Designing Down to Earth. Lessons Learnt from Transformative Social Innovation

The consequences of anthropocentric ways of thinking, and then designing, producing, and consuming, are becoming painfully clear. Moving from this observation several designers have become aware that design culture needs to reorient itself beyond anthropocentrism. In this article, we contribute to this debate starting from Bruno Latour’s proposal of going “down to Earth” acknowledging to be “terrestrials” and moving to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of “care”, considering those concepts as a concrete blueprint for a regenerative design aiming to step out of anthropocentrism. This paper observes a convergence between this emerging idea of designing and some recent social innovation experimentations, which are in our opinion concretely making tangible what it might mean to get down to Earth. This convergence is made particularly evident introducing the concept of “quality of complexity”: in other words, the qualitative dimension emerging from those experimentations re-orienting people’s daily life towards reweaving the web of life. While designing can strengthening its ability to be regenerative by exploring how to further engage with practices with this specific qualitative dimension, it might also provide philosophy with some concrete examples of a praxis moving some further concrete steps down to Earth.