Design and social innovation - 1

I was able to get to some of the sessions with Ezio Mazini this week in Melbourne and Sydney. This is the first installment of some reflections on his insights and some of the discussions that emerged in the lively sessions with CEOs, business people and the design community. In no particular order of significance or importance... 1 Social innovation's significance draws primarily from the particular point of history in which we find ourselves, characterised overwhelmingly by the search for more sustainable ways in which to live. In that sense, the 'point' of social innovation was defined in terms of its contribution to sustainability, and the 'point' of design as a key contributor to social innovation was defined in terms of its ability to bring a sensibility and set of tools and methods to bear on the work of social innovation. 2 Designers are interesting people, judging by the account that Ezio gave of the values and outlook that drives them. They are idealists in many ways, capable of flights of imagination and inspiration. But they are pragmatists too, willing to build prototypes of their vision that are not perfect or even especially beautiful initially, but which help people to see the idea they are trying to bring into the world. And they won't wait for someone else to provide the money or the materials...they work with what they can get their hands on to get started, the create the first prototype. And the quicker they do that, the quicker they can make something better. 3 Designers are builders, people who take ideas and build something that embodies what that idea might mean. An interesting question arose in the discussions...in many ways, social innovators are builders and makers too, often without giving themselves the 'design' label and often without a full mix of the requisite skills or methods. But there is something deeply resonant between the values and instincts of designers and social innovators - human-centred,experiential, experimental, a hybrid of passion, idealism and pragmatism, occasionally maverick and contrary. 4 The characteristics of the world into which social innovators, aided and abetted by the skills and methods of designers, are moving are "small, open, local and connected". It reminded me of the line about the Internet and the world of the web, coined I think by David Weinberger..."small pieces, loosely joined". This suggests a new ethic of production and scale, where scenarios about the kind of world we want to create and the values we want to pursue are defined by more complex conversations between more complex webs of people and institutions. Scale doesn't demand monolithic centralisation. Perhaps we need to explore new ideas of what a recent report from UK think tank NESTA called "mass localism". This is not a world of anarchy or chaos where no one is leading or defining directions, but it is a world in which leading and defining directions are not susceptible to the top-down, often highly manipulative methods of traditional hierarchical institutions, in which we are evincing less and less faith (and, for the most part,quite rightly too).