Green Move

Alta Scuola Politecnica - Design Methods

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Use your interdisciplinary project as a case study to discuss about Social Innovation and Design.

GREEN MOVE

SOCIAL CAR SHARING FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION

ROBERTA MOTTER

ABSTRACT This paper starts with the analysis of the contemporaneity, presenting the general situation of the society and introducing the concept of collaborative community, group of people that try to solve everyday life problem thanks to an original recombination of elements and normal technology. One example of solution is the car sharing system created to respond to the problem of car congestion and pollution in big cities. Subsequently the ASP project Green Move is presented and used as case study to discuss about social innovation and what design can do for led the present context toward a more sustainable direction. The essay concludes with the summary of the main benefits of the Green Move project.

THE CONTEXT Our contemporaneity is characterized by two main aspects: fluidity and complexity. “The solidity of thing is melted in the fluidity of information” (Bertola and Manzini 2004) thanks to the mass media we are getting more and more connected with each other, reducing distances and time, what can be called “liquid mobility” (Bertola and Manzini 2004), where everything is temporary and movable. From this fluidity derives also the growing complexity of the system in which we are living, shaped by all the people involved in it where the innovation “is a social, cumulative and collaborative activity” (Leadbeater 2008) a mass activity more than an elite one.

As J. Green says, our society is no more the hierarchical pyramid, born with the industrial revolution and driven by technology and goods where everything was fixed and people were just passive consumer,s but it’s more like a pancake world “that is much flatter, it’s not top down, it’s connected, it’s network, it’s collaborative and as much as possible people try to be winners and winners” (MWG Interview Josephine Green 17/02/2010).

Therefore something has already started to change in society and in the way people see themselves, but in order to get out from the current economic and ecological crisis we need to have a radical shift “in the way we produce, consume and, more in general, in the way we live” (Vezzoli 2007). The principle that should guide us in the future will be “use, not own” (Thackara 2005), having access to a platform with tools, products and opportunities that could be used in every moment without owning them. We need a cultural change with lightness as a parameter of wellbeing, where people are put before products and technology is not end in itself but support the social innovation.

“Beneath the surface things are moving” (Green 2009) and we can recognize lots of promising cases and new trends where “communities act to solve problems or generate new opportunities” (Jégou and Manzini 2008), such as the value of sharing, production based on local resources, self-management services, services for elderly people, new form of communication and exchange, and alternative transport system.

These examples, as they “challenge the traditional ways of doing” (Jégou and Manzini 2008), are the expressions of the insufficient answer of the present dominant economic system, the research of new solutions to the everyday life problems thanks to an original recombination of “the existence of traditions and the possibility of using an existing set of technologies” (Manzini 2011).

CAR SHARING WHAT & WHY The main characteristics of the present context being outlined, we can find an interesting case that tries to lead the society towards a more sustainable mobility in big cities.

The car sharing is a service providing an enabling platform of products (in this case cars) and additional services, a car rental system where people rent cars for short periods of time.

Looking at the past, we can discover that the car-sharing system has a long history: in fact the first complete system of car sharing -The ProcoTip system- was born in the early 1970s in France, but lasted only about two years. A more ambitious project called the Witkar was launched in Amsterdam by the 1968. It was a much more sophisticated project based on small electric vehicles and planned for a large number of stations covering the entire city. However the real turning point in the development of the sector came in the 1990s with larger and more structured projects in Germany, Switzerland, Netherland and Canada. During its evolution the system has passed from the use of the telephone, paper and pen to the support of the recent technologies (i.e. web 2.0) and the specific design of technology packages. (Jégou and Manzini 2008) The key point of this system is that people don’t own a private car, but, paying a quote, they have access to the vehicle for a period of time. In this way individuals gain the benefits of a private car, without the costs and responsibilities of ownership (i.e. the initial cost of the car, the insurance, etc.).

It can be said that the car sharing is an innovatve system which offers enabling platforms to customers: a private company or the public sector “offers the access to products, tools, opportunities or capabilities that enable clients to get the results they want, efficiently satisfying their needs and wants. The client obtains the desired utility”, in this case the possibility to move from a place to another one, “but does not own the product that provides it, and pays only for the time the product is actually used” (UNEP 2002).

This is a clear example of win-win solution: the costumer is satisfied, he/she pays only for the use, in return the environment has ecological benefits (less number of car in general, less waste, less pollution) and the society gains a more safety environment with less traffic problems.

GREEN MOVE

THE ASP PROJECT

Green Move is the ASP project for an ecological social car sharing service in the city of Milan, based on a social network and using Zero Emission Vehicles. The aim is to create a service with low enviromental impact that is easily accessible for users, has the capacity to create a network of people that collaborate while using the service and become more eco-responsible, sustainable in ecological terms and is able to integrate the public transportation system.The service will start in 2013 in a small area of the city as a demonstrator (Città studi, Cadorna, Linate..) and is planned to be extended to the whole city and maybe in the whole Lombardia region.

The project, which combines technological, territorial and economical aspects, is divided in two main areas: the first one is the technological aspects which cope with the selection of the type of electric cars, the design of the green box (the tablet located on the vehicle that is the interface with the user and the link between the car and the control center), the creation of the docking stations (where to recharge the vehicle) and the informatics structure. The second area of the project focuses on the service idea (target, social network, communication, stakeholders’ interactions, etc.), the business model, the economic and the marketing meaning.

The main actors involved are eight departments of Politecnico di Milano that are developing the project, Comune di Milano and Regione Lombardia as main promoters, private companies that can participate by offering their electric cars and also private citizens that decide to share their ZEV cars.

The main goal of Green Move is to create a solution that responds to the problem of eco-mobility in the city, but also is desirable and delightful, using a user-centered design approach, where the technology is reinterpreted according to the user experience viewpoint.

THE SOCIAL INNOVATION Following the definition of G. Mulgan we can denote innovation as “new ideas that work” which helds in itself creativity and invention plus implementation and diffusion of the ideas. Innovation becomes social when social goals are met:“innovative activities and services that are motivated by the goal of meeting a social need and that are predominantly developed and diffused through organizations whose primary purpose are social” (Mulgan 2006). The word social until now has usually meant “urgent, acute problems generated by extreme poverty, particular diseases, fragile social groups, and so on” (Manzini 2011). However in the recent time the term social acquires also the meaning of “the shift needed is society toward sustainability”: social innovation becomes urgent when the current situation is no more sustainable and the dominant paradigm is not able to give an answer.

In this dense and evolving context where “being mobile is a must” (Jégou and Manzini 2008), moreover in a big city such as Milan, the problem of cars congestion and lack of parking space, pollution

due to the high number of vehicles and stress caused by frenetic ways of living is turning into a more and more urgent issue.The demand of a new transportation system becomes everyday more crucial, even if some constrains can be found, as A. Meroni outlines: “mostly people prefer to own a car rather than use public transportation or alternative transport.” (Meroni 2007) That’s why Green Move aims to create an alternative method for moving in the city, a new service that would be flexible, with a vast choice for the users, orienting them towards more sustainable behaviors. In this project working with the users is a fundamental step, especially for stimulating relevant changes in people lifestyle. Indeed, what is really necessary for a positive result is a radical cultural shift which leads people to value the satisfaction of a need “as opposed to owning a product” (Vezzoli 2010).

The introduction of a system of mobility credits, based on smartphones’ technology, can help in this way the user to collaborate and change his/her habits (i.e. if the user picks up another user and they travel together they have a reduction in the price. In this way it’s possible to stimulate positive behavior among citizens). People who are directly involved in a project or feel that they are part of a community become more responsible and active, promoting and teaching themselves the green value in the society.

In the Green move project they can join the service not only as passive users or active service co-producers, but also deciding to share their private car becoming stakeholders, being part of a community that gives value to the environment and is active for the good of the society.

MAKE IT FEASIBLE Like it happens in many cases, we need the combination of top-down (from experts, decision makers, political activists) and bottom-up (from people directly involved in the problem) initiative to make such a complex service feasible. In fact both the public institution and the collaboration of the citizens are fundamental actors for the success of Green Move. “Social change depends, in other words, on alliances between what could be called the ‘bees’ and the ‘trees’. The bees are the small organisations, individuals and groups who have the new ideas, and are mobile, quick and able to cross-pollinate. The trees are the big organisations – governments, companies or big NGO’s – which are poor at creativity but generally good at implementation, and which have the resilience, roots and scale to make things happen. Both need each other...” (Mulgan 2006).

Technology is another central characteristic. As it was said before, creative communities are able to solve everyday problems thanks to a new combination of existing elements based on tradition and available technologies. By a definition of Manzini the collaborative communities “utilize them in an original way, by putting products and services normally available on the market into a new kind of system” (Jégou and Manzini 2008). In the case of Green Move the utilization of smartphones and social networks permits to come directly in contact with people in a simple and familiar way, “catalyzing in the physical world, people aiming to collaborate to get some commonly recognized result” (Manzini 2011).

THE ROLE OF DESIGNERS According with Meroni’s classification of the “design for services” areas of intervention, it can be said that the Green Move project belongs to imagining future direction for service system area, where the designer’s role is to help “communities and organizations to imagine future scenario, while exploring how these visions could transform their activities and lifestyles on a daily basis.” (Sangiorgi and Meroni 2011) The scenario of a city healthier and safier, with a smaller number of cars, is a future vision, a story which helps to imagine the sustainable development of Milano and to engage the different stakeholders towards a clearly defined future direction.

“Collaborative design means finding ways to share a vision of a system among all its actors and stakeholders as the system evolves” (Thackara 2005).The key objective is to create convergence of interests among the actors involved over the vision for the future of Milano.

The importance of few people that do the majority of work to make an idea, a trend or a social behavior spreads around, in our case the ecological trend added at the value of sharing rappresents that “The dimension of the community is potentially the dimension of change” (Sangiorgi and Meroni 2011).

The role of the designer is to use his/her design skills to “recognize promising cases when and where they take places and to reinforce them” in order to promote social innovation and “developing sets of appropriate technologies” to support them. (Manzini 2011) Enabling the citizens of Milano with dedicated solutions and platforms is what is needed to make the Green Move system works: the infrastructure of docking stations and the availability of cars, the technology for joining the community, for using the reserved car, for giving feedback of the service and being in contact with other members, etc. To sum up the designer should be a “facilitator of change whose job is to help people act more intelligently in the system we all live in.” (Thackara 2005)

CONCLUSION To outline more in detail which are the main benefits that the car sharing Green Move will bring to the society and to the environment I would like to list them: • Intensification of the car use and lower number of car in the given context of Milano • Opening up a new market with the design of specific technologies and ad hoc Green Move service • Reduction of the emissions thanks to the use of ZEV vehicles and to encouraging people to drive less • Reduction of traffic and the problem of parking, car-sharing members have in fact an incentive to drive much less, since the full costs of driving are visible in each trip • Improving the environmentally quality of the city • Education and awareness about the environmental problems spread in society and more people become active and involved in this activity We can work in this direction if it is real what Montecucco says, that Italians are getting more and more aware of environmental and social problems, education and personal growth, wealth and natural therapy. Without a radical change in people’s behavior no new models or systems will work in the right way. All the examples of initiatives like Green Move, GuidaMi, E-VAI, etc. make us hope that this transformation is not only possible, but is also starting in our contemporaneity and the public and private sectors begin to have a feeling for these important themes. The main problem is the fragmentation of different groups, which, even if they share the same vision and values, are still divided.

We have to reach a critical mass for having a world social shift towards a holistic view of the world.The designer has the crucial task to support the existing examples of new services for daily life and try to scale them up in order to bring a macro change.

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Jégou F. and Manzini E., (2008) Collaborative services. Social innovation and design for sustainability. Milano: Edizioni POLI.design.

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