Making Futures : Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy

Richard Topgaard, Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262027939
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Product Design

Experiments in innovation, design, and democracy that search not for a killer app but for a collaboratively created sustainable future.Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people's everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics.Contributors Måns Adler, Erling Björgvinsson, Karin Book, David Cuartielles, Pelle Ehn, Anders Emilson, Per-Anders Hillgren, Mads Hobye, Michael Krona, Per Linde, Kristina Lindström, Sanna Marttila, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Anna Seravalli, Pernilla Severson, Åsa Ståhl, Lucy Suchman, Richard Topgaard, Laura Watts

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Designing Conditions for the Social
• 3. Designing in the Neighborhood: Beyond (and in the Shadow of)Creative Communities
• 4. Connecting with the Powerful Strangers: From Governance to Agonistic Design Things
• 5. Opening Production: Design and Commons
• 6. While Waiting for the Third Industrial Revolution: Attempts at Commoning Production
• 7. Playing with Fire: Collaborating through Digital Sketching in a Creative Community
• 8. How Deep Is Your Love? On Open-Source Hardware
• 9. Creative Class Struggles
• 10. The Making of Cultural Commons: Nasty Old Film Distributionand Funding
• 11. Collaborative Design and Grassroots Journalism: Public Controversies and Controversial Publics
• 12. Stories on Future-Making in Everyday Practices from Managers in the Creative Industries
• 13. Emerging Publics: Totem-Poling the ‘We’s and ‘Me’sof Citizen Participation
• 14. Performing the City: Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban Place-Making through New-Media Tactics
• 15. Publics-in-the-Making: Crafting Issues in a Mobile Sewing Circle
• 16. Emerging Publics and Interventions in Democracy
• Contributors
• Index