Conference Program

The Change Laboratory (Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013), developed within the theoretical framework of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), is an interventionist methodology aimed at promoting expansive learning, collective transformation, and organizational innovation in complex social and work activity systems (Engeström, 1987; Engeström & Sannino, 2021; Engeström et al., 1999). It supports collective processes of analysis and transformation through the surfacing and elaboration of structural contradictions that traverse object-oriented activity systems (Engeström et al., 2024), while also functioning as a dialogic, reflective, and democratic space for adult learning.

This contribution presents an experience of the Change Laboratory implemented within the Working Table/Groupon Severe Social Marginalization of the Municipality of Varese (Bonometti & Ferri, 2025). The process involved approximately thirty actors engaged in services for individuals at high risk of marginalization, providing a context for adult education grounded in informal and interprofessional exchange. From this perspective, the laboratory served not only as a device for organizational development but also as a democratic learning space in which subjects from diverse organizations negotiated meanings, made systemic contradictions visible, and constructed a shared object of work.

The intervention, conducted between November 2024 and February 2025, consisted of six sessions facilitated by five researchers from the University of Insubria and the Catholic University, under the scientific supervision of A. Sannino. The primary objective was to transform the local approach to severe marginalization through the co-design of innovative solutions, grounded in a systemic and historically situated analysis of emerging issues. The process aimed at a reconceptualization of the shared object of activity, redefining marginalization no longer as an individual condition to be addressed fragmentarily, but as a systemic, relational, and territorially constructed object. This cultural and conceptual reconfiguration fostered the emergence of a collective agency—understood as the subjects' capacity to take control of their activity—oriented toward transforming practices and inter-service relations.

A central methodological pillar was the principle of double stimulation: selected empirical data (critical episodes, problematic cases, documentary evidence) were returned to participants to make systemic contradictions visible and stimulate reflective processes oriented toward change (Sannino, 2016). Participants identified tensions between established practices and complex, changing needs, highlighting service fragmentation, weak interorganizational integration, and the absence of a shared strategic vision. Historical analysis and examination of concrete cases clarified the systemic nature of the issues, while the activity triangle model enabled analysis of relations among subjects, tools, rules, community, division of labor, and object.

On this basis, the group outlined a zone of proximal development and co-designed innovative responses: a dynamic mapping of territorial resources, a multidimensional and multi-agency team, and a physical coordination space among public and private actors. These outcomes can be read as concrete mediations of collective agency and as indicators of a new democratic capacity for interorganizational action. Overall, the Varese case illustrates how the Change Laboratory, in interprofessional contexts of adult education, can support processes of conceptual redefinition akin to concept formation in the wild, democratic learning, and the construction of new territorial coalitions.