SERVICE MAKERS City dwellers and designers creating a Local Distribution System

In this paper we are seeking to draw a parallel between the self-production of objects - making (Micelli, 2011) - and the self-production of services, as in collaborative services. Both processes result from a renewed activism on the part of users, which we find in Creative Communities (Meroni, 2007). We will briefly describe the urban context in which this kind of “active” citizenship has matured, both in the design and in the development of goods and services, with reference to scenarios of Sharing Economy and Collaborative Consumption (Botsman and Rogers, 2011). We particularly wish to highlight how the collaborative services brought into being by ordinary people constitute a form of service making, with a truly semi-entrepreneurial impact on the city and surrounding area. One significant example is the Local Distribution System created within the research project “Feeding Milan. Energy for change”, a strategic design project for place development (Meroni, 2011) aiming at creating a network of services to connect farmers in the peri-urban area directly to consumers in the town. The role of designers in this activity is still being defined, but it is increasingly moving towards that of facilitator and community coach (Cantù et al., forthcoming 2012), a figure participating in both the co-production and the development of the service. The exit strategy for designers from these processes and the possible future of services born in such contexts remains an open question. We particularly wonder whether it would be possible to foster a pre-incubation activity that could transform informal collaborative services into actual social enterprise start ups. We are therefore seeking to prefigure potential evolutions of service making, among which the possibility of creating support structures for these activities. To continue our initial parallel, these could take the form of Fablabs for city services, better defined as “Urban Collaborative Service Districts”.