Politecnico di Milano Scuola del Design A.A. 2017/18
Msc PSSD Service Design and Innovation Prof: Daniela Sangiorgi
Student: Martina Monelli 897203
Service design and suburbs How a participatory approach enhances building inclusion Abstract As 66% of the world’s population is projected to be living in urban areas by 2050 (United Nations, 2014), it is very urgent to think about how the flow of people has to be managed in order to create a more sustainable way of living. In order to prevent a chaotic sprawl of resources along the urban and, especially, the suburban areas, it’s becoming really urgent to “significantly influence sustainable urbanization through decision making at local, metropolitan, regional/sub-national and national levels”(Webb et al., 2018,1). The word “sustainable” in this paper will go along with the idea of how a participatory approach can help in the reconfiguration of existing spaces and add meaningful layers to the local community. “Neighborhood Technologies” is a Sweden example that will help in understanding the dynamics of the participatory design approach in suburbs and it will shed some lights on the idea of how to create a form of integration and inclusion using local resources. Keyword Community building, Urban suburbs, Participatory design Introduction It’s a given fact that the world population will focus on urban areas in the coming years, but how will the cities react to this event? Up to now the demographic growth of the last years has brought to a chaotic urbanization based on the widening of the urban borders encouraging the construction of new buildings and infrastructures without a real systemic plan. Both urban but, especially, suburban areas must not be faced just from an urbanist and architectural point of view. They also have sociological and design aspects that must be considered in order to achieve a sustainable way of living which sees a planned recovery of what is already existing without wasting more landscape and resources. It is becoming urgent, therefore, to “stop b u i l d i n g s u b u r b s” f o c u s i n g o n t h e intensification of “our urban centers by fertilizing and fertilizing the suburbs, instead of
continuing to expand them”, this because “if we do not succeed, it will be a disaster, not only urban but also social” (Piano, 2015). Going from the tangible space to its intangibility, the aim of this paper is to explain how service design can positively contribute to transforming suburbs from dormitory places into valuable spaces for their own inhabitants creating a sense of community-based on the local resources. Since “some forms of degradation of the districts are due to a low sense of belonging of the inhabitants of the community” (Paone, 2018, 212), the role of service designer is therefore that of a strategic promoter which enables “local design processes connecting competencies, know-how and creative resource in order to build new means of creating value for communities” (Maffei, Villari, 2006, 29).
Suburbs as a democratic place Nowadays the suburbs enormously depend on urban centers. Centers means education, work and greater chances to emerge. This phenomenon increases the alienation of people from their peripheral communities and their own spaces. The centralized systems are today the practice of an increasingly anti-democratic society. (Manzini, 2018) This means that if decisions are taken without arguing what the real problems of people are, what is produced is n o t h i n g m ore t h a n a re p l i c at i on of consumption patterns that have been part of society for many years now, taking suburbs into the actual marginalization. Every periphery and neighborhood have their own socio-economic structure and an interweaving of relationships that changes according to its history and its evolution. For this reason, it is necessary that suburbs have to be taken under the light of democracy, in which citizens can have the opportunity to express themselves and dialogue in order not to feel margined. (Manzini, 2018) “Services can have a great impact on the urban development if the local culture is taken into consideration and the local people participate in the design of the service and sometimes even in its implementation.” (Rogel, 2013, 29) Suburbs can become democratic spaces in which people can start facing problems and openly not only discuss them but acting in order to create a change. Service design has to enhance this shift of people from passive to active role inside society. In this way, social innovation flourishes inside the suburbs and this means for a change “in the way individuals or communities act to solve a problem or to generate new opportunities. These innovations are driven more by changes in behavior than by changes in technology or the market and they typically emerge from bottom-up rather than top-down processes” (Manzini, 2008).
Suburbs as SLOC The shift that society must take is not only at the social level but also at the economic one. Always Manzini talks about a possible future scenario called SLOC (Manzini, 2018, 156) which is the acronym for Small, Local, Open, Connected. This scenario requires a shift from the current centralized situation to distributed systems. "Socio-technical systems consisting of a network of elements, connected to each other but also relatively autonomous" (Manzini, 2018, 156) on which communities can have a direct impact making it possible to create places to discuss topics of public interest. " The transition to a network-based paradigm has the potential to transform the relationships between organizational centers and suburbs "(Murray, 2009, 19). The network avoids the application of a standard approach imposed by the central bodies, but it allows to distribute the possibility of action to the peripheries where feelings, desires, and needs of users can more easily appear at the surface. In a system in which the global is a network of locals (Manzini, 2018), the challenge becomes simpler because the reduced size of what we mean as local becomes more understandable and controllable by the citizens themselves. This shift can further affect the economic sphere which, thanks to a more adequate distribution of capital, would allow local use of resources for the purpose of cyclically regenerating common goods. Suburbs as communities As mentioned above, there is an urgent need to recreate a sense of belonging of citizens with the spaces of socialization that globalization is gradually transforming. Another aspect through which the contemporary society could be analyzed is the alienation due to the online communities which are gathering more and more people, putting aside a sense of local belonging. In fact, the crisis of communities
and places is not related to their disappearance, but to the transformation, they have been through (Manzini, 2018). Given that communities are increasingly virtual, there is a widespread tendency to take less care of the spaces around us, creating situations of withdrawal and abandonment. (Manzini, 2018). In order to work against this, a design intervention has to create a shift in social mentality. Designing an Italian square may no longer be what people need. They rather need an intervention that knows how to look at the situation in a systematic way creating a breeding ground where people relations can naturally grow. If people build relationships with other people outside, along with the streets and inside squares, they will take more care of their soil. As Manzini writes communities must be built from their molecular elements starting from their relationship and the intersection between people and spaces. Ever y non-virtual community comes to life in the space. And it is the designer's job to stimulate its creation. The concept of building a community is therefore linked to that of the construction of the place. Th i s m e a n s b u i l d i n g a r t i f a c t s a n d infrastructures, as it will be shown later, which can be representative of the local community and the local territory in order to shape new stories, relationships, and meetings. And today we see small realities in which these processes are slowly happening, moving toward phenomena of “d e m o c r a t i c innovation” (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2010, 1). This expression means that thanks to the design contribution, “innovation has been democratized through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. This is a shift that is characterized by a movement towards participatory design especially in open public spaces ” (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2010).
"Infrastructuring" through participation “Participatory Design started from the simple standpoint that those affected by a design should have a say in the design process” (Ehn, 2008,3). Participatory design is an old approach in which local stakeholders, which includes people of the community, are involved in the design process. Participation is a key element if we want to follow a bottom-up approach that as we saw before it is the way to promote sustainable environmental management of nowadays. The role of service designer in this approach starts positioning himself in the design field of research, analyzing the local current situation through a field research that is followed by qualitative interviews with inhabitants looking for insights. Thus, “design can be considered a strategic actor to promote, stimulate and build new possible visions for the development of a specific local area, considering the economic, social, environmental aspects starting from the activities and experiences of people” (Maffei, Villari 2006, 29). Collaborative dialogue and understanding of the matter can show up new knowledge between the various actors. Disposing tools, the designer has the key role to guide people in the creative process of codesign solutions. What is relevant at this point is that participatory design is going to the concept of “design after design” (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2012, 102) which refers to how the role of designer is not just focused on the creation of single artifacts made with, by, for people, but he also has to prepare the ground in order to make people act as designer in their everyday life, designing things “that support good environments for future design Things at use time” (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2012, 108). There is a shift therefor which goes “from “projecting” to one of “infrastructuring” design activities” (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2012, 102) where “infrastructuring"
means empowering people during the project time through a shared design language to actively act as designers of their everyday life. The following example will shed some lights in the practice of participatory design inside urban peripheries enhancing an iterative approach of learning by making and this concept of infrastructuring. “Neighborhood Technology”: participatory case study Living Lab is a project born within the University of Malmo and is a design research center based on participatory approach and social innovation. Malmo is also a city that, until recently, was considered a dormitory city and has now become an active and thriving cultural center. It is a city that sees within it a strong ethnic presence, the highest in Sweden, which creates considerable tensions, especially within the suburbs. With the intention of creating new places for the community, the "Neighborhood Technology" project was created: it implements new media site specifics in the public spaces of Rosengard, on the outskirts of Malmo. After a preliminary project inside Malmo's suburbs, Living Lab got in touch RGRA, a grassroots hip-hop youth organization whose members are first and second generation immigrants living in the suburbs of Malmö. Through different initial brainstorming, it turned out that some young people felt marginalized and in general they wanted to be more visible in the urban landscape from which a project of a street journal through mobile broadcasting was developed. After this initial experiment, new insights were brought out to light from the designers: 1. how young immigrants could feel at home 2. how the association could have gained more visibility in semi-public spaces
3. how they could have diminished the stigmatization of this district considered dangerous After discussing these issues with RGRA, the designers promoted a participatory activity involving local actors who could make their own contribution to the development of the project. Thanks to the mediation of the designer, combining the dots that emerged from the previous sessions and connecting the right actors to RGRA, companies and young people have developed a growing knowledge on issues developing a shared interest in the realization of the various projects being all involved in the good of their city. This exploration has given life to various projects that through an iterative matchmaking process of prototyping have taken shape within the city. The young guys, together with the students from the University of Malmo, gave life to a performance inside a local grocery store, so as to establish more solid relationships with the managers of the neighborhood and be mutually more confident, making them feel more comfortable in public spaces. The collaboration with a company of Bluetooth technologies and two local public transport companies have given rise to the possibility of implementing inside buses (used by the boys of the district to move to the city center for an average of two hours a day) a Bluetooth speakers that increase the musical visibility of RGRA, but that make this space also a more convivial place for all the passengers. Finally, the collaboration with a game design association has led to the integration of their district to the UrbLove platform. A game in which the participants could explore urban environments by solving quizzes related to specific places. This not only gave the opportunity to discover the neighborhood by
young people and visitors but also to the inhabitants of the neighborhood to share stories enhancing their belongings to the place.
Conclusion As we are observing today, the suburbs are increasingly forgotten places where everyday issues of exclusion and loneliness are faced due to the change in relational dynamics that are increasingly related to the virtual rather than the physical. The service designer is a key figure in this process, because through an iterative process in which everyone learns by doing, local and representative results of that society are achieved. By facilitating a collective dialogue between citizens and various public and private actors, new knowledge can be enabled in such a way that communities that participate in the common good flourish, promoting inclusion
and integration. The designer, therefore, has the role of transforming the suburbs into small democratic arenas of discussion in which all together can participate in the co-creation of significant places whose inhabit that places. The presence of local and public partners helps the creation of a long-term relationship, thus allowing the reiteration of community practices, enabling new ones and encouraging the creation of a heterogeneous pattern of creative citizens. Through the case study, it is clear how to create results that affect the behavior and also lives of people. Service designer must not only create narrative elements but must also establish the basics in order to "focus shifts towards seeing every use situation as a potential design situation " (Björgvinsson & Ehn & Hillgren, 2012, 107) for people.
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