Design, When Everybody Designs

The role of design, both expert and nonexpert, in the ongoing wave of social innovation toward sustainability. In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold—an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Manzini distinguishes between diffuse design (performed by everybody) and expert design (performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations—making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation: the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.

Ezio Manzini, a leading thinker in design for sustainability, founded DESIS, an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). He is Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Chair Professor at University of the Arts London, and currently guest Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, and Jiangnan University, Wuxi.

Series Foreword vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 1 Innovation, toward a New Civilization 9 Social Innovation 9 Distributed and resilient systems 17 Multiple sustainable qualities 22 An emerging civilization? 25 2 Design in a Connected World 29 Conventions and design 29 Problem solving and sense making 33 Diffuse and expert design 37 Design mode map 40 Emerging design cultures 43 Social innovation in design 47 Design, a new description 53 3 Design for Social Innovation 55 What is is 55 What it is not 63 How it works 67 A new design knowledge 71 Part 2 Collaborative People 4 Collaborative Organizations 77 New social forms 77 Collaborating by choice 83 Enabiling ecosystems 90 5 Collaborative Encounters 93 Dimensions of collaborative encounters 93 Mapping collaborative encounters 105 Collaborative encounters, in practice 110 Part 3 Making Things Happen 6 Making Things Visible and Tangible 121 Mapping and amplifying 121 Creating stories 125 Scenario building 129 Visual Tools for Social Conversations (12 Visual Examples) 133 Credits 147 7 Making Things Possible and Probable 151 Supportive environments 151 Networked governance 157 Places for experiments 161 8 Making Things Effective and Meaningful 165 Problem Solving 165 Sense making 170 Trust building 173 9 Making Things Replicable and Connected 177 Small, local, open, connected 177 Replicating as scaling out 180 Connecting as scaling up 185 10 Making Things Local and Open 189 Place making 189 Places and resilience 191 Planning by projects 195 Cosmopolitan Localism 202 Design for a New Culture 203 Notes 205 Index 235