Co-Designing STEAM Education Future Research and Policies: A Progressively Pre-Filled Technology Roadmapping Technique.

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education is considered essential for countries’ competitiveness (Bybee, 2010), yet, educators argue that for addressing critical challenges of the 21st century, the classic STEM approach overlooks creativity-related elements, indicated by the letter “A” for Arts (Daugherty, 2013) in the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) acronym. Several countries have introduced policies to promote STE(A)M education (Allina, 2018), while developing a long-term, macro-level policy planning and funding for STEAM remain challenging. The EU-funded RoadSTEAMer project on STEAM education roadmapping of future research and policies, provides the context for testing the extension of the classic foresight technique of technology roadmapping (Phaal & Muller, 2009) with a massive co-design approach (Meroni et al., 2018) through a progressively pre-filled visual canvas facilitating collective foresight (Misuraca et al., 2012; Newton et al., 2024).

Building on the proven advantages of the technology roadmapping technique to visually facilitate foresight and strategizing (Phaal & Muller, 2009; Yasunaga et al., 2009), this study proposes extending the technique to participatory policymaking with massive co-design, taking a reflexive approach to investigate the benefits and challenges.

Specifically, the proposed methodology consists of four phases.

• Phase 1. Pre-fill the Roadmap Canvas: In the technology roadmapping technique, the dimensions of information need to be defined according to the specific context of use (Phaal et al., 2004). The methodology is extended by pre-filling relevant background information.

• Phase 2. Co-design with Stakeholders: The pre-filled information provides participants with a synthesis of key information. Multiple sequential o-design workshops are organized with all relevant stakeholder groups: contributions are visually synthesized in the canvas, resulting in a progressively pre-filled methodology that supports asynchronous collective intelligence.

• Phase 3. Synthesis of the STEAM Roadmap: a synthesis workshop is organized to consolidate the inputs and transform them into a roadmap and specific future policies.

• Phase 4. Testing: policymakers and stakeholders are presented with the fully pre-filled canvas and are invited to assess and comment on the formulated future policies.

  At present, ten workshops have been conducted with 57 stakeholders from a range of diverse backgrounds and areas of expertise, resulting in the collection of over a hundred policy inputs. This paper proposes and reflects on extending technology roadmapping with a progressively pre-filled visual methodology to integrate massive co-design, enhancing democratization and collaboration in bottom-up national policy-making. It pragmatically develops an actionable roadmap for EU STEAM education funding, providing insights for advancing STEAM education.