Design for Social Innovation and CITIES
The Thematic Area (TA) of “Design for Social Innovation and Cities” (DxSIC) includes DESIS Labs’ projects with the keywords City, Social Innovation and Design. The aim of this TA is to gain deeper insight into these projects’ characteristics, specifically their aims, methodologies, results and the stakeholders involved.
Given that the possible intersections between city-making, social innovation and contemporary design are many, and highly diverse, the following sub-themes have been defined within this Thematic Area.
They cluster together different proposed projects, and in this way offer a more precise expression of what is actually happening in DESIS Labs as regards lines of action and thought. In this spirit, the DxSIC thematic area is currently characterised by four main sub-areas:
Design for social cohesion
Connecting people and generating public spaces: city-making based on the social dimension, via light projects with the capacity to reweave the social fabric.These projects stem from concern about the social cohesion crisis, and propose collaborative activities in order to rebuild social links (or to build them from zero, where migrants are concerned).
Design for regenerating commons
These communities-in-place are social forms whose existence is motivated by that specific space. In this framework the project’s role is to connect a well-defined space with the process of building an equally well-defined community. By doing so, these projects enrich the scenario of the city as an urban commons.
Design for urban production
The common denominator of these quite diverse projects is their contribution to regenerating the urban productive fabric. This goal is achieved from different starting points (such as Fab Labs, digital and traditional craftsmanship, small industries, research centres, repair-reuse shops, informal “workers’ networks”, etc.), with projects converging in their common aim of creating new value chains, and the related social networks. In doing so, these projects enrich the urban ecosystem
Design for urban infrastructure
The starting point of these projects is one or more (existing or to be created) physical artefacts which, once in place, could trigger and support different activities and communities. Operating in this way, these artefacts can justifiably be perceived as an infrastructure, and the design process as infrastructure creation. As a whole these projects propose the idea of a city as a set of ecosystems where a variety of communities and social networks can thrive.
MEMBERSHIP
DESIS Network’s purpose is “to promote design for social innovation in higher education institutions with design discipline so as to generate useful design knowledge and to create meaningful social changes in collaboration with other stakeholders.”
DESIS Network’s purpose is “to promote design for social innovation in higher education institutions with design discipline so as to generate useful design knowledge and to create meaningful social changes in collaboration with other stakeholders.” Applying members who share the same vision and fulfil the following requirements will become DESIS Labs.
Members can be legally constituted higher education institutions or Universities with design disciplines (hereinafter referred to also only as “higher education institutions” or only as “Universities”), private or public, sharing DESIS motivations and visions and supporting DESIS activities (Labs projects, international Initiatives, Platform improvements).
Once the Membership Request Letter and its attachments have been received by the International Coordination Committee, they will be analysed in order to verify if the formal requirements are satisfied. On this basis, feedback will be send to the interested teams.
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