Designing “Down to Earth.” Lessons Learned from Transformative Social Innovation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The consequences of anthropocentric ways of thinking, designing, producing, and consuming are becoming painfully clear. Moving from this observation, several designers have become aware that design culture needs to reorient itself beyond anthropocentrism. In this article, we start with Bruno Latour’s proposal of coming “down to Earth,” which acknowledges that we are ultimately “terrestrials,” and connect it to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of “care.” These concepts are pillars of the concrete guidelines we propose here: they are foundations for designing in a regenerative way, stepping beyond anthropocentrism. This paper traces a convergence between this emergent account of design and some recent social innovations, which are, in our opinion, making what it might mean to get down to Earth tangible. This convergence becomes particularly evident when introducing the concept of the “quality of complexity”: in other words, a qualitative dimension characteristic of those experimentations in which people re-orient their daily lives towards reweaving the web of life. While designing can strengthen its ability to be regenerative by exploring how to further engage with practices with this specific qualitative dimension, it might also provide philosophy with some concrete examples of a praxis taking further concrete steps down to Earth.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• radical interdependency
• terrestrial
• care
• complexity
• transformative social innovation
• post-anthropocentric design culture

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 “On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990, 40; Tronto 1993, 103).

2 We are aware of the fact that there are many other examples of practices of care from which designing can learn, but, as in the past years we have been looking closer at TSI initiatives around the world and exploring their potential value for designing (Manzini 2015), for the sake of this paper we decided to exploit the knowledge built in the field of TSI and explore how those practices of care – with a specific focus on CSA, in which in our opinion this is particularly evident – can possibly inspire designers (also those not necessarily working with the realm of TSI) in re-framing their designs as practices of care.

3 The conceptualization and diffusion of the social innovation phenomenon, as it appeared at the start of this century, have been largely driven by English researchers from the Young Foundation and Nesta. Therefore, we think it is both right and useful here to give their best-considered definition: “We define social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs (more effectively than alternatives) and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act” (Murray, Grice, and Mulgan 2010).

4 This point is crucial and it is worth giving some short explanations. In the past centuries, the success of the mechanical models in science and technology spread in the whole society (at least in the Western one), leading to the adoption of the same model and criteria to evaluate our experience of the world. That is, using mono-logical criteria to define and evaluate social organizations (and consequently also reducing the complexity of the involved human beings to stereotyped profiles, as one of consumers/users or producers or designers). In the past century, this mechanical model has been challenged by a new one: the paradigm of complexity, emerging from biology and evolution theories, and now spreading in larger social groups (and in their way of thinking), and, from here, more recently, of the fact that the discovery of complexity is equivalent to the recognition of the Terrestrial and of our necessity to move down to Earth.

5 Or, to use De la Cadena and Blaser’s (2018) terminology, the “world of many worlds.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Virginia Tassinari

Virginia Tassinari’s research areas are design and philosophy, with a specific focus on design for social innovation, participatory design, and design activism. She is the co-editor of Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Re-Framing the Politics of Design (Public Space, 2022). Presently, she is a design researcher for Pantopicon (Belgium), an Antwerp-based foresight and design studio, a design lecturer and researcher at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), visiting professor at LUCA School of Arts (Belgium) and University of Nimes (France), visiting scholar at Parsons, The New School (New York, USA), and the co-founder with Ezio Manzini of DESIS Philosophy Talks: a platform for creating dialogs between designers and social scientists, starting from questions arising from design practice. [email protected]

Ezio Manzini

For over three decades, Ezio Manzini has been working in the field of design for sustainability. Most recently, his interests have focused on social innovation, considered as a major driver of sustainable changes. He is the founder of DESIS: an international network of schools of design, active in the field of design for social innovation and sustainability. Presently, he is President of DESIS Network and Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. He has been guest professor in several design schools world-wide, such as (in the past decade): Elisava-Design School and Engineering (Barcelona), Tongji University (Shanghai), Jiangnan University (Wuxi), University of the Arts (London), CPUT (Cape town), and Parsons, The New School (New York, USA). His most recent books are Design, When Everybody Designs (MIT Press, 2015), Politics of the Everyday (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Livable Proximity (Egea, 2022). [email protected]