This paper presents and discusses an action format developed through design experiments aiming to make things happen. It brings to the already rich debate on social innovation a designer’s perspective mainly focused on action research and field actions. This action format of design for social innovation, the ‘Social Innovation Journey’, is structured on a non-linear sequence of steps and actions that progressively engage a community and help it to set up and prototype a social innovation through an event-like pilot initiative: a ‘farewell’ initiative that, while prototyping the innovation, releases its full ownership to the community. The action format is illustrated through research projects and training activities which have brought designers to design ‘with’ or ‘for’ social innovators, . The ‘Social Innovation Journey’ is an open, in progress, framework for intervention set up by the Polimi DESIS Lab, the Politecnico di Milano based laboratory of the international network DESIS – Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability. It comprises a network of researchers adopting a strategic and systemic approach to design, with a specific focus on designing for services and design activism. It explores how design can enable people, communities, enterprises and organizations to kick off and manage innovation processes by co-designing and setting in place experiments of new services and solutions. [Authors’ abstract].
Meroni, Anna; Fassi, Davide and Simeone, Giulia (2013) Design for social innovation as a form of designing activism. An action format (Paper presented at the international conference Social Frontiers : The next edge of social innovation research, at GCU's London Campus on 14th and 15th November 2013).
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