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Visualizing actions between people, concepts and things requires more than words - models and metaphors are needed to create meaning. I will visualize connections on sheets of backing paper or a white board, or get out a box of Lego. Here I used Lewis chess pieces (resin replicas naturally) on a model of Engeström's Activity System that I draw out on a piece of laminated board the size of a door (Engeström, 2008) in order to get a sense of people working in collaborative teams to a common goal and to understand that an Activity System doesn't represent an entity so much as a framework or scaffold that is held together by the energy of action.

Tool development within ESPON 2013 is targeted to the use of policy makers and practitioners at all administrative levels (including cross-border and transnational groupings) and will enable the use of information and data by these particular groups of stakeholders. Most tools will be online, made available via the ESPON website. As such they will also be at the disposal of the general public, including researchers and university students, thereby contributing to the use of ESPON data and information and the consolidation of a European research field on territorial development and cohesion. At the moment five tools are made accessible via the ESPON website. How these tools link to the project groups and the policy makers is visualised in the figure below. The green arrows in this figure show the use for the policy makers and the blue arrows show the flows from the ESPON projects (the Final Reports or the data resulting from the projects) to the tools and vice versa: The ESPON projects deliver data to the ESPON database and maps to the Online MapFinder. On the other hand, the ESPON projects receive input from the ESPON Database, the Mapping Guide and Typologies. The policy makers can find and use ESPON results via the Online MapFinder, the HyperAtlas and the ESPON DataBase.