The fields of design for social innovation

The idea of common good and public space is related to the physical and the immaterial space of social production and interaction; this is a public realm encompassing the culture and the history of people and places, as well as its resources and energies. The outcome from such collective and grassrooted activity is social innovation, mobilising the ubiquitous creative intelligence and self-organizing actions directed towards the solution to real, local and social problems. The contemporary crisis we are experiencing, which is crossing the global society in its political and financial structures, becomes the chance for a change in order to experiment collaborative solutions and alternative economies. If on one side the category of project has lost its capacity of envisioning the grand utopias of the last century, on the other design, here considered as a collective action, is able to answer to a social call with resilient tactics from the bottom-up.