Ezio Manzini: design for community-centered sustainable open/social innovations and scenarios

One of the real strategic features of the P2P Foundation is the ability to connect different and (almost sometimes) isolated projects and initiatives in order to build a working new scenario. This ability proceeds, at the same time, investigating how current P2P trends can face current (and future) problems in the society, the economy and the environment (in order to have a real sustainable and lasting P2P Scenario).

For this reason, I’m going to cover int this post a research that has been developing in the past years and it’s really interesting and important for future P2P scenarios intended as a way to develop projects for a sustainable society.

This post is about the recent researches of prof. Ezio Manzini, from the DIS (“Design and Innovation for Sustainability”) research unit of Milan Polytechnic Faculty of Design.

The most interesting point of these recent researches is that they started considering the role of design for sustainability not just in terms of an engineering problem, but a social and systemic one. In fact everywhere the focus had always been before on Ecodesign, that is an approach to design products with special consideration for its environmental impacts during its whole lifecycle, trying to reduce the material and energetic resources used. Unfortunately, we slowly recognized in the past years that so many times these strategies are unsuccessful because lighter products only bring even more products in the market, in what is usually called a rebound effect. Designing ligther products most of the times bring more consumption of such products, and therefore more consumption of resources, and we need therefore radical changes in the society and the economy.
Instead, Ezio Manzini’s recent researches try to research how radical changes about using at best the planet resources actually come from changes that take place as social innovations developed by creative communities, that is people inventing new and sustainable ways of living and producing.
These social innovations are often new forms of collaborative organizations using social networks, open source and p2p communities to reduce our footprint. These innovations and the creativity that generates them are distributed, that means that every locality can take part in this challenge with an active role. The best outcome will happen when this localities, even if small, can be open to other localities forming collaborative networks (the small, local, open, connected scenario. A scenario where the global is a network of locals.
This is a completely different approach from the usual and reductionist Ecodesign one: this is looking for social innovations adopting an open innovation community-centered strategy.

The evolution of these researches can be traced back to the Sustainable Everyday exhibition and book (2003), the EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) program (2005-2006) and then with the DESIS Network (2008 – …).

From the Sustainable Everyday exhibition originated the The Sustainable Everyday Project (SEP), a project that proposes an open web platform to stimulate conversations about sustainability hosting several research activities and didactic workshops. The Platform is an organization and communication tool providing an open web space and visibility for activities relating to the fields of design and sustainability in the everyday context. SEP is an independent network funded by public research projects and organization of events.

EMUDE was a program of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which was to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability. To this end it sought to shed more light on cases where subjects and communities use existing resources in an original way to bring about system innovation. From here, it intended to pinpoint the demand for products, services and solutions that such cases and communities express, and point to research lines that could lead to improved efficiency, accessibility and diffusion.
EMUDE was promoted and developed by a Consortium of European universities and research centres. In order to identify a collection of promising cases it had been set up a network of observers, known as Antennas, encompassing teams of researchers and students from 8 European design schools. You can download the project’s brochure, the final report and two books resulted from this project here.

The DESIS Network supports social innovation using design skills to give promising cases more visibility, to make them more effective, to facilitate their diffusion. And to help companies and institutions to understand the promising cases potentialities in terms of enabling services, products and business ideas. The DESIS Network also reinforces the design community’s role in the social innovation processes operating in the design community (developing dedicated design knowledge) and outside it (redefining the perceived design role and capabilities).
DESIS-International is a light, no-profit initiative based on the auto-organization of several local networks in different countries, the DESIS-Local. Given this peer-to-peer approach, each existing DESIS-Local is committed to actively participate at the international initiatives, to develop horizontal collaboration with other members and, in particular, to support with its own competences the start-up phase of new DESIS-Local.

DESIS-Local Networks in work:

DESIS-Local Networks in founding:

To get better the full picture, you can have a look at this long presentation from Ezio Manzini, that explains this scenario and his researches with some real cases as examples:

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