The Sustainable everyday exhibition is available for the public in the Trevi Center in Bolzano, Italy, from the 3rd till the 11th of December, 2007. This time, it includes a section on the region’s sustainable initiatives.

CCSL India Programme has been concluded with the Expert Seminar (September 22nd 2007) and Design Exercise (September 20th, 21st and 24th 2007).
The Expert Seminar took place at the IIMA (Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad), organized by SRISTI (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies), headed by Mr. Anil Gupta.
The Design Exercise took place at NID (National Institute of Design Ahmedabad), with the support of Prof. Shashank Mehta.
This was the third and last CCSL workshop, the previous ones being held in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, April 2007) and China (Guangzhou, May/June 2007), concluding thus this phase of the project.
In the next coming months, we will carry out the third and last phase “Workshops results integrations and final results presentation”, dedicated to the integration of the three workshops results and to edit them.

The LOLA project has been busy moving around trying to promote the implementation process of the project. It was present in the last 2 CCN group gatherings: last May in Bulgaria and in February in Istanbul. This CCN / SEP initiative was also Present in the Italian Task Force Meeting of the Marrakesh process last April.

This project is now entering it’s implementation phase and will be tested in secondary schools all over Europe and hopefully the world. If you want to now more about LOLA click here…

Thanks to the efforts of translation and management from the LLP Ecodesign Institute of Tokyo, a SEP exhibition was presented in Destination 2026, an international fair of design for sustainability that took place last December in Tokyo. There, the work of “Sustainable everyday: Scenarios of urban life” (see library) was displayed, including videoscketching projections and display of storyboards made by design students showing sustainable solutions. Ezio Manzini and François Jegou were also invited to give lectures on the spot in english.

The SEP traveling exhibition was hosted at the Biennale du Design of Saint-Etienne (France) 2006 whose theme was “Cohabitation”. Although the subject of the biennale was really close to the Sustainable Everyday Project”, with the idea of social innovation, local development and creative communities, the exhibition was not, at first, foreseen to be at the biennale.
SEP exhibition was brought, in the nick of time, to present the idea of “Life Systems” toward daily sustainability for an up-coming co-elaboration with the “Cité du Design” of Saint-Etienne. “Life Systems” is a project that aims to create solutions inspired by the SEP ways of doing and scenarios, to promote sustainable lifestyles in the city.

The Sustainable Everyday Project presented the EMUDE and the new “Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles” iniciatives in Wuppertal, Germany the past 22nd until 25th of November in two back to back conferences related to sustainability.

The first one, the Expert Conference on the Marrakech Process - Creating Solutions for Sustainable Consumption and Production on 22-23 November. The 10 Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production, usually called Marrakech Process, is a programme led by UNEP and UNDESA, aims to catalyze and guide the transition to a more sustainable global economy.

Within the Marrakech Process, the Task Force on Sustainable Lifestyles is an initiative supported by the Swedish Ministry for Sustainable Development. Its specific goal is to develop and implement sustainable policies to change consumer behaviour and to promote more sustainable lifestyles.

In this framework, the Creative Communities for Sustainable Lifestyles (CCSL) project has been established to build on the results of a recently concluded European research called Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions (EMUDE). Its main aim was to explore the potential of grass roots innovation and pinpoint emerging patterns of sustainable living.

The second conference, called SCORE, was organized to provide an opportunity for input of case studies on mobility, food, and housing. Also, it build a broad platform for presenting work of science and scientists that may be of direct relevance for the activities of the 10 Year Framework Task Forces.
SEP was involved in the voice of François Jegou and Ezio Manzini, linking this subject to the lifestyle agenda with EMUDE’s set of conceptual tools to deal with the sustainability issues, defining research and design guidelines.

The EMUDE Exhibition in Aalborg, Denmark took place in “Kulturnight”, an event that gathered music, preforming arts, local culture, design and much more…

The exhibit presented the new developed Ways Of Doing, our hypothesis is to promote the solutions inspired by the continuous collection of cases of social innovation as a strateic design activity in order to facilitate and support their adoption by a larger share of users.

The LOLA exhibition at CCN conference in Hamar, Norway have been presenting the progress of the LOLA pilot project with the state of the art of the Teaching Pack, the achievements of the schools involved and the perspectives of follow-up…

4 European teaching training schools involves in the experimentation and discussion of the LOLA Teaching Pack. The first section of the exhibition presents the progress achieved yet by each of groups of students and teachers: translations of the Teaching Pack in original language, presentation of the case of social innovation collected, feedback on the didactic benefit of the process and adaptation needed…
4 separate blogs were open to collect the work of the students in each school and they can be accessed clicking here:
_HIHM, Hedmark University College, Hamar, Norway
_IPBEJA, Politechnical School of teacher education, Beja, Portugal
_KATHO-RENO, Teacher training college, Torhout, Belgium
_VPU, Vilnius Pedagogical University, Vilnius, Lithuania

During the LOLA experimentation process, the students involved and their teachers collected a series of cases of promising initiatives in terms of sustainability. The second section of the exhibition presents all the results achieved yet in the form of a text summary and relative story-boards of photographs.

The LOLA pilot project is half-way now. The purpose of the exhibition and the LOLA workshop here during the CCN Hamar conference is to discuss and complete the material gathered. Participants were asked to take a pencil and post-it and add their ideas, comments, reactions and suggestions for the follow-up of the project…

Uqam exhibition takes place in…

here goes the article about uqam

A SEP installation at the Dutch Designer Week in Eindhoven…

The background of the installation is based on the catalogue of cases of social innovation collected all over Europe from the EMUDE research project. Each of these cases represents a solution for a particular daily life function and is an alternative to the current main stream practice promising in terms of sustainable development.
The purpose of the installation is to put the visitor in the situation of a virtual trip exploring 8 European cities, hunting for innovative cases, meeting the creative communities and the promising solutions they set-up…
The overall picture is the metaphor of a territorial panorama, a geographical map made of pictures of cases and at the same time the image of a smaller territory such as an “ideal creative city” where all these innovative sustainable solutions would be available. Through a zooming operation, the visitor is able to project him/herself in this emerging alternative reality, condensing mentally the offer now widespread and disarticulated around him, within a reach, and challenging is own current way of life and asking the crucial question: if all these opportunities to reduce environmental impact and regenerate social tissue would be available around me, would I take part and change my life in consequence?

This installation takes a deeper signification in the Eindhoven Designer Week context where the visitor already browses the city concentrating for one week many design events coming from all horizons. The same operation of densification at the visitor scale is proposed in the creative community installation. Another important link between the overall hosting event and the installation is that Eindhoven is one of the 8 cities from which the cases are collected from. The Designer Week visitor may therefore recognize certain of the cases -the places where the pictures have been taken in Eindhoven for instance- adding to the ambiguity suggested by the installation: are all these solutions really available for me now? I can reach some of them already cycling through the city?…

Presented as a Designer Week event, the installation is also pointing open questions and showing possible orientations in term of design involvement. The visitor activity interacting with the installation is proposed as an image of the designer role in the necessary transition towards a more sustainable society. The visitor/designer detects and gives visibility to social innovation, offers it to the public debate as a promising alternative towards sustainability and works to support the diffusion of social innovation to make the solution reproducible and available in other contexts and cultures…

On the panoramic display of the installation, the many cases appears as small fuzzy images, too small to be visible from the visitors eyes. On the left side of the screen, a glowing clickable legend triggers different thematic paths across the map of social innovation… Clicking on one of the cases appeared along the path, the visitor amplifies the signal and enlarges the visual material showing the case. In this zoom-in-like operation a series of images from the case scrolls across the screen playing the metaphor of news dropping from press agencies… Lines of images and related captions scrolls showing the “good news from Europe”. Each solution develops in a series of visual evidences, people actually using it shows its social acceptance of the solution, the scrolling story-board of pictures shows its feasibility… The solution becomes accessible and the visitor participate to it’s virtual implementation. The installation puts the visitor into the position of a user-designer co-producing the solution he/she intends to use…

The installation was supported by the EMUDE consortium, Philips and Philips Design, TU/e Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.