Depicting concurrency between the participatory and the strategic design practice within the urban context

The context of everyday urban life is the cradle of more democratic social changes, and on which design practice aimed at the regeneration of urban space towards something more democratic, inclusive, participative and resilient has to focus. However, design practice within the city has hardly been successful from this perspective. In this paper a path to strengthening design practice within the urban context is presented by identifying the points of concurrency and enrichment between strategic design from the perspective of the ecosystem and the participatory design approach of infrastructuring agonistic public spaces. Political design and agonistic democracy are the theoretical thread running in the background of the discussion here presented that results in affirming the need to qualify metadesign, within strategic design, as infrastructuring agonistic public spaces when acting within the city, as well as to amplify the potentiality of the suggested practice through the integration of prototyping and scenario building.Keywords: strategic design, infrastructuring, agonistic public spaces, urban context

Design e Utopias Sociais: O Design Aberto de Movimentos Heterotópicos

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Depicting concurrency between the participatory and the strategic design practice within the urban context

The context of everyday urban life is the cradle of more democratic social changes, and on which design practice aimed at the regeneration of urban space towards something more democratic, inclusive, participative and resilient has to focus. However, design practice within the city has hardly been successful from this perspective. In this paper a path to strengthening design practice within the urban context is presented by identifying the points of concurrency and enrichment between strategic design from the perspective of the ecosystem and the participatory design approach of infrastructuring agonistic public spaces. Political design and agonistic democracy are the theoretical thread running in the background of the discussion here presented that results in affirming the need to qualify metadesign, within strategic design, as infrastructuring agonistic public spaces when acting within the city, as well as to amplify the potentiality of the suggested practice through the integration of prototyping and scenario building.Keywords: strategic design, infrastructuring, agonistic public spaces, urban context

Estratégias de design em ecossistemas criativos de inovação social

[EN] Social innovation depends on a process of systemic change. In order to achieve it, unsustainable ways of life have to be challenged, and social learning processes promoted. The latter must be able to catalyze creative ecosystems’ immanent capacity of developing innovative solutions able to transform society towards collective wellbeing. Creative ecosystems are interactive social organizations that produce multiple, complex and dynamic connections which allow their own existence and sustainable development. Design contributes to this framework by applying it processes for development of socio-technical devices for world transformation: products, services, product-service systems, but also social technologies that support government dynamics, as well as the organizing and transforming ones that take place in, to or by society. This paper aims at identifying which design strategies can be applied in creative ecosystems of social innovation. Thus, firstly the authors present the concept of social innovation and some strategies for fostering it, i.e. strategies based on toolkits, strategies for the diffusion of business models based on standardized formats or franchising, strategies of organic growth, or even institutional support innovation programs. Therefore, through an ecosystem perspective, the paper evolves the design-driven innovation process proposed by Roberto Verganti, redirecting it towards social innovation. Finally, it highlights two processes that are interwoven with the one of design-driven social innovation, i.e. the processes of infrastructuring and seeding. Infrastructuring is about the development and practice of relations among the actors of an ecosystem aiming at fostering a social scenario that enables the design activity of the ecosystem as a whole. On the other hand, seeding aims at the creating seeds of the social innovations developed within the ecosystem, thus fostering their diffusion and autonomous growth there or in other ecosystems.[PT] A inovação social depende de um processo de mudança sistêmica. Para obtê-la, é necessário desafiar nossos modos insustentáveis de vida e, sobretudo, elaborar processos de aprendizagem social que ativem a capacidade imanente nos ecossistemas criativos de desenvolver soluções inovadoras que transformem a sociedade em prol do bem-estar coletivo. Ecossistemas criativos podem ser definidos como organizações sociais em interação, produtoras de múltiplas conexões, complexas e dinâmicas, que permitem sua existência e evolução sustentável. O design se insere nos ecossistemas criativos propondo seus processos para o desenvolvimento de dispositivos sócio-técnicos de transformação do mundo: produtos, serviços, sistemas produto-serviço, mas também tecnologias sociais que auxiliam as dinâmicas de governo, organização e transformação que ocorrem na, para e/ou pela sociedade. O artigo tem como objetivo identificar estratégias de design a serem praticadas em ecossistemas criativos de inovação social. Para tanto, o artigo inicia apresentando o conceito de inovação social e algumas estratégias praticadas para procura-la como, por exemplo, as estratégias de criação por meio de toolkits, de difusão de modelos de negócios por meio de formats padronizados ou de franchising, de crescimento orgânico ou, ainda, de programas institucionais de apoio à inovação. Logo, usando a perspectiva ecossistema, o artigo evolui o processo de inovação dirigida pelo design proposto por Roberto Verganti, direcionando-o à inovação social. Por fim, evidencia mais dois processos que se entrelaçam ao de inovação social dirigida pelo design, ou seja, o processo de infrastructuring e o de seeding. O processo de infrastructuring visa ao desenvolvimento e à prática de relações entre os atores de um ecossistema, de forma a constituir um enredo social que habilite a atividade projetual dos designers e do ecossistema como um todo. O processo de seeding visa à elaboração de sementes de inovações sociais desenvolvidas em um ecossistema, de forma a permitir sua disseminação e crescimento autônomo no mesmo ecossistema ou em outros ecossistemas.Freire, K.; Del Gaudio, C.; Franzato, C. (2016). Strategies by design towards creative ecosystems of social innovation. En Systems&design:beyond processes and thinking. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 639-950. https://doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2015.3289OCS63995