The sustainable lightness of participating: new paths of civic engagement for youth

One of the most important topic nowadays is the decline of traditional participation in young generations (Dalton, 2007; Zukin et al., 2006), which drives us to find new ways to involve them in different social issues. These include the outstanding issue of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), whose seventh goal focuses on the sustainable development (United Nations Millennium Declaration, 2000). As part of an European project, we have planned several innovative awarenessraising activities with the aim to achieve a real involvement of young generations in this field. Our hypothesis is that a good strategy to increase awareness is to convey new information, to increase the sense of efficacy and, at the same time, to engage young people in order to promote optimal subjective experience as the state of Flow of consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). The first step of the project consists in the installation of an interactive educational space during several popular events (as a pop-rock concert) in four European countries. This interactive space is projected as a cognitive and emotional “journey“ for young people in the world of sustainable development: it provides an app to calculate individual ecological footprint, big screens to watch videos and pictures, tablet to record videos and share them on the main social networks. We built a questionnaire to explore the perception of sustainability in young people including different measures: free associations with the concept of sustainability, a short scale of sustainable development self-efficacy beliefs (Hanss & Bøhm, 2010), a short scale about perceived competence, a measure of young people satisfaction with the interactive experience and an item exploring Flow experience. We present and discuss preliminary data about the effectiveness of the interactive installation as a way to promote awareness correlated to the investigated areas.