APPLIED AESTHETICS
It is literally the application of the theories issued by a philosophical aesthetics discourse to cultural constructs: from lifestyle to literature, from performing arts to gastronomy. In the specificity of Design and Architecture, it is often used as a synonym of Environmental Aesthetics. In this sense, it mainly refers to the application of philosophical and communicational theories to design and architecture, detailing in terms of human responses and interactions with urban and living spaces, everyday objects, urban art and services, a cross-sector analysis, involving Humanities and design practices.
CAPACITY BUILDING / EMPOWERMENT
DSI processes enable society driven innovations, where people acquire knowledge, awareness and self-responsibility, and foster capacity to deal actively with complex changes and to innovate in the society. Limited to the social innovation framework, the processes of empowering people in taking action and collaborating through the acquisition, growth and improvement of skills, knowledge, tools and capabilities. In TEPSIE definition of Social innovation, a core element of social innovation is the enhancement of society’s capacity to act, as “supporting beneficiaries by creating new roles and relationships, developing assets and capabilities” (Caulier-Grice et al., 2012).
COLLABORATIVE SENSE-MAKING
A shift to new paradigms and values that encompasses the capacity of generating a shared and trusted vision of a process and of a solution, towards a shared ownership for effective social changes.
COMMUNITY-CENTRED DESIGN
A design approach where the community emerges as the new unit of interaction, being a key to generate systemic and lasting changes. As opposed or complementary to user-centred design, a community-centred design approach deals with wider socio-technical transformations where cooperative problem-solving activities could support the generation of systemic and radical changes for public interests. In participatory and co-design processes, the community emerges as a new unit of interaction. As Meroni and Sangiorgi state (2011) “when the aim is to generate systemic and lasting changes, community-centred design is more helpful than a user-centred design approach”, arguing that the dimension of the community is potentially the dimension of change (Ogilvy, 2002). They continue adding that “elective communities (defined by interest, geography, profession or other criteria) are seen as sufficiently larger than the individual to impose moral restraints that transcend the individual will, but still small enough to be recognised as representative of individual interests” (Meroni & Sangiorgi, 2011). In this framework, the role of the designers comprises both ways to make actors collaborate as well as strategies and tools to diffuse “community-based initiatives that ‘prototype’ innovative ways of doing” (Ibid.).
DESIGN ACTIVISM
Design, as a process for achieving change, embodies activism as a form of shifting to new paradigms and values when is a driver for achieving change. In this sense, it could elicit social and behavioural change. Markussen (2013) defines design activism as a “disruptive aesthetic practice”, focusing on the impact of design acts on the public sphere as ways to introduce “heterogeneous material objects and artefacts into the urban field of perception” (2013, p.4). The term disruptivedoes not have here a negative sense, since “the design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Ibid. 2013, p.1) and “has the potential to re-negotiate the relationship between people’s doing […] and their feelings about this doing” (Ibid. 2013, p. 6). Design artefacts, when embedding the intention of instigating change (Thorpe, 2008), trigger the user to action through forms of active engagement and foster new forms of inhabiting and new identities of places, objects and interactions. These are design thinking, imagination and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing positive social, institutional, environmental and/or economic change“. (Fuad-Luke, 2013, p.27)
DESIGN FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION
Design for social innovation is everything that expert design can do to activate, sustain and orient processes of social change toward sustainability (Manzini, 2015, p.62). In other words, designers use their “skills and competences to recognize promising cases when and where they appear and to reinforce them” (Ibid., p.58). Design can play a major role in triggering and supporting social change through new design capabilities to move from ideas to mature, scaled-up, consolidated and integrated solutions and to viable and strategic programs.
EVERYDAY AESTHETICS
It is a new frontier of the aesthetics discourse arising in the context of late twentieth-century Anglo-American aesthetics. It was launched as a reaction against what was an undue restriction on the scope of aesthetics. It aims to investigate the entirety of people’s multi-faceted aesthetic life, including various aspects of everyday life. Everyday Aesthetics aims to free aesthetic inquiry from an almost exclusive focus on art, as in modern Western aesthetics, openly expanding the domain of research to what is not just art. By considering a wide range of contemporary examples, issued from human interactions with nature, environments and object of everyday use, Everyday Aesthetics, as elaborated by Yuriko Saito – based on some British and North American premises across 18th -19th century and Japanese culture – questions the inadequacy of art-centered aesthetics to analyze the responses generated by contemporary phenomenological manifestations, focusing also on ethics and social values. It provides, indeed, novel insights to expand the aesthetic discourse also to the mundane and the familiar, in a framework of moral, political, and existential appreciation of everyday issues and implications. As established as a discipline following up to Saito’s teaching and research activity at Rhode Island School of Design RISD, it perfectly integrates with the approaches and methodologies usually applied within Design Schools.
PARTICIPATORY DESIGN
Participatory design is a design process and methodology where the designer opens the process up to users starting from the initial phases of the project and where value is co-created between elective communities and designers/organisations. Participatory design (PD) is not only a methodology but a design shift in itself. It encompasses the notions of power redistribution and of sharing ownership, and it contributes to the practical concerns of people in a specific context. It is nowadays a core value of design thinking, by affecting its practice and identity, methods and approaches within an established – but still to be fostered – participatory mind-set and a behavioural change in society (institutions, local and global organizations) and complex socio-technical systems. PD is a methodology employed in various fields and settings and its terminology underlines a variety of approaches and interpretations: action research, collaborative inquiry, emancipatory research, action learning, contextual action research, co-operative design, joint application design, are only some of the terms used. From these emerges the basis of this methodology, highlighting its constitutive assumptions. First of all, PD is a social process and has its origins in social sciences: it is transformative in aim, contributing “both to the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to further the goals of social science simultaneously” (Gilmore, Krantz, & Ramirez, 1986, p. 161). It involves researchers, practitioners and people in general (who), through collaboration, inclusion and social action (how), for a planned organizational change to solve real problems (why). Therefore, PD is applied to real, specific contexts, and sees the active engagement of both the researcher and the traditional object of social research: people. The process of the action itself – cyclical, iterative and adaptable to changing circumstances – is much more relevant than its output, since it deals with continuous co-learning and adjustment. In design research, the level of participation and involvement are widely discussed. PD, as mentioned above, has its origin in social sciences and the research around this topic has been and is still extensively examined and analysed. The user-centred approach was acquired by the design discipline and later developed into co-designing with the user: a human-centred design approach. Co-design has been defined by Sanders & Stappers (2008, p. 6) as a way “to refer to the creativity of designers and people not trained in design working together in the design development process”. Creativity is defined as the capacity to contribute and participate – in different ways – ina design process. Human-centred design scales up to community-centred design (Meroni, 2007) when facing complex systems of challenges dealing with groups and communities at society scale, in order “to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actualneeds” (IDEO, 2015, p. 9). The design discipline addresses a system of contradictory and continuously changing elements made of complex interdependencies.
PROTOTYPING
Design prototypes support to move from research findings and insights to actionable concepts, bridging from research analysis to creative synthesis, also as part of the early front end of the design development process. Prototypes are part of the design research process since they inform and inspire the design development process. In fact, they are no more only part of the final phase but also of the early front end of the design development process, often referred to as the “fuzzy front end”. (Sanders, 2005). This shift is happening as part of an overall reinforced attention, in the last twenty years, typical of Research Through Design approach, also defined as Experimental Knowldege, where knowledge is produced by processes epistemological, experimental and cognitive models and practices. That opened the way to a renewed design culture in the range of ways of thinking of design, which span from a deterministic view (Pandza & Thorpe, 2010), to a reflective one (Schön, 1987), within a post-industrial era that is the scene of societal challenges, changes and actions, dominated by new emergences (individuals to sharing communities), new dominant structures (hierarchies to networks), and new design approaches (technology-centred to human-centred) (Krippendorff, 2005). Thus, prototypes (models, systems, objects, services, processes) assume a role also in being generative methods, as “as vehicles for inquiry” (Wensveen & Matthews, 2015): not only to test and evaluate ideas, but also to create and uncover ideas and opportunities. Prototyping are useful in social innovation (Murray et al. 2010), since they can be performed through co-creation (Björgvinsson et al., 2010), opening the way to “more open-ended long-term process where diverse stakeholders can innovate together” (Hillgren et al., 2011, p.2), through a gradual scaling up process (The Young Foundation 2011).
SCENARIO BUILDING / ENVISIONING
It is the design discipline capacity to bring concepts to life through the process of conception and exploration of possible solutions and of possible futures. Envisioning serves to ideate and exchange knowledge and information within creative process where diverse stakeholders can innovate together. Scenarios encompass the envisioning of interactions, actions, objects, processes, services and serve as a way to express the complexity of multiple factors, their variables and their unfolding in space (abstract or contextual) and time. They “deal with the macro-scale of the socio-technical systems and present a variety of possible futures” (Manzini, 2003, p.2), that are reasonable, acceptable and debatable. They can be single visions or a variety of comparable visions. Scenarios facilitate the design process and innovation processes through the generation of a shared vision and the convergence of actions by different actors, and activate the strategic conversation among different actors, in order to support participatory, rational decision making (Manzini & Jégou, 2004).
SOCIAL INNOVATIONS
Social innovations are solutions based on new social forms and economical models, that produce meaningful solutions dealing with social change toward sustainability (Manzini 2015). Specifically, social innovations are new ideas that simultaneously address unmet social needs (Mulgan et al., 2007, p.2), create new social relationships or collaborations (The Young Foundation, NESTA) and that transcend established institutional contexts with the effect of empowering and (re)engaging vulnerable groups either in their ends and in their means (SIMPACT, 2015). New ideas can take the form of products, services, models, actions, systems, processes, regulations or organisational forms. Social innovations are focused on the regeneration of both the social processes, required to the generation and implementation of new means, as well as the social outcomes, satisfying new needs in the provision of vital public goods (Nicholls et al. 2016).A core value of processes of social innovations is that they are sustained by the co-production of knowledge between scholars and communities of stakeholders from civil society, business and government (WILCO, 2013), rebalancing power disparities of economic inequalities in society.
SOMAESTHETICS
(…) In exploring the body’s crucial and complex role in aesthetic experience, I previously proposed the idea of a body-ntered discipline that I called soma esthetic. Timidly tentative, my proposal remained very vague.
Suggesting somaesthetics as a possibility worth exploring, I dared not presume to define it by proposing a systematic account of what topics, concepts, aims, and practices it would comprise. After almost three millennia of philosophy, to propose a new philosophical discipline might seem a reckless act of arrogance; to suggest one centered on the body could only add absurdity to hubris. At the risk of further ridicule, I now wish to outline the basic aims and elements of somaesthetics and to explain how it could promote some of philosophy’s most crucial concerns. The purpose is to show its potential utility, not its radical novelty. If somaesthetics is radical, it is only in the sense of returning to some of the deepest roots of aesthetics and philosophy (…).