I’m very happy to say that a Design Research Initiative that influenced me very much during the development of my thesis has been selected among the finalist projects for the most important Italian Design Award.

EMUDE (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) was a programme of activities funded by the European Commission, the aim of which was to explore the potential of social innovation as a driver for technological and production innovation, in view of sustainability. To this end it seeks to shed more light on cases where subjects and communities use existing resources in an original way to bring about system innovation. From here, it intends to pinpoint the demand for products, services and solutions that such cases and communities express, and point to research lines that could lead to improved efficiency, accessibility and diffusion.

As we can see here, has been selected among the finalist projects for the Compasso d’Oro.

I wrote earlier (here and here) that Creative Communities (bottom-up communities that self-organize to solve local problems in a sustainable way) can be useful in order to spread sustainable behaviour throughout society, as they already show sustainable lifestyles, based on sustainable and fair use of resources.
Designers 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. And an Open P2P Design could manage Open P2P organizational forms and principles as a design tool and as a design goal to support such Creative Communities.

All these cases have been published in a book: “Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living”, Edited by Anna Meroni with essays by: Priya Bala, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Luisa Collina, Bas de Leeuw, François Jégou, Helma Luiten, Ezio Manzini, Isabella Marras, Anna Meroni, Eivind Stø, Pål Strandbakken, Edina Vadovics”

The book is about social innovation as a driver for sustainable technological and production innovation. Adopting a design perspective, it presents several case studies and their providers, the creative communities, where individuals and communities use existing resources in a creative, original way to bring about system innovation.
This book does not set out to give yet another theoretical definition of creativity. Instead it seeks to define creativity through a series of innovative responses to the various problems that crop up in everyday life. So it talks about on-the-field creativity (and therefore innovation) triggered by the real context of needs, resources, principles and capabilities.

Here you can download the book, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 licence:
http://www.sustainable-everyday.net/main/?page_id=19

Tags: Community, Design, Design Research, Italy, Locality, Participation, Social Innovation, Sustainability