How Design can Contribute to Infrastructuring Bottom-Up Initiatives into Public-Interest Services.

This paper discusses an experimental “infrastructuring” process to transform bottom-up ini- tiatives into public-interest services,by using a set of design methods and tools coming from service design research. The starting point is a renewed activism on the part of citizens that has led to a variety of initiatives which can be understood as new forms of services in between public and private, amateur and professional, profit and not for profit, market and society.The majority of these activities are characterised by transience and overlapping and need an infrastructuring pro- cess in order to avoid their weakening and ultimate failure. Building upon this experimentation by “Creative Citizens”, this paper presents the main results of the author’s doctoral research, outlining an infrastructuring process in ten stages that focuses on collaboration among designers, citizens, institutions and local stakeholders. This represents an attempt to go further into the issues related to incubation and replication of solutions and, in a more extensive way, it might be viewed as an attempt to explore how social innovation could grow thanks to the design contribution. Finally, the paper focuses on the role of designer within this process, shifting from the role of facilitator to that of change maker and advocate.