On social innovation, design and the Conference Changing the Change
We can say that a social innovation is an implementation of new element arrangements. The combination modes of these constitutive elements can be varied.
They include diverse associative ways and diverse operative procedures of social interest technologies (either by making current use technologies available for new purposes, or by inventing new technologies). The distribution processes are not external elements that are simply aggregated, inasmuch as they can be compatible or incompatible with the base of values that underpin the social innovation as such.
The social innovation results concern their very own characteristic: the implementation (meaning reinforcement or restoration) of relational patterns. Social innovations are always situated in a given context and subject to a process of “charisma routinization”. They promote social change through the birth and death of institutional forms. Yesterday’s social innovation may be tomorrow’s institutional form.
The study and evaluation of social innovation processes demand the assessment and the analysis of the relational patterns’ characteristics. For this purpose, a multi-criteria matrix is necessary. Its components can be defined based on the attribute binary polarities of the relation modes, such as: dialogical/instrumental, direct/mediated, near/distant, accessible/restrict. To learn with the study of social innovations in the contemporary world means more than identifying typologies. It has also to do with facilitating the access to this specific kind of information and so contributing to interconnect several (worldwide) initiatives and practices.
I see the Conference Changing the Change as an opportunity to discuss far beyond the limits of social inclusion technologies.
I address the following questions to the Conference:
The first one is: “can conceiving relational patterns be considered a design problem?”
The National Academy of Engineering in the United States of America recognizes that engineering is, since its origins, a profoundly creative process, and says: “a most elegant description is that engineering is about design under constraint” (The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century, Washington: National Academy Press, 2004, pp. 7 – 25, pdf available at http://www.nap.edu).
My second question is: “what are the specific constraints of designers’ activities? How different are they from the constraints of engineers’?”
Angelus Silesius’ verses (“Aus dem cherubinischen Wandersmann”) say that the soul has two eyes: one gazes time, and the other gazes far away towards eternity.
My third question is: “does the designers’ aesthetic commitment represent the possibility of perfectioning the gaze that perceives eternity?”
