Citizen Activism and Social Innovation

Abstract

This chapter aims to briefly describe the worldwide phenomena of creative communities (Meroni in Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Edizioni Polidesign, Milano, 2007) and citizen activism: a growing number of people who use their capabilities and existing assets to experiment with new and more sustainable ways of living. They are currently developing a new generation of services and, at the same time, new forms of participation in the public interest, shifting from simple citizen activism to effective active citizenship. This results from the evolution of the first creative communities of the 2000s into actual social innovators, as the socio-behavioural context is currently more mature; and the same is also happening for the socio-technical context (Meroni and Selloni in Design roots: local products and practices in a globalised world. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). In fact, the final part of the chapter is devoted to developing the notion of social innovation, combining it with citizen activism, and starting to introduce those things design can do to support the promising initiatives of such social innovators.