Comparing ‘Creative Citizens’ with a Set of Interconnected Experimentations

Abstract

This chapter describes a set of experimentations within different DESIS Labs: ‘Welcome to St Gilles’ (LUCA DESIS Lab), ‘Green Camden’ (UAL DESIS Lab), ‘The NYC Office of Public Imagination’ (Parsons DESIS Lab). These experimentations are part of a DESIS thematic cluster named ‘Public and Collaborative’, a design research initiative on public services and public realm-related topics, such as affordable housing social integration, neighbourhood improvement, daily services and, more generally, public sector innovation policies. As Manzini and Staszowski (2013) claimed, ‘Public and Collaborative’ originated from the empirical observation that several design schools and DESIS Labs in Europe, Canada and the United States were already doing research on the intersection of design, social innovation and public policy. The experimentations here presented are design courses developed with students and researchers who immersed themselves in a specific neighbourhood, in direct contact with the society and its members, as in ‘Creative Citizens’. They are situated between design activism and public sector innovation, and they include on one side, communities of local residents and on the other, public servants and policy makers, attempting to define a middle ground in which design may play a crucial role.