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

Front Cover
Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Richard Topgaard
MIT Press, Oct 31, 2014 - Architecture - 351 pages

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

 

Contents

1 Introduction
1
2 Designing Conditions for the Social
17
Beyond and in the Shadow ofCreative Communities
35
From Governance to Agonistic Design Things
63
Design and Commons
87
Attempts at Commoning Production
99
Collaborating through Digital Sketching in a Creative Community
131
8 How Deep Is Your Love? On OpenSource Hardware
153
Public Controversies and Controversial Publics
227
12 Stories on FutureMaking in Everyday Practices from Managers in the Creative Industries
257
TotemPoling the Wes and Mesof Citizen Participation
269
Exploring the Bandwidth of Urban PlaceMaking through NewMedia Tactics
277
Crafting Issues in a Mobile Sewing Circle
303
16 Emerging Publics and Interventions in Democracy
323
Contributors
345
Index
349

9 Creative Class Struggles
173
Nasty Old Film Distributionand Funding
187

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