Social innovation and new industrial contexts: Can designers "Industrialize" socially responsible solutions?1

Design Issues

Volumn 23, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 3-21

  Morelli, Nicola ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

DESIGN; INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION; SOCIAL IMPACT; SOCIAL SCIENCE;

EID: 38149030926     PISSN: 07479360     EISSN: 15314790     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/desi.2007.23.4.3     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. This paper is a revised version of the paper presented for the Design Research Society International Conference, Wonderground, Lisbon, Nov. 2006.
2. Victor J. Papanek, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, 2nd, completely rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985).
3. In a recent contribution, Victor Margolin, "Design for Development: Towards a History" (paper presented at the WonderGround - 2006 Design Research Society International Conference, Lisbon, Nov. 1-4, 2006) notes that this logic explains the lack of interest of development organizations in design. Margolin, instead, emphasizes a different and less known path in the history of design for development; from the Ahmedabad Declaration in 1977 to Gui Bonsiepe's call for a more complex involvement of designers in different stages of industrial development.
4. An overview of such contributions is proposed by Victor Margolin (Margolin, "Design for a Sustainable World" in The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies, Victor Margolin, ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
5. Another relevant contribution in this sense came from Ezio Manzini (Ezio Manzini, Artefatti: Verso Una Nuova Ecologia Dell'ambiente Artificiale (Milano: Edizioni DA, 1990)
6. and Ezio Manzini, "Prometeus of the Everyday: The Ecology of the Artificial and the Designer's Responsibility" in Discovering Design, Exploration in Design Studies, Richard Buchanan and Victor Margolin, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Manzini considered environmental problems as a question concerning the ecology of the artificial word. With this proposal, Manzini was in fact overcoming Papanek's approach by proposing an approach that, instead of contrasting industrial production, proposed a change of its intrinsic logic.
7. R. A. R M. Weterings and J. B. Opschoor, "The Ecocapacity as a Challenge to Technological Development" (Advisory Council for Research on Nature and Environment, Rljswijk, The Netherlands, 1992).
8. Leo Jansen, "Towards a Sustainable Future, En Route with Technology" in The Environment: Towards a Sustainable Future, edited by the Dutch Committee for Long-term Environmental Policy (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kuwler Academic Publisher, 1994);
9. Ezio Manzini, "Designing Sustainablllty Leapfrog: Anticipations of a Possible Future," Domus 789 (1997);
10. and Ernst Von Welzäcker, Amory B. Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, and Club of Rome, - Factor Four Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use: A New Report to the Club of Rome (St. Leondards, N.S.W., Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1997).
11. So far, designers in Western countries have rarely been affected by this phenomenon. Because of its strategic role, design services have not migrated yet; but the growth of the new market is likely to require local design expertise, which will cause a massive relocation of design centers to developing countries.
12. The book No Logo by Naomi Klein was possibly among the most significant explorations of the landscape of social injustice and human rights violation due to an unscrupulous use of outsourcing agreements when moving production from Western countries to developing countries. Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999).
13. This perspective is suggested by the works of Richard Norman and Rafael Ramirez. See Richard Normann, Renaming Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2001);
14. Richard Normann and Rafael Ramirez, Desiging Interactive Strategy: From Value Chain to Value Constellation, 1998 Ed. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994);
15. and Rafael Ramirez, "Value Co-Production: Intellectual Origins and Implications for Practice and Research," Strategic Management Journal 20 (1999).
16. Ota De Leonardls, In Un Diverso Welfare. Sogni e Incubi, Elementi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1998).
17. Ezio Manzini, "Enabling Solutions for Creative Communities," Designmatters 10 (2005): 64-68.
18. Richard Normann, Service Management: Strategy and Leadership in Service Business, 3rd Ed. (Chichester, UK and New York: Wiley, 2000).
19. Ezio Manzini, "Enabling Solutions for Creative Communities."
20. In his Development as Freedom (Amartya Kumar Sen, Development as Freedom, 1st. Ed. (New York: Knopf, 1999), Amartya Sen argues that capability deprivation is more important as a criterion of social disadvantage than is the lowness of income, since income is only instrumentally important and its derivative value is contingent on many social and economic circumstances. Even if Sen's perspective is focused on more radical forms of capability deprivations, his approach - based on the consideration of human beings as active, rather than passive, receivers - provides an interesting point of view for revising the approach to social problems also within the most industrialized countries.
21. Ota De Leonardis, In Un Diverso Welfare. Sogni E Incubi.
22. Peter Butenschon, "Worlds Apart: An International Agenda for Design" (paper presented at the Common Ground, London, September 5-7, 2002).
23. Victor Margolin and Sylvia Margolin, "A 'Social Model' of Design: Issues of Practice and Research." The paper was published in Design Issues 18:4 (Autumn 2002): 24-30.
24. Victor Margolin, The Politics of the Artificial: Essays on Design and Design Studies - (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).
25. Nicola Morelli, "Design for Social Responsibility and Market Oriented Design: Convergences and Divergences" (paper presented at Techné: The Design Wisdom, Barcelona, April 28-30, 2003).
26. Giacomo Becattini, Industrial Districts (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2004).
27. This condition possibly contradicts Margolin's statement that "While the world's design needs are evident, reinventing the design profession is not." (Victor Margolin and Sylvia Margolin, "A 'Social Model' of Design: Issues of Practice and Research" (paper presented at the Common Ground, London, September 5-7, 2002). When demand patterns come to individual segments, in fact, the world's design needs become less evident, but the designer possibly will have a different role in addressing them.
28. Richard Normann, Reframing Business: When the Map Changes the Landscape.
29. The term "operative paradigm" was introduced by ingeman Arbnor and Bjørn Bjerke. Ingeman Arbnor and Bjørn Bjerke, Methodology for Creating Businesss Knowledge, 2nd Ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage, 1997). The term is clarified in the next section of this paper.
30. A recent EU-funded project called EMUDE collected a series of cases of social innovation generated by a bottom-up approach to social problems. Creative communities have been spotted that, instead of waiting for government support, have solved some social problems (e.g., child care, isolation of elderly people, and problems in socially disadvantages areas of big cities) by using their own social network and mobilizing their own, individual skills. The collection of cases has been published on www.sustainable-everyday.org.
31. Ingeman Arbnor and Bjørn Bjerke, Methodology for Creating Businesss Knowledge.
32. Victor and Sylvia Margolin, "A 'Social Model' of Design: Issues of Practice and Research."
33. Jacob Buur, Thomas Binder, and Eva Brandt, "Taking Video Beyond 'Hard Data' In User-Centred Design." (paper presented at the Participatory Design Conference [PDC 2000])
34. and J. Buur and Astrid Soendergaard, "Video Card Game: An Augmented Environment for User-Centred Design Discussions" (paper presented at the Designing Augmented Reality Environments [DARE 2000], Helsingør, 2000).
35. Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti,"Design: Cultural Probes," Interaction 6:1 (1999).
36. Dennis S. Jepsen, Max V. Nielsen, Claus Rantzau, Andreas H. and Martin S. Thomsen, "My Way: Project and Process Report for the 7. Semester ID" (Aalborg: Aalborg University, 2003).
37. Solution Oriented Partnership: How to Design Industrialised Sustainable Solutions, Ezio Manzini, Luisa Collina, and Stephen Evans, eds. (Cranfield, UK: Cranfield University European Commission GROWTH Programme, 2004).
38. Ezio Manzini and Francois Jegou, "The Construction of Design Orienting Scenarios. Final Report. Sushouse Project" (Delft, The Netherlands: Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology, 2000), 36.
39. Becattini, Industrial Districts.
40. The most relevant research works in this case are EU-funded projects such as HiCS (Manzini, Collina, and Evans, Solution-Oriented Partnership: How to Design Industrialised Sustainable Solutions) and EMUDE.
41. Olivier L. de Weck, Eun Suk Suh, and David Chang, "Product Family and Platform Portfolio Optimization" (paper presented at the DETC'03 2003 ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, Chicago, Sept. 2-6, 2003)
42. and Karl T Ulrich and Steven D. Eppinger, Product Design and Development, 2nd Ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
43. Source Sinne Nilsen, Maja Schou Ohana, Sinja C. Svarrer, Nanna Gram Thomassen, and Jens Vestergaard, "Delight Assist. Project and Process Report 7. Semester ID," (Aalborg, DK: School of Architecture and Design, Aalborg University, 2006).
44. Daryl Kulak and Eamonn Guiney, Use Cases: Requirements in Context (New York, Boston, and London: ACM Press, Addison-Wesley, 2000)
45. and Dean Leffingwell and Don Widrig, Managing Software Requirements: A Unified Approach, The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2000).
46. Nicola Morelli, "Designing Product/ Service Systems: A Methodological Exploration," Design Issues 18:3 (2002);
47. Nicola Morelli, "Product-Service Systems, a Perspective Shift for Designers: A Case Study: The Design of a Telecentre," Design Studies 24 (2003);
48. and Nicola Morelli, "The System around the Product: Methodologies and Experiences Focusing on Material and Immaterial Aspects in Design Solutions" (paper presented at the Futureground Design Research Society International Conference, Melbourne, Nov. 17-21, 2004).
49. Victor and Sylvia Margolin, "A 'Social Model' of Design: Issues of Practice and Research."