Designing resilient creative communities through biomimetic service design

Abstract

Creative communities are grassroots, bottom-up initiatives of people who through their diffuse design capacity propose new, desirable service futures that address the problems of everyday life. These creative communities exist within a transition from modernity towards sustainment, their adversarial character embodying alternative values such as conviviality, solidarity, and openness and shifting the focus from growth to flourishing. The sociotechnical system that is a creative community creating social innovation faces constant threats due to the collapse of traditional support structures and their disruptive, adversarial character, and so, identifying strategies to increase its resilience is necessary. We turn to nature for inspiration and mentoring. Biomimicry is a framework that designs solutions inspired by biological systems. We argue that permaculture, provides an interesting direction for development and research in the context of social innovation.