SwissINCA project as INCA supporting spin-off

21 April 2025 By

In Switzerland, within the INCA project, SUPSI has been granted for a side money project from the Mercator Schweiz Foundation named SwissINCA. It started in November 2024 and will end in June 2026. We might consider SwissINCA as a direct “spin-off” of INCA.

The SwissINCA project aims at exploiting and further disseminate in Switzerland INCA results and contents.

It offers to INCA an added value on one hand exploiting its results in a complementary approach to multiply its range. On other hand to boost dissemination and deployment of the project in Switzerland, allowing to enrich it with additional, not planned, outputs. SwissINCA sits on the whole INCA approach and deliverables, in particular deploying: the educational tool on digital platformization processes awareness and citizenship empowerment; the video-documentary on the impact of big-tech companies and platformization on society; the exhibition, able to translate in an original and innovative “language” the learning and gaining acquaintance of inner aspects of digital platforms.

On INCA outputs and concept, and on these latter three outcomes SwissINCA project leverages its activity and targets the challenge for a systemic educational impact.

Starting from the educational module for secondary and post-primary students that will be carry out and released in the INCA project, ready in a first draft version in Spring 2025, SwissINCA aims at targeting the challenge above depicted by:

  • Using the educational tool for a specific test first in Ticino area with teachers and two middle school classes and then with the track to scale-up in Switzerland.
  • Projecting the video-documentary in a public and visible location in Ticino (I2a, the iInternational Architecture institute, located in Villa Saroli in Lugano) followed by a debate with teachers, educational and urban policy makers and experts in didactic on the possibilities and ways to introduce the use of the video in school activities as well as in other supporting and side activities, combined with the educational module.
  • Staging the exhibition in the same premise (Villa Saroli) open for public visit and with a specific presentation for teachers and students of the schools that will test the educational module and beyond.
  • Presenting the Swiss experience on educational module testing within a public workshop of the INCA and SwissINCA projects in Autumn 2025 in the same place hosting the exhibition, linked with the celebration of the International democracy day promoted by UN. As follow-up we will disseminate the project towards the Swiss national school system in both Ticino and Swiss thematic events and innovative Swiss Campus Democracy and the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation SERI.

SwissINCA is then both a means to enlarge and deepen the dissemination of INCA outputs and approach and a further activity engined by INCA to spread the importance of conceiving an approach of digital citizenship able to cope with digital platforms in a politically and socially active and performative move.

Filippo Bignami, SUPSI