102.3
Future Practices and Social Innovation
Elisenda Ardévol and Débora Lanzeni
Digital Culture, understood in its broadest sense as the things people create, make, say, think, experiment, develop or exchange with bits (Horst & Miller, 2012) is nowadays at the core of most meaningful social transformations, creative practices and innovation processes. In this paper we aim to contribute to untangle how “social innovation” in digital creation occurs, which role are playing the "future practices" -material, imaginary and narratives- in these creative processes, and how citizens are called to participate in their future through technology design. Our goal is to critically analyse how innovation occurs from a social perspective in the field of digital design creative spaces, projects and practices. Taking a social, generative and relational understanding of creativity and innovation (Ingold y Hallam, 2007) social innovation does not refer only to the creation of “something new” but to ways of doing and “new” ways of intermingle values, materials, affordances and expectations. Through our ethnographic fieldwork, we will look at how social innovation is linked to models of citizen participation (leaded by public institutions, companies, associations or collectives, from social movements to government policies), addressing issues such as democratic participation, living conditions, energy sustainability, etc. And more specifically, we will analyse the “future practices” embedded in technological innovation that seek social transformation and the role of the notion of citizenship in these processes (Ratto et al, 2015). We conclude that the visions of future (and anticipatory practices) that are key to digital design (Balsamo, 2011) are nowadays also part of the ways of producing culture and socialization, as we see in the emergence of cultures of 'making' and in the social projection of design as a form of intervention in the world (Pink, 2015)