Imagining New Ways of Living
Posted on December 11, 2010 | posted by:Social innovations are now taking place all around us. Community-supported agriculture, co-housing, car-pooling, bike-sharing stations, community gardens, neighborhood care, and time banks are all prototypes of sustainable ways of living. The loose definition of social innovation is “the process of inventing, securing support for, and implementing novel solutions to social needs and problems,” which leaves much room for interpretation. At what point do these move from being naturally occurring, emerging patterns to being a social innovation? The concept of community-supported gardens and sharing have long-since existed in early civilizations, structured around kinship and the exchange of gifts. What characteristics of these community-supported efforts here in New York any different than those of the distant past?
This social movement in mature industrial countries is powered by a rise in a creative class that is taking matters into their own hands—bypassing traditional economic models of service to offer new choices that are more economical, sustainable, and healthy. Whether we are talking about car-sharing, micro-financing strategies, or more sustainable ways of living, the prevalence of social networking, mobile technology, and open-sourced networks offer new frameworks to exploit to our advantage.
On a global scale, philanthropic campaigns and humanitarian efforts are tackling some of the world’s biggest problems in poverty, environment, HIV/AIDS, health and nutrition, universal education, or gender equality outlined in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The stakes are significantly higher here, given the social, political, and economic contexts of the developing countries that need our attention most. These contexts give rise to a greater number of important questions that designers must ask ourselves. To what degree is a strategy transferable or reproducible from one context to another? What are the circumstances in which people will engage and trust in an unfamiliar system or intervention? How can designers facilitate that trust? And who is accountable if programs don’t go as planned?
What’s clear is that social innovation comes with both great opportunity to positively effect our lives around the world, and with great responsibility and risk. There is much to be learned from the prevalent number of NGO’s, nonprofits, and companies who have documented positive (or negative) outcomes of these projects. Discussing what went wrong is always much more difficult than singing the praises of what went right. Measuring the success of these types of outcomes requires a great deal of transparency across all disciplines and stakeholders so that future innovations can be even more effective.