Design for Social Innovation

This paper analyzes some self-production and craft processes which can contribute to social innovation. Object of this research is the concept of self-production, considered as a humancentered design process held by a designer-maker who, working within a community of artisans or a platform of digital fabrication, manages the entire process, from design, to production, distribution and communication. This research covers a broad spectrum of material that relates to the changing landscape within the design world and beyond, drawing the heterogeneity and complexity of self-production. Diverse approaches developed in the contemporary design scene have been mapped, defining new relationships and highlighting peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. Linking these diverse approaches is the new role of the designer, who embraces wider areas and acts as catalyst of social innovation, actively involving diverse actors in the design process. Such a figure embodies both the designer’s knowledge and the maker’s know-how, implementing either artisan productions or digital fabrications, shared within a close relationship with craft communities or virtual platforms for Do-It-Yourself. Self-production seems to be not an anachronistic situation, but an interesting opportunity, which addresses the increasing demand for flexible and diversified productions, able to connect local realities with global markets. Such an approach seems to provide young designers with a viable opportunity to start from the bottom, opening up new start-ups on their own to counter the current crisis of the work world. Design can be a key guide for transforming the current scenario into an advanced craftsmanship. It has to rescue its social and economic relevance and foster local innovative initiatives that seek social innovation and sustainable development of a territory.

The Design Journal - An International Journal for All Aspects of Design , 2017

We currently live in a world in constant mutation and plenty of multiples uncertainties. The scale of the world economy and the technological development is unprecedented, but at the same time most of the world population faces daily challenges against serious problems. That is why people yearn for autonomy and reject the mediated influence of traditional institutions, which have failed to keep up with people's changing needs and desires. By this way, socio-technical innovation implies a process of change in both the structure of a socio-technical system and the relationship among the actors inside that system. Designers' skills to design products, communications, interaction, services and spaces have been used to transform the ways in which people interact with systems, services, organizations and policies. The proposed model reflects a modular structure, which can be adapted to the specificities and features of each social-technical innovation.

2006

Background Almost thirty five years ago, Viktor Papanek pointed out designers' responsibilities with respect to major social and environmental needs (Papanek 1985). Papanek's call was an alarm bell calling for a change in the design profession, but for many years it did not have too large consequences among designers and did not address the design approach towards the satisfaction of those needs.

Design & Recherche/Design & Research”, Conference …, 2008

This article attempts to shed historical light on some of the social, political, and ethical issues that have arisen from two disparate perspectives on technology which have both come to integrate an explicit consideration of social factors into systems design. It presents two distinct historical traditions which have contributed to the current field of participatory design methodologies-Joint Application Design (JAD ® ), and the British "socio-technical systems" and Scandinavian "collective resources" approaches-and which in practice integrated the endusers in different ways consequent upon their differing perspectives on workers, professional relationships to technology, and stated goals. One interest in examining the independent development of methodologies from these two perspectives is that, despite their differences, the approaches ultimately converged on a set of shared concerns and very similar practices.

2016

Shaping the way we think and act, technological progress is redefining the society we live in. In order not to be overwhelmed by their own tools, people try to build themselves and their aspirations through the imaginary. This one, charged with symbols and striving to represent the desires and anxieties of all of us, may be social as well as individual, thus becoming an active engine to re-think the future of a society that seems rooted in an eternal present. A new demand of change is moving people, group of active citizens, realizing to live in a state of uncertainty, crossing crisis. Thanks to technology and networking they act creating a pervasive creative intelligence spreading collective and grass-rooted activities and bottom-up solutions to real, local and social problems. Terms such as communion and commotion (i.e. shared emotion), can assume a leading role in designing the world of tomorrow with actions oriented the most on processes than on products. Design, with new creati...

OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING AS …, 2007

2017

The use and democratisation of new digital technologies have given visibility to groups of people and grassroots organizations that can be considered agents of change in the transition to a more sustainable world. Design plays an important role in the definition of strategies and in the development of innovative solutions to tackle some of the contemporary problems society faces. This paper aims to show several projects developed over the last 5 years in the subject Design for Social Innovation at the Master in Design and the Master in Engineering and Product Design at the University of Aveiro, and its relation to the new social media and technologies. By using Service Design tools to improve Social Innovations and the integration of new digital technologies, we design new and improved solutions to foster sustainable development. The creation of a DESIS Lab has also allowed to develop innovative design solutions within local communities. The methodology used is based on Learning-by-...

2019

, Bjørn Gustavsen passed away. Gustavsen was a major actor in the discourse of Norwegian and European work life reform and innovation, and he was always a spokesperson for "concept-driven development" based on practical experiences. Gustavsen's point of departure was the Norwegian industrial democracy projects in the 1960s, where he worked with Thorsrud and the researchers of the London Tavistock Institute, developing the first generation of STS thinking. His later work went "beyond original STS". A book that he coedited with the philosopher Stephen Toulmin was titled Beyond Theory: Changing Organizations through Participation (1996). When we use "STS and beyond" as the title of this article, and of this special issue in general, it is as a token of remembrance of and respect for the role that Bjørn Gustavsen played in European work reform and work research, and for his development of STS beyond the original STS. EJWI Vol 4. No 2. Special Issue September 2019 100 "Over the next decade, AI won't replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace those who don't" (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2017:11). "With more highly functional and integrated systems in both the office and the factory high performance is obtained by getting all workers to take on values and prerogatives heretofore expected only from management" (Pava 1983:139). "Technologies are constituted by unique affordances, but the development and expression of those affordances are shaped by the institutional logics in which technologies are designed, implemented, and used" (Zuboff 2015:85).2

Il settore edilizio non è, tradizionalmente, un vero e proprio motore di innovazione sebbene numerose siano le innovazioni, tecnologiche e non, che hanno contribuito alla sua trasformazione, in particolare nel corso degli ultimi decenni, e che continuano ad alimentare nuove tendenze . L'innovazione può essere legata alla disponibilità di nuovi prodotti, alla gestione del progetto, all' organizzazione del processo (produttivo e/o costruttivo) ma, nella maggior parte dei casi è accolta con una discreta diffidenza e recepita con una certa lentezza prima di essere in grado di modificare pratiche a lungo consolidate nel tempo . Spesso l'innovazione ha raggiunto il settore edilizio per trasferimento da altri ambiti di ricerca come l'industria chimica, meccanica, bellica, aerospaziale, ecc. e più recentemente l' elettronica e l'informatica. La contaminazione con il mondo digitale sembra aver impresso un'inattesa, ma prevedibile, accelerazione nel trasformare alcuni sistemi in vere e proprie interfacce che permettono all'utente di interagire con l' organismo edilizio. Le cosiddette tecnologie abilitanti diventano strumenti a disposizione dei cittadini/utenti per accedere, interagendo attraverso il web, a prodotti e servizi di varia natura. Ed è in questa interazione che si manifesta un interessante cambio di prospettiva che vede l'utente protagonista attivo di un processo di trasformazione anche sociale (Boeri et al., 2017). Assumendo che i fondamenti dell'innovazione tecnologica siano familiari alla maggior parte dei lettori, diventa quindi rilevante interrogarsi sui meccanismi di innovazione sociale che possono intervenire in questo processo di trasformazione e, ancor prima, sul significato stesso di innovazione sociale. Maurizio Busacca, che da tempo si occupa di questo argomento presso lo IUAV di Venezia e Cà Foscari, rappresenta un interlocutore ideale per ap-profondire le possibili contaminazioni tra innovazione tecnologica e innovazione sociale. Jacopo Gaspari L' argomento si presta ad essere affrontato con approccio interdisciplinare, ma partendo da una prima analisi di contesto: cosa si intende per innovazione sociale? Maurizio Busacca L'innovazione sociale è un cambiamento nelle relazioni sociali (Pol e Ville, 2009), è un concetto che descrive una nuova capacità sociale , è una strategia per trovare soluzioni a problemi sociali . Come evidenziato da Maiolini (2015) una lunga lista di definizioni può essere compilata in base alla prospettiva disciplinare: è un concetto che fa da ombrello a un cambiamento sistemico per istituzioni e mercato. La crescente attenzione rivolta a questo concetto è legata all' operato di istituzioni internazionali (interessi) e all'accelerazione di cambiamenti sociali e tecnologici (bisogni) ma anche al dibattito retorico sviluppato intorno ad esso . Ci sono almeno quattro ambiti in cui l'innovazione sociale manifesta tutta la sua rilevanza: lo sviluppo locale (ecosistemi innovativi a livello di città, regione, Paese), il mercato del lavoro e i nuovi impieghi (imprenditoria individuale, start-up, co-working), i sistemi di produzione della conoscenza (crowd-sourcing, open source, creative commons), l'innovazione dei modelli organizzativi (organizzazioni ibride, piattaforme cooperative, imprese sociali, social housing). In tutti questi ambiti l'innovazione sociale è individuata come un passpartout per risolvere problemi e conflitti. Tuttavia, è necessario affrontare il tema criticamente: l'innovazione sociale è un fenomeno dinamico fatto per esempio di nuove relazioni tra produzione, sistemi di scambio e organiz-