Welcome!

This website is intended to be a place for meeting, discussion and sharing of knowledge about how design can face succesfully the complexity of society and its problems, especially sustainability.
It is now Massimo Menichinelli’s personal website, with the possibility and hope to grow in the future, becoming a community.

It starts as a personale website as it is intended to serve as a tool to publish and develop further my master’s degree graduation thesis, presented on 6th of April 2006 at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Design. It is a theoretical thesis developed studying the possibility of a role for design in giving support to communities, enabling them to act and improve their conditions. The starting point was the success of Open Source and Peer-to-Peer software, and specially the success of theirs community-based organizational forms. They have been so successful that theirs organizational forms have spread to other fields. and we have realized that there have been others successful organizational forms before that share some principles.
This thesis is about thinking how service design can be used to co-design organizational forms that draws some features of Open Source and P2P communities (or Open Peer-to-Peer Communities). Furthermore, these communities don’t need to be web-based in order to be successful: their success doesn’t come as a consequence of the technology used but from their organizational forms, that, thriving on their complexity, let them face complex situations.

An open and non-hierarchical approach to design: Open P2P Design. In order to face the complex problems of the society, one has to adopt new way of thinking and designing that can face complexity in all of its aspects, without reducing it. Just as Open P2P Communities can face complex problems successfully thanks to their organizational form, that exploits their complexity.

This website is intended therefore to publish this thesis under a Creative Commons License: soon you will be able to download a pdf file and read and modify a wiki version, participating thus to its further development. As my thesis is about 360 pages long, probably it will be published in its entirety in Italian only; in the future a 10-20 pages long version will be published in English and Spanish.

As the thesis represents the web site’s core ideas, the operative core is now the Blog (in Italian, English and Spanish), because of its capability to allow a quick communication and the discussion of the ideas. Along the Blog there is a Wiki (still under construction), so it will be possible to develop further the ideas and share them with everyone. It won’t be a website interested in just Open Source and P2P (or Web 2.0, which represents a further development and bloomed in the meantime), but it will be interested to the wider relationship between design, complexity and sustainability.