Designing coalitions: Design for social forms in a fluid world

Abstract

The fluidity of the world produced by the diffusion of connectivity drives us to adopt a similarly fluid interpretation. Doing so, the products of human activity are to be seen as fluid forms: social forms in a turbulent world, the existence of which continuously requires us to exercise a considerable diffused designing capacity. The article applies this interpretation to a concrete case: a line of social innovation known as collaborative living and a programme of initiatives on this theme promoted and implemented in Milan over the last 10 years. What this case shows us, and is assumed to be generalisable, is the creation of new social forms, new communities of residents, and the existence within them of proactive groups that operate as design teams, which the article refers to as designing coalitions. The article discusses the nature and dynamics of these communities and the designing coalitions that act in and with them, and concludes by stressing the importance of a strategic, design approach capable of bringing them into being, orienting them and keeping them alive, ultimately making them independent of external support. Contemporary society seems to be losing its solidity: its organizations are becoming ductile and the forms of life within it are becoming fluid, every project tends to be flexible and every choice reversible. Or at least that's what we like to think. It follows that the best metaphors to describe it come from the physics of fluids rather than of solids, more from living systems than from mineral ones. This is nothing really new in philosophical terms, we are just going back to Dem-ocrito and Lucrezio's fluid world, to the world of Venus rather than Mars, as Michel Serres wrote long ago (Serres, 1980) 1