Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and DemocracyPelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Richard Topgaard 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 |
Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Designing Conditions for the Social | 17 |
Beyond and in the Shadow of Creative | 35 |
From Governance to Agonistic | 63 |
Design and Commons | 87 |
Collaborating through Digital Sketching in a Creative | 131 |
How Deep Is Your Love? On OpenSource Hardware | 153 |
Creative Class Struggles | 173 |
Public Controversies | 227 |
Stories on FutureMaking in Everyday Practices from Managers in the Creative | 257 |
TotemPoling the Wes and Mes of Citizen | 269 |
Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban PlaceMaking through | 277 |
Crafting Issues in a Mobile Sewing Circle | 303 |
Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl | 323 |
List of Contributors | 345 |
Nasty Old Film Distribution | 187 |