Design actions with resilient local communities: Goals, drivers and tools

Abstract

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), which permits reproduction, adaptation, and distribution provided the original author and source are credited. AbstractSince resilience is identified as the capacity of communities and institutions to manage environmental, economic and social urgencies in a good and innovative way, design research and actions create the right conditions to engage resilient processes. This paper is about the critical readings of some research projects developed at the Design Department of the Politecnico di Milano (Italy) through goals, drivers and tools presented as relevant for design actions with resilient local communities.

Cultural Factories: Conversion of Industrial Areas into Cultural Hubs

“…The figures of designers play a crucial role in this context by making essential contributions: designing inclusive services, planning tourist and cultural initiatives focusing on the past and history of the territory and the company with its resources in a resilience way (Fassi & Sedini, 2017). For the next steps of the research, the will is to classify these case studies to find insights or intuitions from individual case studies, for example, how the case studies organized site spaces, uses, related services; bring the insights together to find guidelines for companies in crisis that can convert unused spaces into cultural hubs.…”

How Do I matter? A Review of the Participatory Design Practice with Less Privileged Participants

“…This group was composed of tribes located in Australia [51,70], Namibia [17,81,82] and one ethnic community located in China [80]. The sixth group was individuals in critical neighborhoods (n:6), who participated in projects promoting resilience and social cohesion [30,66,69,72], health [43] and community reflection [47]. It is relevant to highlight that these projects involved different communities as, for example, children and older adults at the same time.…”

“…Finally, we observed that stakeholders were involved in interviews at any stage of the design process. The latter was a common practice when expert counseling is needed [6,30,69]. For example, researchers interviewed clinicians, teachers, and parents when working with children with autism [58,64] to understand aspects related to their condition.…”

“…how an individual's participation will influence the project and inform the design outcome. Examples of the latter are the cases that promote participants involvement in data collection activities [30,84], where they can promote the topics that are relevant for them to include in the project, and skills development [37,66] on which, by the end of the process participants can perceive the improvement or learning of a skill, as it happened in the case of the films developed in a neighborhood by the community to tell their stories of migration. Along with the latter, activities, whereby participants can openly talk without feeling so vulnerable, are a good way to overcome this challenge.…”

Creative Food Cycles: A Cultural Approach to the Food Life-Cycles in Cities

“…These target groups are considered integral parts of the project work and are incorporated into a specific audience development strategy based on creative workshop experiences and open cocreation moments for building art installations and international biennial festival exhibitions in Every action of the project is conducted by extending open calls for action and for projects in order to allow wider participation by professionals and encourage local organizations to deepen their audiences and experience international exchange at the same time. Calls for projects are meant as essential tools to collect ideas on the topic of food but also to allow the creation of a network of proposals [26] with a high innovation level that can be spread at a bigger scale.…”