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.
