Aesthetics of Design for Social Innovation. Pathways for a Dialogue with Everyday Aesthetics

Abstract

The paper presents “ADESSO - Aesthetics of Design for Social Innovation”, foundational research that aims at investigating the sensorial insights and the aesthetic experience related to services, relationships, environments, communication strategies, and spaces within Design for Social Innovation approaches, highlighting the impact on processes and outcomes. As Design for Social Innovation deals with all that design branches can do to promote and support social changes towards social and environmental sustainability, such processes are usually typified by a strong dematerialization of the design object itself: they own a relational and dialogical perspective. As the object itself of the design process has constantly been expanded, mainly towards its intangibility, the focus on the value generated by the experience of artefacts and places has found its area of investigation. Also, a decreased authorship has progressively turned the designer’s role into participatory-design-led practices. Indeed, Design Aesthetics has mainly dealt with product design and the related sensorial involvements, and no specific studies have so far included Design for Social Innovation. Focusing on these three principal axes of change for design research, ADESSO starts by investigating the aesthetic experience generated throughout sustainable and participative cases, stressing the importance of differential contributions to the whole process.