This is a CTP of initiative: DESIS - POLIMI DESIS Lab Italy (Italy)
This project was considered a CTP because it “brought the theories on design for social innovation into practice” and “instead of analysing case studies of social innovation we started to make social innovation happen”. The project was developed through an “intensive service co-design process with citizens” and this was also considered an important experience for the Polimi DESIS Lab team.
The project was developed within Ph.D. research carried out in the field of service design.
The initial idea was “to carry out research outside universities and bring in the society, in direct contact with the city and its residents, specifically in a place which is a symbol of Milanese activism: Cascina Cuccagna, a farm-house located in the heart of “Zona 4″. Cittadini Creativi applied to the call for the assignment of temporary spaces in the Cascina, presenting a program focused on participatory design between designers and local communities, by using the tools from service design research”.
The main aim was “to generate a collection of everyday services co-designed and co-produced with the active participation of city dwellers, envisaging a possible intersection with the public sector, enhancing a novel form of welfare and the birth of original service start ups, run by the people themselves that would become social entrepreneurs”.
The Cittadini Creativi project promoted “a series of sessions dedicated to different areas: food systems, the objects we use in daily life, the skills we need to solve bureaucratic problems, the domestic tasks that we have to carry out and many other activities”. In each session there “was a temporary set design to simulate service situations”. It was a “light path of creative participation, precisely because everyone can become the ‘designer of his daily life”.
The project Creative Citizens had its starting point in some events related to another project being developed by the Polimi DESIS Lab at the same time: Feeding Milano (the project was another CTP). Feeding Milano developed a farmers’ market as one of its core activities.
The co-design process carried out in the Mercato della Terra, nel progetto Feeding Milano, was 'fast' and 'pass by', i.e. it was done with people who were passing by a stand placed in the market that in English we named "ideas sharing stall". It was a place in the market in which people could participate in the development of the service. We showed some mock-ups, some prototypes, and people gave feedback. It was an innovation but it was a very fast and a very quick relationship with participants. It was not really co-design; we named it "fast co-design".
In the project Creative Citizens, the program was quite different, because it was quite a strong commitment, meeting every Thursday for 2 hours, from 7p.m. to 9 p.m." for 6 months. It was not all about food services, but about entering into other fields, and as a result several fields of application came out. The original community of protesters from the Mercato della Terra (Earth Market) were a core of 6 people and then it grew to 30 people. They highlighted all the key issues and questions regarding the neighbourhood. So we tried to work with these local needs".
The project Creative Citizens was endorsed by the Council of Zona 4 and was supported by several actors within Politecnico di Milano: Dipartimento di Design (design department), Dottorato di Ricerca in Design ( Design Ph.D.), POLIMI DESIS LAB (within DESIS network) and the project Feeding Milano, which was developed in collaboration with Slow Food Italy, Politecnico di Milano, Università di Scienze Gastronomiche.
The project EMUDE (2004-2006) is considered a precursor of the project Creative Citizens because it highlighted the importance of social innovation for the design discipline. But this project was focused on existing case studies and placed its focus on how to communicate the value of the cases of social innovation through using design skills. The project Creative Citizens was different: it sought to develop social innovation cases.
Two other events are described below as examples of how the importance of social innovation started to be recognized by the public administration and other actors in the city of Milan: when the Municipality of Milan enacted guidelines for the management of co-working initiatives (2014) and the Sharexpo event (2015). It is considered that the Polimi DESIS Lab contributed to the recognition of the importance of social innovation (and the innovative services it gives rise to) by the public administration and other actors in the city.
2004-2006 Project Emerging Users Demands for Sustainable solutions (EMUDE). The project placed its focus on social innovation as a driver for technological and system innovation. It included: the identification of cases of social innovation geared towards sustainability and evaluation, selection and bringing the most promising cases to light; the identification of the demand for the products, services and solutions that they gave rise to; the visualization, communication and dissemination of these cases and their possible implications by means of technological trends, scenarios and roadmaps.
2014 – Municipality of Milan increasingly recognizes the importance of social innovation. A good example was in 2014, when the Municipality enacted rules for the management and operation of co-working initiatives in the city
2015 – Sharexpo: Milan as a collaborative and shareable city. Sharexpo’s main goal was to bring the emerging topic of a sharing economy to the attention of institutions, economic players and grassroots organisations. The event included the definition of strategies to facilitate the development and diffusion of collaborative services in Milan (besides public administration and other actors). A member of the Polimi DESIS Lab worked in a Sharexpo committee.
This CTP inherited a contestation that took place in a previous project (Feeding Milano). The development of this CTP (the project Creative Citizens) was, in itself, a way to overcome this contestation:
“The Mercato della Terra (Earth Market) faced a crisis in 2011 when the municipality of Milan closed it. It was closed because a law was enacted that prohibited the operation of farmers’ markets in public parks. So it was closed for 6, 7 months. This triggered a violent protest by citizens of that neighbourhood, who got organized using a newsletter and newspapers. In short, they became a small movement. The project Creative Citizens was developed with this community of protesters and was created almost as a compensation for them. We started with food services and later, we included many other services, which were developed in a series of meetings”.
“Later, the Mercato della Terra (Earth Market) was reopened in another place, La Fabbrica del Vapore (a cultural center in Milan) in another neighbourhood”.
The project was not understood as a CTP in the beginning:
“The project started with a very simple ambition, to use and test co-design tools. I later understood that this was a very small ambition, because we ended up developing real services. I hadn’t completely designed the implementation phases (service development as a goal). The project was conceived based on a methodological ambition, not a transformative one.
If the services were not really developed it would not be a problem because I would have tested the tools.
Later I understood that it was transformative for that neighbourhood and for the people involved. They already had a transformative ambition, which was to change their daily lives through those services”.
The role of the public sector in social innovation:
“This (the project Creative Citizens) was a real social innovation in a way, in the process let's say, and at the end six services were created, but now, currently, only two are really happening, and they faced the same problem as the "farmers' food box": who will take care of the service? The service legacy, lets call it. (detailed in the CTP "Feeding Milan"). You make efforts to develop social innovation but the legacy of these activities... (about the services developed by the Polimi DESIS Lab, which don’t always have a provider to keep them running after the prototyping phase).
I mean, you need the public sector. It was there as an endorser of Creative Citizens, because sometimes it is the natural heir of these services, because they are services of public interest, even if they are not provided by the public sector, but they are for the community, for the general interest, that's why you need the public sector and sometimes the public sector must become the provider of these services".
What was learned about the service development process:
“One of the services running is the 'Sportello dei Cittadini' (Citizens' desk) which is where you can get advice about bureaucratic procedures, offered by experts in the community. There are volunteers, lawyers, accountants, architects, who offer advice once a week (for 30 minutes). We have developed the rules, a website to make the appointment online, formats.. It runs in many different rooms in Cascina Cucagna: Tuesday you have a lawyer; Wednesday you have an architect... and so on. It was free in the beginning, but now we are defining a small fee for this service. People feel more safe when they are paying for the service” .
“The other service is the 'time bank' that was already running in Cascina Cucagna with some volunteers, but only with pensioners. We tried to make it more intergenerational, and we have developed it as a service (website, etc)”.
“There was no problem that we had failed on with some projects because they had set the stage for subsequent experiments”
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