Co-creating sustainable futures – The MUSAE Factory Model for SDG-oriented innovation through art and technology

Innovation is central to advancing the Sustainable Development Goals and European agendas, yet current models struggle to address systemic complexity, trade-offs, and long-term transitions. This contribution presents the MUSAE project and its open-source Factory Model, an art-driven, futures-oriented operational framework aligned with the Industry 5.0 paradigm. At its core is the Design Futures Art-driven (DFA) method, which integrates trend analysis, visioning, ideation, and prototyping by combining artistic experimentation, design, technological development, and co-creation with artificial intelligence. Tested through art-and-technology residencies in the context of ‘food as medicine’, MUSAE shows how shared visions of the future can generate prototypes up to TRL5 and foster systemic synergies. The model interprets SDG 9 as an enabler of integrated, human- and planet-centred innovation under conditions of uncertainty.