DESIGN, LOCAL SERVICES AND ACTIVE PEOPLE
The social conditions of the more industrialised countries are becoming more and more complex and require solutions that the existing public and private system is not able to produce and the dominant thinking for the provision of public service is based on an idea of welfare that is no longer practicable. Furthermore the economic system is proposing lifestyles and model based on a passive behaviour of products’ final users in many everyday functions. We are outsourcing the performance of those function to something or someone else. However its consequences could be very serious, if not catastrophic.
This paper will instead look at an emerging trend: new services are proposed, that are characterised by the active participation of final customers in the co-production of a solutions. Such groups of active people are solving problems that neither welfare systems, nor private initiatives are covering.Such “bottom-up” initiatives are very promising for the development of new welfare ideas and practices.
However many of those initiatives have been developed as isolated cases, paying little attention to the perspective to systematize them, in order to make them easier to reproduce, to generate new knowledge and possibly and to benefit to local business and economies. This is the point on which the design discipline can offer its contribution, in order to make those initiatives accessible, appropriately organised and reproducible.
How can the design discipline contribute to any of those conditions?
This paper will explore this territory by looking at individual solutions from a design perspective. In this perspective, individual and localised solutions can be seen as a production system, whose final result is the product of the interaction between the above mentioned actors. In the last few years, this perspective has been explored in service and system design, with the aim of analysing analogies and differences between traditional production systems and systems whose outcome is co-produced by a network of actors including final customers. The exploration provided several methodological insights, which can now be the basis for a contribution of the design discipline to the consolidation of a new approach to the solution of social and local problems.
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