Co-creative partnerships as catalysts for social change

Authors

  • Ingrid Mulder Delft University of Technology

Abstract

Mundane cities are challenged to design for unpredictable and rapidly changing futures. In the current work, we refer to thesechallenges as a collaborative design challenge and explore how co-creative partnerships can enable a participatory turn by establishinga new social infrastructure. The corresponding citizen-centred design approach offers a variety of design opportunitiesto engage with citizens, to empower all involvement, and enabling a social fabric to be increasingly reflexive and responsive.Through the illustration of three collaborative design studies in the public realm, we explore how design can act as a strategytowards a transforming society. It shows that participatory designing enabled empowerment across the co-creative partnership,though it also calls for strategic guidance in order to sustain transformational change. We end with an elaborate discussion onthe role of strategic design in facilitating the interplay among new coalitions of city makers towards a transforming society thatembraces sustainable social innovation. It can be concluded that co-creative partnerships can act as network designers, capacitybuilders, and enablers of transformational change, and have the potential to act as change makers, driving sustainable socialinnovation.

Keywords: co-creative partnerships, diffuse design, participation, social innovation, transitions.

Author Biography

Ingrid Mulder, Delft University of Technology

Ingrid Mulder is an Associate Professor of design techniques, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology. Her expertise is in design for social transformations. With a background in Policy and Organization Sciences (MA, University of Tilburg) and Behavioural Sciences (PhD, University of Twente), her ongoing teaching and research activities interestingly combine strategic design with diffuse design while addressing the interplay between top-down policy and bottom-up participatory innovation. As part of her previous readership in digital social innovation, she has initiated the first Fablab in Rotterdam and the Rotterdam Open Data movement. She also founded Creating 010, a trans-disciplinary design-inclusive research center enabling future making in Rotterdam. Since 2007, she chairs the research programme Meaningful Design in the Connected City, which has an extended research group in both Delft and Rotterdam.

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Published

2018-07-30

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 3 (2018): Sep/Dec

Section

Articles

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