Empowering the Culture of Social Innovation

It can be argued that today, in Europe and world-wide, there is an increasing effort of social actors and cultural operators to organise initiatives in support of social innovation, to find new and sustainable ways of thinking and doing. This paper suggests that designers, today, can play a role in empowering this phenomenon, supporting the culture of sustainable social innovation by catalysing co-creative and participative contexts involving citizens, communities, businesses, third sector organisations and institutions to find solutions for the most pressing societal issues. By presenting and discussing ‘design experiments’ developed within the international Network DESIS – Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability - and other benchmark cases, this paper considers how effective co-design contexts that help to scale this culture within society are created.