May 23rd, 2025
A Collectible Trading Card Game for Education in Regenerative Food Systems
International & urban-regional synchronous development of an Open Educational Resource (OER) and Game for the Creative Commons
Open Development began
on May 08th 2025
Visit Project website for detailed information
Walking up our UNESCO world heritage “Bergpark” under Hercules watchful, naked eyes. Walking towards our first Innovation Circle for the State Ministry of Agriculture and the Environment, hosted at the Forest School Kassel – a space dedicated to Education since 1926, surrounded by a forest, much, much older. Entering an agile development sprint, a temporal coop quest within our climate education landscape in the fields of #foodsystems. An innovation program, initiated, funded and facilitated by our innovative documenta City Stadt Kassel for the Ministry – together with a network of expert organizations in the field.
Letting 100 gut project ideas pour out of us into the middle of our “Great Circle”, then collectively point voting them down to 4 projects with 4 Team Circles. Sitting in the green grass in springtime sun beams, eating fresh baked bred, jamming ideas in our 4 Circles…walking back down town……
After an intense and fruitful first round in the Innovation Sprint, we will continue on Monday to write our concepts and Offering out. With this official procedure we will then be directly awarded, assigned, equipped with a fund and a Go! from the City Administration of our Stadt Kassel.
I am grateful to be part of the Journey – bringing my work experience, skill sets, talents and passions to the Circle, as all of our fellows do. + I bring my fresh On-Boarding bag of practices and approaches, inspired by the wonderful Conscious Food Systems Alliance, convened by UNDP Food Systems. An Alliance, I’ve gratefully and happily joined.
Grateful and excited to be part of a 6-month agile innovation journey, initiated by the Hessian Ministry for Agriculture and the Environment, Germany.
Starting next week at the Forest School in Kassel, I’ll join a small group of selected innovators to co-create impactful solutions with a special focus on regenerative food systems. In just two weeks, we’ll shape our ideas into a concrete development plan—and then sprint forward, supported by dedicated funding, until November.
The Climate Education Landscape is a project of the Hessian Ministry for Agriculture and the Environment. The City of Kassel, the Working Group for Nature and Environmental Education in Hesse (ANU), and the World Garden Witzenhausen are jointly implementing the project as a coordination office for Kassel and the surrounding area.
They serve as the regional points of contact. The initiative is part of the Hesse Climate Plan in the area of action titled “Education and Research.”
The goal is to embed climate protection and sustainability structurally within local educational landscapes for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). To this end, the full range of local stakeholders from education, municipalities, administration, business, civil society, and climate protection should be involved. The initiation phase of the Climate Education Landscapes is planned to run until mid-2028.
April 30th 2025 – AndrĂ© Boeing
Educators from diverse backgrounds have started using our narrative approach to explore the themes of waste, recycling, and the Great Circular. Because we developed the game under a Creative Commons license, it’s now being remixed and adapted for various gameplay formats and educational use cases — from Education for Sustainable Development to playful media education.
I’m deeply grateful and happy. After a full year of passionate, committed development, today marks my last day with the SWAG project. I’m now setting out on new project quests in the field of Regenerative Food Systems — my heart’s calling.
đź“„ Project documentation: swa.futurespace.org
🌍 Join the educational community continuing SWAG: community.epic-education.eu
Thank you to everyone who contributed! Onwards to new adventures. 🙏✨
Narrative Education and educational Adventures activate Joy, Playfulness and deepen engagement among learners. The German non-profit .org Epic Education adopted our Creative Commons Game “The Smart Waste Agency” in March 2025
To support our educational products of Pen & Paper and Live Action Roleplaying Games (LARP) and tabletop/card + movements Games I have designed a gamified, Open-Source Online Community platform for Open Educational Resources around our themes.
You can visit the Beta Release at
https://community.epic-education.eu/
March, 6th 2025 – written by AndrĂ© Boeing
It is with great joy and gratitude that my Ktopia.eu André Boeing application with CoFSA has been reviewed, and I have been welcomed as a new member of the CoFSA Community. I look forward to contributing to our Alliance and being inspired by my fellow members—networking and collaborating with professionals across food and agriculture systems who also recognize that, underneath our helpful programs, policies, and funding structures, we must essentially cultivate inner capacities to activate systemic change and regeneration.
Healthy soil begins with a fertile mind
The Conscious Food Systems Alliance (CoFSA), supports people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration. Convened by UNDP, is a movement of food, agriculture, and consciousness practitioners united around a common goal: to support people from across food and agriculture systems to cultivate the inner capacities that activate systemic change and regeneration.
As the United Nations lead agency on international development, UNDP works in 170 countries and territories to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality. We help countries to develop policies, leadership skills, partnering abilities, institutional capa- bilities, and to build resilience to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Our work is concentrated in three focus areas; sustainable development, democratic governance and peace building, and climate and disaster resilience. Find more info at undp.org.
As an individual member under the Ktopia.eu narrative label, my core contribution to CoFSA lies in multistakeholder dialogues and cooperative pathways for developing Open Educational Resources (OER). These narrative, playful, and co-created OERs aim to inspire and support conscious citizen participation in transforming our food systems.
You can find my membership profile here.
Antonio Guterres,Â
UN Secretary General
Playful Food System Expedition Quests, pragmatic k.limate Utopias and mindful Living Lab Ecotopes for growing joyful Optimisms.
Here we have it! A wonderful, clunky sentence and essence of my self treated re-identity design retreat. As I compressed the vision and mission statement, as well as a tiny manifesto into that one clunky sentence, it’s pretty condensed and short. The golden nugget.
The 6 Services showed up in retroperspective after the first year since founding ktopia: Idea Scouting, Rapid Prototyping, Facilitating a multi-stakeholder quest coop in a living lab, Deploying custom self-hosted Open-Source Social Collaboration Tec, Myth Weaving an engaging story narrative, Designing the Narrative into an edutaining product and freely share with the commons.
If, so far it still sounds lofty and abstract. The concrete products out of this context show, that the deeper philosophy is also pragmatic with an effective outcome.
I founded Ktopia in January 2024 as a freelancer. In November 2023, during International Novel Writing Month, I wrote and published a climate fiction short story. It painted an alternative vision for my place of residence, the documenta City of Kassel, Germany.
Ktopia, the Smart Eco City version of Kassel, embraced both technology and practical ecology – especially through its abundant, close loop circular food system – its passion for creative urban gardens and gastronomy. My story was inspired by the novel Ecotopia, published by Ernest Callenbach a year after I was born.
“I have great faith in optimism as a guiding principle, if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
—Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Inspired by the stories of Ecotopia, Ktopia, and Sir Arthur’s optimism as a guiding principle, I have also found great beauty in Pragmatic Utopias, betting on the same outcome: a possible, self-fulfilling prophecy.
Two months into Ktopia, I became immersed in its first project quest within the Wastelands, assigned by the city administration’s Smart City department. Over the course of 2024, this led to the creation of the Smart Waste Agency Game (The SWAG), an edutaining, open-source tabletop and card game about waste, recycling, and the circular economy. But something else emerged as well: a circular, cooperative model, as described in this article.
A year after its foundation, in January/February 2025, I have revisited Ktopia.eu itself again and reflected on its practical philosophy while redesigning the website to express the “today”.
Technically, Ktopia remains a social brand under my freelance status within the EU Small Enterprise / Business Owner scheme, dedicated solely to the common good. But I let it flow & grow organically. It might as well evolve into a non-profit org legal entity, that becomes a fellowship in diverse project coops for shared seasons.
On the re-designed website there is also a visual story, narrated by Grove Druid. It also tells about the essence of what playing with pragmatic utopias in ktopia means.
As I researched the possibility space of Smart Waste and Youth Participation for my City Administration client exactly one year ago, I compared different countries and their waste management systems – from statistics to the mindsets and models behind. I also came across another helpful meme from Japan, known for it´s mindful, simple words describing not just a policy but a philosophy: „mottainai.“ This term, which merges respect for resources with practical conservation efforts, serves as a cornerstone of Japan’s environmentally conscious mindset and exemplary waste management system.
In recent years, „mottainai“ has gained international recognition as a versatile principle for environmental conservation and sustainable living. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai popularized the term outside Japan by adopting it as a motto for her environmental and social justice work in Africa. The concept aligns closely with the 3Rs of waste management (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) but adds a fourth, „Respect,“ to highlight the importance of respecting the earth’s resources.
Cultural attitudes towards cleanliness, respect for resources, and community responsibility play a significant role in the effectiveness of Japan’s waste management system. The concept of „mottainai“ (a sense of regret concerning waste) permeates Japanese society, encouraging frugality and the mindful use of resources. Japan has, like Germany, implemented EPR policies (Extended Producer Responsibility), requiring manufacturers and retailers to take responsibility for the disposal of products and packaging. This includes obligations for recycling and has led to innovations in sustainable product design in Japan to reduce waste and improve recyclability.
To fully articulate the breadth of „mottainai,“ I proposed an expanded 6R framework, which includes 2 basic mindsets and 4 practical applications.
In the graph, the x-axis, common ground and horizon is „Respect“. The y-axis, the depth and heights is Respond. Both build the foundation pillars for the Circle and Quadrants. The 4 practical applications of Mottainai. Reduce Waste wherever possible. Reuse waste in creative ways. Repair items as long as you can. Recycle if the end of the product has come.
A consequence of the 6R mindset would be Exnovating the dominant product life cycles trimmed for short life spans of products to sell new stuff quickly and dispose of the outdated version as waste or second markets in developing countries. We should encourage markets for repair-abilities both within products as well as repair and enhance service small businesses.
The 6R offer a holistic framework to create fun and deep educational content, which is being planned to accompany the SWAG Tabletop- and Cardgame and 2025 Boxversion release! We are currently scouting for funding, to create the edutaining 6R content.
A cloud platform allowing for managing all incomes and expenses of a project. In full transparency (you can even download the csv and analyze). A fiscal host offering it’s non-profit legal structure to receive grants from institutions. There you have it. The SWAG, the Smart Waste Agency Game Product is now fiscally hosted and open financed here:
https://opencollective.com/the-swag
For a video explaining the principle, see below. I start with a screenshot showing in public transparency, where money came from and where it went for what.
posted January 19th 2025 by André Boeing
Looking back into 2024, the back then January has been almost prophetic. “Wasteland – beginning at the end” is the title of my January 11th 2024 post.
Before I simplified the complexity of food systems down to 4 quadrants. The last quadrant being the one, where all the waste of our food systems goes. In an ideal world this “waste quadrant” at the end is naturally the beginning of the first quadrant of food systems: Where our food grows. It’s a perfect “Circular” when the waste of food becomes the base for new food.
But in our current world, the waste quadrant is the one, where the Circular usually ends and creates a big mass with a destructive impact on our life systems.
In 2025 – a whole year later – I am still “Beginning at the end” and found my calling in the “Wastelands” – although not the most pretty one in food systems and I am looking forward to dedicate my passion to the other quadrants, once my work in the Wastelands is being done.
In my last English post here from May 1st 2024 I reported our German Smart City Kassel Youth Participation project getting ready to launch in it’s first iteration – and then stopped posting here because all my time has been focused on our German Projekt and local work in the documenta City Kassel documented here.
We had an epic fail on May 29th in our first field test, celebrated the valuable insights, modified our approach, re-launched our Smart Waste Agency Game Project during the summer holidays, now witnessed super positive resonance among the young participants and finally released a first printed Alpha version of the Tabletop- and card game in December – for the exploration of the Wastelands, Recycling and the Circular.
In 2025, I want to take our game out of town and into the European Union. We plan to connect young people from diverse EU countries and cities on our gamified social network, teach the design of waste monster cards, smart waste multi-tools, and tabletop wastelands via local youth organizations, localize the game into different languages and country contexts, and start the exchange about smart waste, zero waste, and recycling in our cities.
Connected by our own gamified open-source collaboration network, we could tackle our „waste monsters“ together, exchange smart ideas about ways to do so and continue to develop THE SWAG. On our path we will connect with agents and young „game designer“ in other countries with the same challenge and learn about our regional specifics.
The fresh EU expansion Page launched here:
https://www.the-swag.eu/
Branching from the German site here:
https://swa.futurespace.org/
and being financed with radical Transparency here:
https://opencollective.com/the-swag
