DESIS Europe, SEE workshop and (Re)designing the Regions in Malmö…

DESIS Europe, the European branch of the international Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability network is already active with projects, research and workshops but had not been effectively launched: this was one of the many activities scheduled between the 1st and the 4th of June in Malmö, Sweden. Two events were organised back-to-back at MEDEA Lab settled at the University of Malmö: (Re)designing the Regions was a 3 day study tour organised by La 27e Région a French public innovation lab; SEE that stand for Sustainable Everyday Exploration was a workshop organised by Strategic Design Scenarios and Politecnico di Milano within the PERL (Partnership for Research and Education for Responsible Living) European project. Both overlap in time and share the same concerns: how can we innovate in local transformative processes towards sustainability; how to renovate the way public actions and policies are made and foster social innovation-based bottom-up processes towards new sustainable ways of living… The seminar focused on local projects such as Living Labs in Malmö and Copenhagen, the MindLab of the Danish Ministry of Finance but also on many invited participants representing original projects and institutions such as Social Entrepreneurship in Residence from the Young Foundation, WWF One Planet Mobility, UK Building Schools of the Future programme, the MidtLab from central Danmark region or Inciativa Joven from Estremadura region in Spain…

Magic words…

Experimentations; micro-projects; co-design; rapid-prototyping; immersion… seem to be the key words to foster social change and renovation of our public infrastructures. They were omnipresent in all the presentations these 4 days in Malmö… Maybe a bit too much… but this is the unavoidable side effect of concentrating so many best cases of social innovations and sustainable transformation supported by design in one room… or I should say in one ‘lab’… Lab is also a key word as most of these projects are promoted by structures that define themselves as labs as a way to depict an agile and fluid structure, a ‘friendly hacker’ as Stéphane Vincent defines La 27e Région, a ‘non-institution’ able to challenge established infrastructures and innovate in the processes.

Lets not be trapped into a now recognizable style of the so-called creative industries as says Pelle Ehn, Professor at Malmö University: a clear model of participative innovation emerges. Most inspiring approaches are already far beyond working ‘with’ instead of only ‘for’ the users: ‘residences formats’ ask the question of how long and deep are you able to stay in contact with users in an ‘impregnation’ process. In parallel new original light format of ‘crash intervention’ appears as for instance the MindLab ‘Good Advices’ proposing a simple 2 hours orientation discussion with experts of the future Copenhangen Social Innovation Lab ‘Emergency Line’ for starting immediate projects. Being able to work in partnership is key: Social Entrepreneurship in Residence programme is partly financed by a small venture fund of the Young Foundation; La 27e Région co-finance the Territoires en Résidences creative immersion sessions to keep autonomy and shared leadership in the process…

Bridging policy and design…

Hubert Guillaud, journalist editing a blog on IT and social innovation comments: “…there are 2 groups and they mutually think the other is disconnected from reality…”. The public institution group and the design-driven innovators group looked at each other with mix of true interest and a bit of diffidence: the former recognises the potential of the users-centred approaches and tools to kick-off innovations in institutions but don’t see how to scale-up out of a policy-driven processes; whereas the later explores how to reach macro-transformations supporting a bottom-up process and is curious to see around the table politicians and civil servant open to this approach…

Starting to figure out these questions for the Sustainable Household European funded research project in the early 00’s we gave with Ezio Manzini, DIS Indaco Politecnico di Milano, a working definition of DOS for Design-Orienting Scenarios focussing the project scale and smaller systems of related stakeholders. We distinguish them from POS for Policy-Orienting Scenarios focusing structural economic or legislative changes in the governance of larger regional or national systems. The discussions in Malmö question these distinctions, blur macro and micro scales, prefer participation to leadership and sketch tentative promising collaboration between the 2 groups… 

Promising social innovation…

Social innovation is also among the ‘magic words’ catalysing interests and energies but also very different attitudes and points of views… Brigitte Peudupin, Deputy Mayor of the city of La Rochelle http://www.ville-larochelle.fr/en.htmlin West of France notes that certain cities are attracting social innovation – as La Rochelle for instance – referring to a virtuous interplay between the pre-existence of successful socio-cultural projects and the attention the city pays to host and support them properly… She’s refereeing to social innovation as forms of ‘bottom-up entrepreneurship in the social sector’ that has always complemented gaps or uncovered need areas in our society. When John Kolko, Austin Center for Design reports social innovation as one of the emerging trends in major design consultancies, he shows examples of ’social design’ such as mobile phone based cheap AIDS warning campaign or accessible computer management in depraved schools.

The motivation to focus social innovation is different when Per-Anders Hillgren, Responsible of the Malmö Social Innovation Living Lab says after the workshop group had a diner organised by the Herrengårds Women Association: “…these group of Afghan women are a really cool stakeholder to innovate with…”: he is pointing how their creativity and entrepreneurship is likely to inspire new and more sustainable ways of living. In the same way, when Michael Narberhaus, in charge of the One Planet Mobility programme of WWF, warns that successful social innovation projects are sometimes too much put forwards as icons of sustainability by local public authorities, he points social innovation as an inspiration for social change and again the critical question of how to scale-up to systemic transformation of ways of living… 

From micro-experimentations…

Sophia shows the Rabbit Hotel in one of the building of the Augustenborg neighbourhood of Malmö. This project is part of the rich social innovation tour of Malmö Living Labs and consists in sharing pets: the apartments in this social logging area are too small and crowded to keep pets at home. Therefore Sophia with the kids living there refurbishes and maintains a collective basement hosting half a dozen of rabbits, growing them vegetable and generating a rich collective experience. Beyond socialisation of the kids, the Rabbit Hotel proposes an interesting deal to the mostly immigrant families living there: kids can stay there afterschool; the only price to pay for the parents is to take part to Swedish courses set up locally to foster cultural integration. A nice example of micro-experimentation balancing ‘push’ and ‘pool’ toward social change acknowledged by most of the participants but as Jean Baptiste Roger responsible of IT development in Ile-de-France Region said: “we are the guys with the macro-googles here and we are wondering how to scale-up?”.

Getting from micro-experimentations to macro-transformations was exactly the joint topic of the 2 Malmö meetings: can an ‘acupuncture’ of micro-projects achieve systemic change in a city or a region? Which tools to activate local projects? How design-based approaches can enable such planning by projects?

…to macro-transformations

Eysine, a city near Bordeaux in the South-West of France is organising every year the Raid des Maraîchers a day to engage the population in the question of short food circuits through a discovery journey and country party in large local vegetables plots. Christine Bost, Mayor explains how Eysine and the cities nearby were traditionally the production plant of a short food circuit providing the street markets of Bordeaux and its surroundings. She also explains about the challenge to maintain this agricultural land within the city boundaries, to resist to the speculation pressure, to collaborate with the agricultural college nearby to form and install a new generation of market-gardeners and finally to engage the population in supporting the initiative through design of the annual event of the Raid des Maraîchers.

Eysine market-gardens is a good example of a potential emerging ‘framework project’ similar to some of the cases presented by by DESIS partners as Politecnico di Milano South Agricultural Park project ‘Feeding Milano’ or Tonji University Chong Ming Island near Changhai during the 3^rd of June joint day between (re)Designing the Regions and SEE workshops. In total 7 cases were reviewed to kick-off the SEE research project including Noth-East England DOTT07 first real size experiment, urban dynamisation projects as Parsons School project in Lower East Side, MEDEA Social Innovation Living Lab in Malmö, UK national programme Building Schools of the Future, WWF One Planet Mobility and La 27e Région’s Territoires en Résidences. A particular effort was made by all contributors to see each case as a Framework Project, an attempt to reach macro-transformation of a city or a region through an acupuncture of micro-projects in synergy. A common template allows starting cross analysis and shows for instance many robust, fresh, innovative micro-projects but sometimes a lack of a clear vision linking them and related efficient strategies to activate them in synergy… Between macro-planning and micro-initiatives, policy-driven action and design-driven innovators, bottom-up and top-down, SEE research project is looking for a balanced acupuncture…

“Greeness to be clarified” is the claim of the Conference on Green Design 2010 organised by the Hunan University of Technology May 21-25 in Zhuzhou, China. It’s a good title… As a lot has effectively to be clarified about sustainability today. It’s striking when strolling across the huge EXPO path where no pavilion -be a city, a company or a country- forgets to advert any kinds of effort to be green as the ultimate solution. And it’s also true for universities and design education in particular which are seeking for which way to go between enjoying two digits national growth or wondering what designing more sustainable ways of living means when 300 million Chinese are expected to rush from the countryside into the cities in the next 20 years…

“How many time do you think China will need to catch-up with France?” asks Pr. Wang, ink painter teaching at Hunan University when driving through the huge building plant of the future Changsha airport… The country is rushing to catch-up. It’s even more clear when visiting Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall and considering the football field large model with thousands of skyscrapers demonstrating how Shanghai should look like in the near future. But it is not clear to catch-up with what and if visions have been updated… A 360° 3D animation immerses visitors into the ever astonishing dream of the city of tomorrow that dominate city planning since more than 50 years now…

The gigantic EXPO is the ultimate one-to-one scale model that -if necessary- demonstrates the lack of scenarios for the future. Starting from the form: where is the exhibition? Nothing on display but a more of less lucky scenography of screens showing conventional corporate communication to rushing visitors. The architecture of the pavilions is really worth to see it but… it is asking also questions: how this demonstration of creative architecture in the ‘EXPO playground’ will cope with outside million of people packed in high-rise if it is unable to adapt the flow of visitors that have to stand in lines for hours to sneak 5 mn inside each pavilion.

‘Better city, better life’ should be searched at another scale and the real richness of the expo is elsewhere. To see it you have to look down in front of you and watch the thousands of English speaking Chinese students that volunteers as assistant staff, smiling all day, supporting tired visitors and representing the only true part of humanity in this mega-galactic old dream…

Coming back to the Green Design conference, many interventions were searching for new inspirations to shift away from the western consumption-centric imported model: it’s difficult without a deep understanding of the Chinese language and philosophy to assess the potentials for instance of the “Shanshui City”, presented by Hu Jie, Director of Beijing Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute or Prof. Liu Guanzhong of the Academy of Art and Design of the same Tsinghua university advocating design as third category of wisdom and ability for human to survive in addition to science and art. But which design?

Many of these works are fundamental research as European green architects reviewed by Mario Brizzi of Università degli studi Florence or the personal research of a green philosophy in vegetal digital sculpture of Prof. Liu Yudong, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Moreover they start from scratch as if time and resources where sufficient to rebuild our world in a proper way… Benny Leong, School of Design, Hong-kong Polytechnic University in more pragmatic terms depicts a large panorama from simple eco-design improvements to more radical scenarios of sustainable lifestyles exploring the use of distant digital collaboration. An on-going field study investigates most sustainable and unsustainable aspects of Chinese lifestyles and shows an interesting attempt to create a common ground and a digital platform among the DfS (Design for Sustainability) network of main Chinese universities…

Tomohiro Fukuda described in his speech Osaka University current developments in green design with 2 scenarios capturing the ambivalence in the conference participants between 2 temptations: the sustainable techno-optimism and a reasonable slowing down. Moreover, he presented the Kobunaki Eco-village using a 3DCG simulation software: flying above an area of Omihachiman city, the camera plunge down to the ground in a vertiginous pure style of 3D urban planning phantasmagoric visualisations but instead of skyscrapers it lands into a neighbourhood with habitants cultivating their orchard and kids playing in the middle of the street: clever mistification or signal of change of mindset…?

J.W. Drukker, professor of design history in Delft university concludes his speach acknowledging the only really successful birth control policy achieved by the Chinese government in the recent years asking indirectly the critical question of balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ measures in the rapid transformative change towards sustainability… an great risks that too match plannification disconnected from the people real life represents…

The hypothesis of a transformative change towads sustainable ways of living through an ‘acupuncture’ of micro-projects we presented was welcome: the challenging metaphor in the country where this traditional medecine was invented seems to effectively inspire a different attitude to projects. The experiences of residences of La 27e Région in France as an innovative process to activate energy of local projects is a promising way to pass from theory to practice. In particular the debate between participants during the second day largely agreed it inspires a necessary change in the design attitude teach to the students: as Chen Anying vice chief editor of the journal of Zhuangshi, academic journal for arts and design in China and co-organisor of the conference reported in plenary, it time to pass from a ‘design for’ to ‘design with’…

François Jégou

20 images in 20 seconds.

Notes for open conference at Victoria Eco Innovation Lab in Melbourne, Nov 2007

Transitions toward sustainability implies to address systems that are more and more large, fast moving, complex and with numerous inter-related actors… Scenario thinking in such context is a way to overcome the on-going evolution, to envision discontinuities, to stimulate strategic conversation between stakeholders and bring them along to implement radically new solutions…
The talk will focus on 3 areas of Solutioning scenario building activities:
To explore opportunities…
Investigation of social innovation is a way to focus new and more sustainable lifestyles. VideoSketching technique and the use of other visualisation tools allow to show alternative ways of daily living, simulate new visions and describe possible reconfigurations of complex systems.
To facilitate convergence…
Co-design and participative techniques allow to involve users and stakeholders in the construction of their own futures. Sustainable Everyday Project events around the world blow this process at a large scale involving visitors of exhibitions in building their own sustainable lifestyle and showing how the use of scenario could foster the social conversation on sustainability…
To focalize solutions…
The development of new product-service systems requires new instruments for the designer. SystemMap, OfferingDiagrams, InteractionTable, StakeholderMatrix… an entire “solution notation toolbox” has been developed and experimented during the HiCS European research project to progressively share and specify a solution between different players. (more…)