How design innovation adds 'STEAM' to Denmark's energy transition

Enlit on the Road visited award-winning design agency KirtxThomsen in Copenhagen to understand how design innovation can accelerate the energy transition and investigate what makes the city’s innovative space unique.

When it comes to innovation, the focus of R&D is most often on STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. But for Rune Kirt, CEO of the agency, what’s important and increasingly needed is bringing the ‘A’ into the equation, that of design and the arts.

“We bring an ‘A’ to STEM, so it becomes STEAM, to bring the arts into STEM…a little bit like the softer skills, almost like looking at two sides of the brain.

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“Where one maybe tends to think more in one side of the brain on the hard skills, we bring the other mindset in, where we think a little bit more holistically and [focus] also more on the 'why' questions.”

This holistic thinking, states Kirt, is then materialised in their visualisations, adding an impactful element that can then be communicated with C-Level executives and other industry stakeholders who may not otherwise be related to the tech itself.

This in turn, “enables better collaboration and, in the end, accelerates the successful implementation of a product or new technology.”

Watch the rest of Kirt's Enlit on the Road interview where he breaks down the importance of collaboration for innovation and why Denmark's flat geography has aided the city's 'thinking outside of the box' approach.