Chiara Del Gaudio

The influence of local powers on participatory design processes in marginalized conflict areas

This paper explores the influence of local forces on Participatory Design processes aiming at promoting access and inclusion, carried out in marginalized conflict areas. Social contexts are the synthesis of the forces exerted by local actors which become more and more influent on contextual dynamics in situations of local instability and struggles. We present and analyse a Participatory Design project developed in a Rio de Janeiro slum, within an NGO. Through a conceptual framework on power and on its exercise, we explain how project partners, participants, and local institutions and groups have influenced the project, to the point of preventing its implementation. The intention is to show how the context may condition the design project, to point out the difficulties in acting in conflict areas and to present factors that will help designers in dealing with them.

Sementes de inovação social como alternativas à hegemonia

One of the main issues brought by globalization is the hegemonic affirmation of an ideology fostered by whom dominate the global financial and economical fluxes. This ideology valorizes and promotes competitive and predatory social practices. The same communication and information technology that has supported this process is becoming more and more available and accessible to a wide range of different social actors. It can be harnessed to disseminate alternatives that subvert the domination logic, spreading seeds carrying potential social innovations. This article presents seeding as a possible metadesign action, in the strategic design domain, to reach this positively subversive purpose.

Strategies by design towards creative ecosystems of social innovation.

This paper presents a way to organize social innovation processes, since the identification of opportunities to the diffusion of solutions, that is based on the ecosystemic perspective and on the design method. The ecosystemic perspective is crux in order to generate the innovation necessary to reach systemic changes in today’s unsustainable ways of life. According to the systemic thinking, the understanding organization processes of complex physical, biological and social phenomena, implies focusing on the network that connects the parts of a system, rather than to the single parts. Then, it implies paying a special attention to the network that connects the various systems and the environment (Capra, 1996). We are especially interested in creative ecosystems, that is, complex and interactive networks of social organizations and individuals, whose multiple and dynamic connections activate creative processes for the transformation of the world. Design is one of these creative processes. Actually, it can be defined as a creative process that aims at the development of sociotechnical for the transformation of the world. Towards sustainability, it is necessary that this transformation process both preserves and constantly creates favorable conditions for further future transformations. We adopt the strategic design approach since strategy is necessary to act within ecosystems. Morin (2008) recognizes that the ecosystems are instable and that such instability demands strategy. Moreover, the instability is not an obstacle for the action, vice-versa it is a necessary resource to assure the dynamics that allows the possibility of acting. In this sense, strategic design is proper for facing not only the regular, the evident and the possible, but also the unpredictable, the fortuity, the drifting and the mistake. From this basis, the paper tackles the literature gap related to the long-term sustainability of social innovations. Actually, it is still necessary to understand how to feed, scale and spread them, and to develop strategies in this perspective. Thus, from an ecosystemic perspective, the paper aims at discussing the contribution of strategic design to the developing processes of social innovation through a review of design, management and sociology theories. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2016.3289