Design Process
A case based discussion on the role of design COMPETENCES in social innovation Paper
Tamami Komatsu, Manuela Celi, Francesca Rizzo, Alessandro Deserti
Politecnico di Milano (2), Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Politecnico di Milano
manuela.celi@polimi.it
Keywords: social innovation; design thinking, design competences; SI economic and social value
Abstract
Thus far, many contributions in the field of design have described design’s role in the life cycle of a successful Social Innovation (SI). Design, in fact, has been proposed by many authors to be the most suitable approach to developing SI initiatives from their start-up to release. In particular, some authors have proposed Design Thinking as the best methodology for the development of new SIs; while others, promote Participatory Design as the best method to support SIs, heralding its process of collaboration, networking and coproduction. Nevertheless, many research results have demonstrated that the need to find a balance between social and economic objectives is one of the main barriers to SI. This paper discusses these general results as they have been elaborated in the context of the SIMPACT European project and focuses on the value of design competences to better design SI products, services and brands, which is explored through the discussion of two well established cases of SI in Europe.
This paper is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
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Cite this paper: Komatsu, T., Celi, M., Rizzo, F., Deserti, A. (2016). A case based discussion on the role of Design Competences in Social Innovation. Proceedings of DRS 2016, Design Research Society 50th Anniversary Conference. Brighton, UK, 27–30 June 2016.
This paper will be presented at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme