The demand for welfare is increasing parallel to the evidence of the impracticability of the ideas on this issue that have been dominant up to now. At the same time, the realities of Italian and international society show that new service ideas and practices are emerging: a new generation of social services characterised by the participation of those directly concerned in the definition of aims and how they are to be achieved.

We refer to these phenomena of creativity and diffuse enterprise with the expression creative communities: networks of people, institutions and enterprises who have known how to think up and put into action original, effective ways of being and doing that produce sociality.

EMUDE (FP6-EU financed consortium of design schools and research institutions) has spent the last two years years looking at social innovation among creative communities in different parts of Europe, having observed the emergence of what was called “active welfare”.

Public administration is continuously challenged by increasingly complex problems, due to the emergence of new social issues, such as ageing of population, new diseases, immigration and cultural integration, new work patterns and high unemployment rates. Services and infrastructures that should address those problems often refer to old models, based on a social and cultural context that no longer exist. New solutions are needed, which are based on new policies and criteria for the development of public services, also based on the revision of the role public administration, private companies and citizens can play.

However those initiatives, developed in local contexts, would represent very weak and isolated cases if no effort is put in an accurate planning process. This project explores the landscape of such initiatives, their potential and the possibility to generate a platform of infrastructures (products, services, technologies and organisational forms) that support their development and, possibly, their extension to different local contexts.

Considering this, the ACTIVE WELFARE OBSERVATORY operates to consolidate the idea of active welfare and, through a series of examples, put the characteristics of a new generation of social
services into focus.

This project is analysing existing cases and selecting some of the most promising for a more accurate analysis and a co-design process with the actors, institutions and organisations directly involved in such cases. The aim of the project is to work out methodological reflections and practical indications about how design can significantly support and organise active welfare initiatives.

The Active Welfare Observatory is promoted by Politecnico di Milano, Industrial Design Dept, research unit Design and Innovation for Sustainability and is giving continuity to the EMUDE final results.

The Observatory is developed in Brazil by Rio de Janeiro Federal University - by DESIS - Service Design and Social Innovation Group - affiliated to the Graduate School and Research in Engineering Institute (COPPE).

The project is financed by POLI.Design.

Ezio Manzini [ezio.manzini at polimi.it]
Carla Cipolla [carla.cipolla at polimi.it]