« Intro.01

As designers, why are we interested in communities and so in participation to improve the qualities of a locality towards sustainability? The Design community has reflected upon the sustainability issue in the past years, why are we interested in community now?

For sure, the Design community has reflected upon sustainability, learning from successes and failures.¹ Now, we are at a point where we know that simply redesigning products (ecodesign) reducing materials number and quantity and proposing services (which are not so immaterial as we thought) it’s not enough to achieve sustainability.

These attempts have brought to a completely opposite effect (rebound effect), an incredible growth of products and services on the market (and, as a consequence, a growth in the use of resources).

Maybe it’s better to propose (and improve the diffusion of) sustainable lifestyles, based on sustainable and fair use of resources. Lifestyles that could be proposed by designers or companies, but already exist in the society, though they are not very well known and widrespread. Ezio Manzini calls them Creative Communities². Bottom-up communities that self-organize to solve local problems in a sustainable way.

Design could support the emergence and diffusion of the Creative Communities, providing them products, communication tools, services and strategies that can help them doing their activities. But Design have (almost) never considered communities, how can it relate with communities in participative projects?

For sure, Design could learn something from Architecture, Urban Planning and Web Design, that usually deal with participation.

Maybe the Design community could learn how to face the complexity of communities an of their local dimension, looking at whom have been capable to do it successfully…for example, Open Source communities, P2P communities and similar communities…

(to be continued)

Notes:

1. (2003) Manzini E., Jegou F., Quotidiano sostenibile. Scenari di vita urbana, Edizioni Ambiente, Milano [↩]
2. (2006) Manzini E., Creative communities, collaborative networks and distributed economies. Promising signals for a sustainable development , Dis-Indaco, Politecnico di Milano, (link to the file, in english) [↩]