Abstract
The issue of design for social innovation is closely linked to citizen participation and the inclusion of the different groups that make up society, particularly the most disadvantaged or at risk of being marginalized. The new product and service design paradigm requires a specific sensitivity in which education and research have to be combined to produce sustainable innovation. A key aspect in the future of design will be cross-disciplinary knowledge and disciplines more adapted to local needs and specific user groups. Hence, as a matter of constructing the future, it seems that the business model has to be re-invented in collaboration with all stakeholders. This chapter gives a sample of the innovation processes experienced in the EPS program, which reflect the interrelationship between open and participatory design methods linked to the issues of accessibility and inclusion in different contexts.
TopBackground
A new participatory culture has emerged from the digital and immaterial space, since it is a public platform that enables people to work together and collectively classify, organize and create new information (de Couvreur & Goossens, 2010), facilitating the development of collective intelligence. In the design field, trends related to the concepts of open design, collaborative design, and innovation communities (von Hippel, 2006) are calling for plural research that can be implemented by different approaches in order to respond to the challenge of innovation for the contemporary world; where their central axis resides in the change of production methods, the re-creation of the social habitat (Romero et al., 2012) and the design of the commons. The book “Teams of Teams” (McChrystal et al., 2015) describes a new structure model based on Networking which comprises strong communication and power teams. These global changes and the complexity of the systems that have led to network thinking have given rise to the need for a transformation in the way of addressing problems by moving from a static, rigid and categorized linear structure to a dynamic reticular structure, which is open to changes (Weinberg, 2015).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Social Innovation: An evolution in the way social problems are faced and solved to create added-value for a community.
Living Lab: User-centered and open innovation ecosystems using systematic co-creation approaches with public-private-people partnerships, integrating research and innovation processes in real-life communities and settings.
Urban Lab: A strategy to seek proposals and solutions which integrate participatory methods for urban planning.
Innovation Communities: Research carried out by different groups involved in particular cases or situations to respond to current innovation challenges.
Co-Design: A design process where the work evolves with different people in a workflow, which increases the quality of the result through collaboration.
Open Design: A form of co-creation where the users may design and develop products or services by using and sharing design information.
Community: A wide range of people who can support or be beneficiaries of the project. Multidisciplinary users who can provide feedback, different impressions, knowledge, or assistance for different steps of specific projects.