Creative agility and futures literacy as transdisciplinary innovation for sustainable futures : evaluating a higher education living lab with the CAIFL competence framework

This paper addresses sustainability transformations as learning contexts characterized by complexity, affective overload, and non-linear change that exceed purely cognitive, linear skill models. It presents a one-week interdisciplinary Living Lab on Creative Agility and Futures Literacy at a Swiss university, enabling students from communication management, social work, and psychology to remain action-capable amid uncertainty, polycrisis, and AI-mediated disruption. The Lab operationalizes “non-linear skills” (e.g., intuition, emotional literacy, ambiguity tolerance, working with not-knowing) through the Creagile Futures Literacy (CAAFL) competence framework and a mixed-methods evaluation using Rflect. Quantitative pre/post self-assessments (n=28) show the strongest gains in emotional self-awareness and relationship intelligence, communicative transformation competence, digital judgment, and dealing with uncertainty, while ethical-sustainability responsibility slightly decreases—suggesting heightened critical standards and competence paradoxes. The findings argue that Creative Agility and CAFL offer a transdisciplinary template for responsible innovation, systems thinking in action, and regenerative education by making the messy affective and developmental dimensions of transformation explicit learning content.