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

1. Consumption:
   Consumer -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
2. Self Service:
   Consumer -> choice -> cash -> company’s products/services made entirely by company
3. DIY Do it yourself:
   Consumer -> degree of involvement in the value chain -> cash -> company’s products/services made by the company
4. Co-design:
   Consumer -> customizing the product -> cash -> company’s products/services for partial products made by the company
5. Co-creation:
   Consumer -> actual involvement in design/production -> (cash ->) open sourced produced product ->(possibly a company or not, ie Wikipedia).
6. Direct peer production of use value with no concern for monetization:
   Consumer -> idea -> (cash ->) consumer produced/manufactured product. Example: couchsurfing.com.

   Important here is that cash is not necessary, but in theory possible.

7. Direct peer production of use value with concern for equitable monetization:
   Consumer community-> a commons -> peer production -> cash -> equitable production and commerce

Note that I wouldn’t use ‘consumer community’, as we are talking about both producers and consumers, users might be more correct, or as Axel Bruns says: “produsers”

8. Direct production of use value by groups with commons-oriented business ecology:
   Customer community -> ecology of business producing marketable, scarce goods through a foundation on non profit basis -> consumer consumes. (Linux)

Here I make a difference between the businesses creating added value on top of the commons, say IBM vs. Linux, and the foundations which run the infrastructure of the commons, such as the Wikimedia Foundation. They are not the same.

9. Direct production of use value by individuals with monetization of attention through proprietary platforms:
   Consumer -> (Intellectual) Product on a communal (proprietary) platform -> Cash -> Consumer (Web2.0)
10. Direct production of exchange value by groups: cooperative production:
    Consumer communities -> cooperative format of product -> cash -> consumer (Old model of producer cooperatives).
11. Direct production of exchange value by individuals:
    Consumer-> product distributed using local infrastructure for distributed production-> cash -> consumer (Ebay, a person designing something that operates a machine in a far off place to churn out the product)”

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 and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

Open P2P Communities can self-organize with:

• a bottom-up participation: a community gather independently to fix a common problem (for example: Amul). The community forms in a bottom-up way:
• a top-down participation: a (public or private) service that allows the formation of a community and bases on it its operation is offered. Participants operate in order to fulfill the enterprise’s/local institution’s goals/work (i.e. the participants depend from the enterprise/local institution) (for example: YouTube). The service is offered in a top-down way, and the participants act consequently .
• a marketplace participation: a (public or private) service that allows the formation of a community is offered, and the participants gather in the community. Participants behave independently, forming relationships between each other in order to develop their own goals/works (i.e. they behave independently, in a true peer-to-peer way) (for example: BBC Action Network). The service is delivered in a top-down way, but the participants act in a bottom-up way within it.

The fundamental point is: who takes the initiative and looks for persons in order to form a community? And with which goals? And which type of relationships, and therefore social network, it enables?

I am not sure that marketplace participation is the right term, it should be something that relates to a place where people can gather, that doesn’t emerge spontaneously, but it is offered instead by someone else (a private company or a local institution). There, people could follow a market economy, or a gift economy too.

Any suggestions?

And here I’m going to talk about a specific way to analyse and classify participation, regarding it as a ladder.

The first ladder of participation came fron an article written by Sherry Arnstein in 1969 (Arnstein, Sherry R. “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” JAIP, Vol. 35, No. 4, July 1969, pp. 216-224).

Why use a ladder? Because the most important thing to notice, is that there are different levels of participation, ranging from full participation to fake participation, from being in-control to being under control.

After this one, other ladders of participation have been described: for example the
Ladder of Children’s Participation (also called the Ladder of Youth Participation), from (1997) Roger Hart, Children’s Participation: The Theory And Practice Of Involving Young Citizens In Community Development And Environmental Care, UNICEF:

…that has been adapted as a Ladder of Volunteer Participation too.

(Here and here in Spanish )

…and, guess what, a participation scale has been adapted also for Web 2.0! This image comes from the work of Charlene Li at Forrester (via Steve Rubel). The most striking things is that 52% (the majority) is inactive, but this is not a surprise.

presentazione_Menichinelli_24-10-2007_Polimi.pdf, (3.2 Mb, in Italian)

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04 « Intro.05 « Intro.06 « Intro.07 « Intro.08 « Intro.09

Unlike a traditional, linear, design process, Open Peer-to-Peer Design is non-linear and characterized by multiple parallell processes because of the large number of agents and their interactions. An Open Peer-to-Peer design process thus provides the basis for developing more parallel projects, an ecosystem of designer agents with a memetic evolution of the projects that are more “suitable” to the community, whose selection will lead to better results.

An Open Peer-to-Peer design process is characterized by openness and sharing of the project (the source code for software) of the platform and of the activities that it allows once provided to the community by the designers. The community will test and modify it several times and in several directions (in the software, compiling the binary code), until a satisfactory version is reached (the stable version of the software) and self-organization is ensured.

The source code of the project (community source code) consists of tools from design services, with the introduction of a description of the reputation levels within the community, the license that governes cooperation and the access to the results, a social network map able to show weaknesses and strengths in the community. The source code is accessible to all participants, who are testing it with increasing level of reality (the platform is gradually built during this phase) reporting to the design community any errors (bugs in software) present. The higher the number of participants, the greater the chance that errors are detected and corrected.
During the design process and at its end, the community will self-organize modifying the project if necessary, as far as possible; it is this ability to self-organize and improve the local conditions that makes the communities alive and interesting.

Participation in this design process is open and equal, but is also governed by two principles: self-selection and reputation, which give place to different levels of participation in the various design phases, according to the possession of knowledge needed in each project phase. The different phases of the design process, therefore, require different levels of participation and therefore commitment and visibility of the participants. These different levels give place to different typical phases (similar to some phases of the community of practice) of the life of the communities: potential, coalescing, stable, self-organization and expansion, decline.

analysis

The project begins with an analysis of the participants, in order to understand the existing and therefore usable resources, limitations, critical points. Through the analysis, the designers begin to know the participants, prefiguring which features the community’s activity could have in the future. The objective of this phase is to define the objectives and the strategy on which the concept of the community’s activity will be build. The analysis, carried out through ethnographic investigation and social networks analysis, will cover the platform, the characteristics of the individual participants if possible, as well as existing activities.

concept

Once the analysis of the participants, of their activities and their social networks is done, a first concept of the community’s activity (and its platform) is developed. The designers then develop an initial version (we might say the 0.0.1 version) of the project of the activity/platform, formalized in the community source code.

parallel co-design / test / setting-up

Once developed, the concept is shown to the participants and collectively discussed. From now begins a phase of co-design of the activity/platform, characterized by steady growth of commitment, energy and visibility by the participants. At this stage, the concept of activity is developed collaboratively to get a functioning project, a “stable” source code (version 1.0).
The participants test the community source code of the community simulating the activity, in order to understand what are the weaknesses, errors (bugs in the community source code). The source code is subjected to a peer-review process, in which both the designers (who observe the simulation) and the participants report errors and the necessary changes. Once a bug is identified the source code is modified and again a testing begins with the new code.

In order to simulate the activity, participants must share the conditions necessary to carry out the activity, represented by the platform. Rules and roles should be developed and adopted, and the artifacts that are not already present will be built or acquired. This means that along with the continuation of the co-design / test process, the platform is implemented and when the project reaches the stable version, the participants can begin the regular activity, strengthening then the sense of community.
Once the co-design / test ends, the project will already be done, there are no phases of production nor execution. As in software, then the source code (the project) gives place to the binary code (the work done by the participants).

self-organization

After the first “stable version” (1.0.0) of the source code is reached, the community will be largely formed: during the simulation / activity new social relationships will have formed. A stable version of the source code means that it can be “compiled” (ie, done) and used by anyone without the possibility of critical errors. At this stage, therefore, the community is able to carry out the activity and self-organize without the contribution of the designer: if his role was that of a facilitator (enabler), now the community is able to act successfully alone.

At this point, ideally, the role of the designer is not needed anymore; however, the community will always need its contribution in the future: the designer has always knowledge and expertise useful to provide support to the community in response to changes in the outside world.
Also, if the community activity is a design one, the desinger’s capabilities make them important in the community, and they will continue to be part of also during the self-organization phase.

These observations represent therefore an initial proposal (1.1) for an Open Peer-to-Peer design guidelines, in a broader process of studying a comprehensive methodology.

Finally, what are the future opportunities and directions for the application and study of these design guidelines?

(to be continued)