Anna Meroni
This is the time for a new DESIS website and we believe that any change is an opportunity for an evolution. Who are we? What is our mission? What is design for social innovation today?
We think of DESIS as a centre of collective intelligence, that is the capacity we collectively have to create knowledge for a common value, to shape a commons.
Strengthening, stimulating, collecting and making good use of this collective intelligence in an ever changing context is the mission of DESIS, never stop questioning what we are doing and why, as Ezio actually does in the following editorial.
From a disciplinary perspective, today, we can see Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability within a more complex and mature theoretical framework. In fact, in the on-going discourse, it often overlaps with the approach of Design for Resilience, it crosses the path with Social Design (as already argued in this same webpage) and it encompasses the concepts of: Design for Activism (when more focussed on citizen initiatives), Design for Democracy (when more about participation and open governance), Design for Policy (when more concerned with orienting governance systems), Design for Paradigm Shift (when it is about changing the way of producing solutions), Design for Scaling and Impacting and Design for Incubation (when it is about supporting social innovation to start, impact and scale as a form of venture).
Still recognising a core foundation of methods and tools from Design for Services and Product-Service System Design, DESIS today has evolved in a more complex body of knowledge we have to explore from now on.