, as in this first edition for example, align their technical ambitions.

Depending on the format, design days engage various target groups, including the individual project pilots, the EXCENTRIC cohort, and the public. In the upcoming Design Days, other topics relevant to the pilots will be addressed. Ultimately, Design Days also serve as preparation for the Open Demo Days.

This first edition of the Design Days served a dual purpose:

to anchor the Accelerator in shared principles before moving into more technical and experimental phases;

and to equip participants with confidence and critical tools to navigate sensitive areas such as consent, diversity data, social impact, and accountability.

Part 1: Designing for legal and ethical confidence

The first Design Day session continued the Accelerator’s ethical and legal strand, led by Olga Tykhonova (Museum Booster) and Enrique Santamaría Echeverría (Erasmus University Rotterdam), legal advisor to EXCENTRIC. Rather than delivering abstract legal guidance, the session was grounded in real organisational practice, using CTL – Cultural Trend Lisbon as a live case study.

From fear to framing: rethinking GDPR and consent

A recurring theme of the session was the need to move away from legal anxiety toward legal literacy. Enrique emphasised that GDPR is often experienced by cultural organisations as a set of prohibitions, when in practice it is a contextual framework that leaves room for interpretation, design choices, and proportionality.

Key discussions points included:

Consent under GDPR: when it is required, what makes it valid, and crucially, when it is not the only legal basis for processing data.

The distinction between personal data, non‑personal data, and special categories of data, and how mislabeling data as “sensitive” can unnecessarily limit experimentation.

The difference between legal compliance and ethical transparency: even when consent is not legally required, organisations may still choose to inform users in ways that build trust.

Consent emerged not as a checkbox, but as a situated design problem. As Olga Tykhonova highlighted, what counts as “clear” or “accessible” information depends on audience, context, and interaction design. In other words, compliance and user experience are inseparable.

Learning from CTL Lisbon: diversity, timing, and institutional assumptions

CTL’s presentation provided a concrete lens for exploring organisational needs regarding effective internal tools and policies. As a cultural organisation, CTL generates and manages a significant volume of data. Within this context, the organisation is working towards embedding diversity more intentionally into its programming, using insights from artists and audiences to support more balanced line-ups and more inclusive cultural spaces.

This need raised important questions about how such information can be gathered, interpreted, and used responsibly, especially where identity-related data is concerned.

Ultimately, CTL’s presentation, combined with other pilot feedback, contributed to (1) the ongoing reflection questionnaire, one of the core deliverables of the Accelerator, and (2) identifying crucial additions to tools to reflect the complexity of practice rather than abstract compliance, including distinguishing between data sharing versus insight sharing, or between controllers and processors.

Part 2: From ethics to impact – Why measurement matters

The second Design Day session shifted the focus from legal frameworks to social impact and value creation, opening a new strand of the Accelerator.

A concrete case: social impact in practice

The day began with a practice-driven contribution from Tony Butler (Derby Museums), who shared the organisation’s long-term use of Social Return on Investment (SROI) in the redevelopment of the Museum of Making.

The focus on return on investment and social value was introduced deliberately at this stage of the Accelerator, as a direct response to needs identified during the pre‑piloting diagnostics (D2.1). The diagnostics revealed that some EXCENTRIC pilots are already operating in contexts where they must demonstrate value beyond attendance figures, particularly in relation to public funding, municipal accountability, and long‑term sustainability. For these pilots, data is not only a tool for internal improvement, but a strategic asset for advocacy, justification of public investment, and dialogue with funders and policymakers.

Rather than presenting SROI as a universal solution, Tony framed it as a strategic choice, suitable for participatory, long-term, relationship-based projects. His case demonstrated how social impact measurement can reveal changes in confidence, belonging, skills, and employability that visitor numbers alone cannot capture; improve organisational learning and internal alignment; and translate cultural value into a language funders and policymakers understand – without reducing culture to economics alone.

Equally important were the limitations discussed: SROI is resource-intensive, leadership-dependent, and not suitable for every project. The key lesson was not “measure everything”, but “measure what matters”. D2.1 highlighted a recurring gap: being “data‑rich but insight‑poor”, struggling to translate complex datasets into narratives and indicators that make cultural impact visible and legible to external stakeholders. So, bringing this SPARKLE case into the Design Days served a clear purpose within the Accelerator.

Building a shared language around impact

In the second part of the afternoon, Carmela Milano, one of EXCENTRIC’s Researchers in Residence, formally joined the project and opened a collective reflection on how we even talk about impact, laying out the groundwork for a shared vocabulary.

Rather than starting with indicators or methodologies, Carmela invited participants to unpack words such as impact, proof, value, wellbeing, benefit, and contribution. The exercise revealed just how fragmented and emotionally loaded these terms are across organisations and contexts.

Several tensions surfaced:

the discomfort many cultural actors feel around the idea of “proof”;

the gap between what organisations value internally and what funders ask them to report;

and the difficulty of isolating an organisation’s impact from broader social and urban change.

By the end of the session, it became clear that social impact measurement is as much a cultural and organisational question as it is a technical one. Participation, trust, capacity, and shared purpose all shape whether impact assessment becomes a meaningful learning process or a burdensome reporting exercise. During our upcoming Open Demo Days 1 in May 2026 at the Arts Festival Summit in Budva, EXCENTRIC will hold a session to further explore social impact.

What this means for the Accelerator going forward

The first EXCENTRIC Design Day was conceived as a core component of the Accelerator, designed to support the internal life of the piloting process: working through the unresolved, fragile realities of data‑driven transformation.

Across the Accelerator, the Design Days take place as a series of four closed, online sessions, bringing together the pilot cohort, the project consortium, and the EXCENTRIC Orbit, with a particular role for the Researchers‑in‑Residence.

This closed setting is intentional. The work addressed during Design Days requires deep contextual understanding, shared vocabulary, and trust built over time. Within this environment, pilots are encouraged to practice “brutal honesty”, allowing problems to surface early and feedback loops to remain short and actionable. It is here that EXCENTRIC’s internal “Trading Routes” become most active: pilots exchange concrete solutions to highly specific challenges, test assumptions against peers, and collectively refine approaches in response to real‑world constraints.

At the heart of the Design Days is a mode of thinking together that is explicitly pilot‑centred. Structurally, each Design Day brings together several complementary formats clustered within the same session. These may include targeted workshops, mentorship sessions, and Sparkle Cases presentations.