http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini EZIO MANZINI 's blog Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:15:34 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Introduction to the Conference Changing the Change Being a designer means being an optimist: given the problems, all the problems even the most difficult, all we can do is to presume there is a possibility of solving them, not because we cannot see the difficulties (designers must also be realists), but ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=19 Flexibility in the era of networks and sustainability. There are two interesting different interpretations of the term flexibility: flexibility as openness, that is, able to allow a variety of uses; and flexibility as evolutionary potential, that is, able to change in time in relation to context alterations. Two signs that seem ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=18 Some introductory notes. In the present times, designers have to operate in a society in which, as contemporary sociology points out, “everybody designs”. In other words, they have to consider themselves part of a complex mesh of designing networks: the emerging, interwoven networks of individual people, enterprises, non-profit organizations, local and ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=17 Over the past hundred years, even when driven by the most positive intentions, designers have been active promoters of the ideas of wellbeing and ways of living that we have recently and dramatically discovered to be unsustainable. That is, designers have mainly been part of the (social and economical) problem ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=16 Slow approach to distributed economy and sustainable sensoriality We organised with Slow Food Italy a one-day Slow+Design seminar on the “slow approach to distributed economy and sustainable sensoriality” in Milan. [Download Slow+Design background document] http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=22 Guidelines for a transition phase “Design is a creative activity whose aim is to establish the multi-faceted qualities of objects, processes, services and their systems in whole life-cycles” (ICSID 2005). A creative activity that is also the reflective one of choosing between different possibilities. The openness of the field of ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=14 Promising signals for a sustainable development. The paper introduces some promising cases of social innovation and discusses the possibility/opportunity of moving from them to conceive and develop sustainable enabling solutions. In particular, it focalises two clusters of cases (the creative communities and the collaborative networks) that permit to build ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=9 How to design sustainable solutions The transition towards sustainability calls for a radical change, i.e. a systemic discontinuity. At a local scale, to promote this discontinuity means to generate low material intensive and highly context-related socio-technical systems. In this framework the role of design is to promote this discontinuity and ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=12 Promising models for a sustainable development. The following notes are a draft for the discussion. They focalise a set of emerging signals that, in different fields of applications, indicate the practical possibility to shift form centralised systems to distributed ones. The specific interest of these signals is that, taken ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=8 Social innovation, creative communities and strategic design. “If someone is hungry do not give them fish. Give them a fishing rod and teach them how to fish”. This ancient wisdom shows us, now more than ever, the way out of the tunnel that a mistaken idea of comfort, and an ... http://sustainable-everyday.net/manzini/?p=7