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 [...]

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

One of the key point of Open P2P Design is that the designer/s should become an enabler of the creativity that lays in a community/system. I will write something more about this theme in the future (a very long post is under construction), but for the moment I’d like to suggest you a brief [...]

Tags: Enabler, Generative system, Locality, Product Design

And the second announcement refers to the UrbanLabs 08 event, which will be held on 9-10-11 October 2008 in the Citilab-Cornellà (Barcelona), a space designed to activate, promote and expand the creative and innovative capacity in technology entrepreneurs, companies, citizens of the information and knowledge society and knowledge.
The aim of the event is to think [...]

Tags: City, Enabler, Information Society, Institutions, Locality, Open P2P Communities, Social Innovation, Spain

You can’t force people to follow directions they deem arbitrary.

via | reddit

A desire line is a path developed by erosion caused by animal and/or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest and/or most easilly navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of [...]

Tags: Complex Systems, Design, Flows, Locality, Self-Organization, Swarm / Flock / Crowd

City Hacking #02: Design Pubblico (by esterni)

Barefootpaths

In cities that are no longer communities, where estranged citizens go through the same paths every day and hardly ever get closer, design pubblico promotes another way of living collective places together, a conception of “public space” as opposed to the preeminence of “private time”; first-hand visions instead [...]

Tags: City, Design, Locality, Strategic Design

City Hacking #01: Urban Cup Holder

The aim of the urban cup holder is to encourage people to reinterpret street settings and claim them as their territory, instead of just using them as a means of passage from A to B. The cup holder is easily clamped with one hand to posts in the street, then [...]

Tags: City, Locality, Product Design

People Make Places

People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles [...]

Tags: Architectural Design, City, City Planning, Co-Creation, Community, Emergence, Institutions, Local Services, Locality, Participation, Self-Organization, UK