I first met Ezio Manzini while at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and remember being incredibly inspired by his presentation and vision. His presentation at the Symposium did not disappoint.
He began with a warning about the social dangers inherent in over-designing an experience and the potential for producing a theme park experience. I took this to mean that besides not engaging participants, such services are inherently stunted, confined to a set of possibilities which prohibit growth and evolution of both the people who participate and the service itself.
In contrast, Ezio described a series of social innovations, new ideas that are working to meet social goals. (He mentioned a document from 2006 by the Young Foundation: “Social Silicon Valleys: A manifesto for social innovation”, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like it’s available any more: a follow-on book is listed on the Young Foundation site for £10.) According to him, these social innovations leverage new technologies not yet digested by society to create new solutions and thereby help themselves.
As we are all aware, we face many deep problems in society and the world around us, and social innovations may be one way to respond. However, we need to keep in mind a few points:
- Today, social innovation is as important, and maybe more important than, techno-scientific and business innovations. Because these social innovations tend to be grass roots efforts developed from the bottom up, the top needs to help cultivate them or risk crushing them. This danger exists because these grass-roots efforts are currently not recognized for their potential in quite the same way as are other, more established types of innovation.
- Creative communities produce prototypes and are prototypes themselves: they demonstrate that things can be done in a certain way. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
- Service design can help to facilitate this social innovation phenomenon, keeping in mind, however, that human relationships cannot be designed (the theme-park risk); people need to be free to interact and find their own way.
In light of this last point, Ezio suggested that we need to update and upgrade the current view and definition of service design. Fundamentally, people co-create the final result, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be designed or delivered by a company: the members themselves design, produce, and deliver the service. (Member is such a nicer word than user, don’t you think?)
To discover these new services, we need to look attentively beyond main-stream behaviors to find signals of alternatives (remaining mindful that this is not a scientific evaluation of society, and that we should exercise care when choosing who to study and hold as examples). Some of the examples Ezio mentioned included services which use existing capabilities of houses and people:
- House sharing
- Housing a student
- Living room restaurants
- Nurseries at home
- Carpooling
- Time Banks
- Eindhoven elderly community
- Good food directory
- Little organic markets
- Urban gardens
(More inspirational cases are available at http://www.sustainable-everyday.net/cases.)
The materials for creating new social innovations already exist: we can utilize under-used resources by connecting them into a network (where “resources” are both physical infrastructure assets and skills, including a healthy dose of entrepreneurship). Creating a network of diffuse skills and assets produces value greater than the parts, which members can then share.
Another example is collaborative services, where service users are also the main service deliverers and the main service assets are the users’ resources. Service promoters act as both facilitators and integrators, but good relationships are a precondition for the viability and existence of these kinds of services.
According to Ezio, sustainable ways of living (and thus sustainable services) must address the following three considerations:
- better use of existing resources
- improvement of the social fabric
- active and collaborative ideas of wellbeing
New social services (like those listed above) address each of these points. While there may be a financial and quality cost to implementing better services, these new social services help to lower delivery costs, allow higher customization, and result in fewer social problems by reducing passive behavior amongst participants.
What’s interesting is that we can make some connections between these services and social networking. Specifically, the application of a peer-to-peer approach in daily life and a convergence with Web 2.0. In the latter, the user brings the content (see “collaborative services” above), while P2P relationships skip major hubs and enable direct communication, and are essential to collaborative services (see any of the cases listed above).
However, as with the online world, the big question is how to scale up? The risk is that scaling the original small communities will turn them into large bureaucratic organizations (which nobody wants). How can we scale up without losing the quality of relationships?
Within the scaling question are two major problems waiting to be solved: a lack of trust and a lack of motivation. These are open problems waiting to be solved, but it may be useful to keep in mind that while you cannot design trust and motivation, you can design some ways to facilitate them.
One possible approach is for social services to remain small and connected; that is, a knot in a larger net(work). With this approach, designers and design-experts can conceive and develop replicable enabling systems which leverage the network while enabling services to remain small, nimble, and relevant to their specific contexts.
Next: Mikkel Rasmussen from ReD Associates