Design as a Service Incubator for Social Interaction and Innovation. The “Oficina Solidaria” Model for the Rocinha Favela in Brazil

This paper presents the ‘Oficina Solidaria’ research project, which was developed in 2013 for an urban redevelopment programme for the Rocinha favela in Brazil. In this project, which was carried out as a ‘workshop/laboratory in progress’, design was positioned as a critical and technical tool for the development and implementation of initiatives oriented towards social growth. In particular, the whole of these actions—which together form a kind of start-up based on methods connect to ‘collective co-working’—entails the active, shared participation of the residents of Rocinha. In fact the people called upon to take on, alternatively, the roles of designer, small business-owner, artisan and end user, become the directors and interpreters of all of the phases aimed at the creation of the furnishings that they need to overcome conditions of clear residential privation. These goals, following a discipline-based path developed on the levels of basic and applied research, are pursued in the theoretical passage from Social Housing to Social Design, but above all, interpreting principles of social cohesion. These principles to encourage, among active participants, a ‘Collaborative Economy’ capable of translating itself into ‘Social Entrepreneurship’. Highly equitable entrepreneurship that assigns the various levels of design called into play the task of activating and configuring the entire system such that all of its different parts can develop coherently and with a high level of concreteness.