Abstract

The article considers social innovation in an eco-systemic perspective, focusing on policies able to foster it and discussing design’s role within them in terms of professional skills and a widespread capability among all social actors involved. To be expressions of an innovative governance, social innovation policies must themselves be innovative and form policy constellations: clusters of initiatives able to interact positively with the socio-technical system on which they seek to impact. The article is specifically devoted to illustrating the notion of policy constellation, discussing three social innovation policies in Italy: ‘Bologna Regulation’, ‘Milan Smart City’ and ‘Bollenti Spiriti’ in Apulia. All three case studies refer to project strategies that lead to the creation of ecosystems of independent (but mutually synergic) initiatives. Until now, expert design has had a sometimes significant, but generally marginal, presence in this field (mostly as strategic design and, to a lesser extent, as service and communication design). This article suggests that this could and should increase in the future. The authors conclude by posing a new question: what holds together the constituent projects in a social innovation policy? A possible hypothesis is that this something is a cultural frame: a vision of the world shared by all the actors involved. Keywords : policy constellation, social innovation, design for social innovation, strategic design, design for services, co-design.

Highlights

  • Resumo O artigo ilustra o conceito de constelação de políticas

  • We wish here to highlight three other important aspects of these policy constellations: they are the result of a proper localisation strategy; they are subsystems of a wider socio-technical system; strategic design plays a key role in guiding, feeding and orienting this variety of initiatives

  • We propose a working hypothesis about the existence of a common ‘cultural frame’ shared among the social actors involved in these policy constellations, launching a call for further research

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Summary

Types of design actions

By their very nature the overall policy and its various constituent initiatives require designing. Empowering: transferring knowledge, skills, methods and tools development, to improve different actors’ competences in designing and managing their own initiatives and in supporting future policies This capacity building may be developed by using co-design, which, according to the authors, is a way of empowering people (Selloni, 2014) and enhancing their confidence in the possibility of being able to affect their local situation. Envisioning is a characterising activity of expert design that benefits from the designer’s capacity to give shape to intangible things, providing powerful images able to inspire people and to create a shared vision on crucial issues These visions work as the ‘boundary objects’ conceived by Star (1989) and redefined by Ehn (2008) as tools for aligning different participants and different matters of concern. This is why Penin et al (2013) talk about the importance of applying an‘amplification method’ in order to expand weak signals and make them strategic

Case study discussion
Previous activities
Exploring design actions
Conclusions and next steps
Policy constellations as localisation
Policy constellations as open systems
Full Text
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