Design for social sustainability. A reflection on the role of the physical realm in facilitating community co-design

Understanding the environmental conditions that shape the physical support for developing social sustainability requires analysing the symbiotic relationship of people and place. Place is considered an essential aspect in shaping social identity, identification and cohesion. Thus, this paper explores the role of the physical realm in enabling co-design practices within community initiatives. It outlines two PhD research projects focused on strengthening community engagement using co-design approaches. It evidences its findings analysing two different settings. Firstly, a PhD research project exploring the mutual influences between spatial and service design also through the investigation of public spaces as platforms for strategic interventions with experimentations in the urban fabric of Milan (Italy). Secondly, a doctoral research exploring the value of community co-design on rural areas in the Highlands and Islands (Scotland) associated with Leapfrog, a three-year-funded project by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Conducted by two different research teams, we analyse to what extent participatory processes can strengthen communities and their identities, as well as reflecting on place-based approaches for design strategies of territories

Culture and creativity as assets for inclusive growth in small and remote places: a design-led process

This paper aims to highlight the design-led process in the research and the range of its application in contexts beyond the mainstream: the decentralized areas, defined as “small and remote places”. This is based on an ongoing action-research project called SMOTIES - Creative works with small and remote places, a four-year co-funded project by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The ten partners involved in the project come from the cultural realm, including universities, design/art collectives, NGOs, and design associations. They aim at knowledge transfer, capacity building, and audience development in 10 small and remote areas in their own country. This paper refers to the first two years’ activities focusing on the shared methodology and overall program

Proximity and remoteness: exploring a design and future driven approach for cultural entrepreneurship as a resource for territorial development

The paper proposes a two-fold perspective on the topic of proximity: proximity and remoteness as non- univocal and not-only geographical categorisation of territories; design-driven innovation and entrepreneurial-driven innovation to prompt cross-disciplinary educational experiences. These perspectives are illustrated through the educational process set for a Design Thinking course for master students in business innovation and entrepreneurship. The course, now at its third edition, is based on defining a possible and future innovation pattern in a small and remote context, then suitable to host an innovative entrepreneurial venture. The integration of foresight and creative abilities served to frame and develop a design project opportunity through the development of scenarios. These served to identify emerging models of alternative economic ecosystems and, possibly, new business models for innovative start-ups as a fertile ground for local economic transitions. The paper is focused on the first phase of the process, where the identification of an eligible small and remote place could be seen as the ideal setting for experimenting alternative ways for future cultural and environmentally sustainable living

From “LEARNING BY DOING“ to “CREATING BY SHARING” experiences: are people the fundamental connective tissue in enhancing creativity in the project format of the workshop?

In this paper I describe the potentialities of the workshop (ws) format in design education - thanks to experiences I attended both as teaching assistant and as participant - in order to gather: / Key features of this kind of practices / Psychological (inner and environmental) aspects that increase the results’ level / Adjustment of usual teaching methodologies / Increase of tutoring capacities The goal is to support this approach, especially in design education and practice

Unconventional Spaces for Art and Design: Enabling Community Synergy. A Methodological Approach

The design process of the studio described in this chapter focuses on public spaces, both indoor and outdoor, by establishing connections and relationships with the local citizens – connected to shops, associations, informal groups and neighbourhood committees – and with a specific local community: contemporary artists who own their art gallery, exhibition and work spaces in the Milan NoLo District. The focus of the studio resonates with the most advanced fields of research and experimentation that the European Commission is now fostering through research and innovation programmes. More specifically: 1) how “public spaces” both shape, and are shaped, by, cultural activity, including art, and how this can bring about integration of people, including at the political and economic levels; and 2) how the co-creation of public goods (services, spaces and strategies) can actually become a way to engage citizens and stakeholders of all kinds in shaping the European identity. As stated in Chapter 3, the connection between contemporary arts and the bottom-up transformations of urban spaces has a multi-faceted role in establishing brand new social innovations and place-making processes. The key point of this shift is the active engagement of local actors; the studio enhanced this concept in its process. This chapter focuses on how these broad fields of research have been transferred into the MSc Interior Design Final Studio held by Davide Fassi, Laura Galluzzo, Anna Meroni and Xiaocun Zhu helped by Annalinda De Rosa and Martina Mazzarello, in the academic year 2016/17 at the School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. The description of the various phases of the studio is structured to focus on the methodological approaches adopted. The first – Investigation – embraced notions of Constructivist Grounded Theory as a qualitative strategy of inquiry together with an in the field approach. A dialectic in the data collection has been effective in opening a range of design possibilities. The second – Designing Concept – has been based on Participatory Action Research and Co-design tools to iterate the design process. The final course step – Prototyping – sees a cross-pollination and communication among different fields of design for the project definition, which are then realized in the Event phase

People, Places and Social Innovation - An Analysis of the Impacts by Applied Design Researches

The open debate launched through the ‘Design Research Agenda for Sustainability’ within the paradigmatic ‘Changing the Change’ conference held in Turin in 2008, defined design for sustainability as “Everything design can do to facilitate the social learning process towards a sustainable society. That is, to sustain promising social and technological innovations and to re-orient existing drivers of change towards sustainability” (Cipolla & Peruccio, 2008: 42)

Celebration of the public space

Design is called to find strategies to innovate the use of public space both in the services and in the interior research, in order to rethink on how these places could be decisive in establishing a renew sense of confidence and safety in the city and in supporting social relations

Envisioning in participatory design processes for civic sense-making. A collective articulation of a counter-narrative through provotyping fictional worlds

Participatory design (PD) has been considerably broadening the gaze of the design discipline. This produced a huge impact on design processes, boosting the academic dialogue and engaging institutions as well as diverse forms of publics in give together form to the public sphere. Participatory processes can play an important role in reframing issues and reconfiguring behaviours in the common realm, opening the social imagination to boost citizenship awareness. In this paper, the authors investigate the potential role of narratives for PD activities as a key to interpret the cultural heritage and the social ecosystem of an urban settlement. They do so by supporting the development of a diffused capability of envisioning both a better present as well as a better future with and for citizens, leveraging design’s down-to-earth capacity to foresee possibilities for change. The potential of narratives for PD practices is investigated here by means of a situated and cross-disciplinary research project for the city of Ivrea (Italy), which served both to contextualise new ideas as well as to develop new techniques, pursuing the hybridisation of PD processes with storytelling and design fiction, and developing tools borrowed from science fiction, spatial design and narratology

Service+Spatial design: Introducing the fundamentals of a transdisciplinary approach.

The paper is a position paper attempting to frame the foundations of an emerging topic in design research, education and practice: a transdisciplinary approach defined here as Service+Spatial design. Starting from the insights acquired by the authors through basic research and educational activities exploring the mutual influences between Spatial design and Service design, the challenge is to disclose the fundamentals of Service+Spatial design in order to set up a qualitative comparison and discussion around their relationships. The paper explores the cultural dimension of design, trying to identify and highlight common ground and differentiation to frame, support and expand the comparison between these two design disciplines. The common ground is based on the relevant converging factors that create the current landscape of design; the perspective for comparison is structured through the identified key dimensions in the different evolution of Spatial and Service design; the comparative analysis is sketched around the ongoing findings and the evidences gathered from the theoretical research and the assessed teaching framework tested