Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The role of design, both expert and nonexpert, in the ongoing wave of social innovation toward sustainability. In a changing world everyone designs- each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project . Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold-an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created.
Manzini distinguishes between diffuse design (performed by everybody) and expert design (performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations-making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation- the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Series Foreword (p. vi)
• Acknowledgments (p. xiii)
• Introduction (p. 1)
• Part1 Social Innovation and Design
• 1 Innovation, toward a New Civilization (p. 9)
• Social innovation (p. 9)
• Distribute and resilient systems (p. 17)
• Multiple sustainable qualities (p. 22)
• An emerging civilization? (p. 25)
• 2 Desing in a Connected World (p. 29)
• Conventions and design (p. 29)
• Problem solving and sense making (p. 33)
• Diffuse and expert design (p. 37)
• Design mode map (p. 40)
• Emerging design cultures (p. 43)
• Social innovation in design (p. 47)
• Design, a new description (p. 53)
• 3 Design for Social Innovation (p. 55)
• What it is (p. 55)
• What It is not (p. 63)
• How it works (p. 67)
• A new design knowledge (p. 71)
• Part 2 Collaborative People
• 4 Collaborative Organizations (p. 77)
• New social forms (p. 77)
• Collaborating by choice (p. 83)
• Enabling ecosystems (p. 90)
• 5 Collaborative Encounter (p. 93)
• Dimensions of collaborative encounters (p. 93)
• Mapping collaborative encounters (p. 105)
• Collaborative encounters, in practice (p. 110)
• Part 3 Making Things Happen
• 6 Making Things Visible and Tangible (p. 121)
• Mapping and amplifying (p. 121)
• Creating stories (p. 125)
• Scenario building (p. 129)
• Visual Tools for Social Conversations (12 Visual Examples) (p. 133)
• Credits (p. 147)
• 7 Making Things Possible and Probable (p. 151)
• Supportive environments (p. 151)
• Networked governance (p. 157)
• Places for experiments (p. 161)
• 8 Making Things Effective and Meaningful (p. 165)
• Problem solving (p. 165)
• Sense making (p. 170)
• Trust building (p. 173)
• 9 Making Things Replicable and Connected (p. 177)
• Small, local, open, connected (p. 177)
• Replicating as scaling out (p. 180)
• Connecting as scaling up (p. 185)
• 10 Making Things Local and Open (p. 189)
• Place making (p. 189)
• Places and resilience (p. 191)
• Planning by projects (p. 195)
• Cosmopolitan localism (p. 202)
• Design for a New Culture (p. 203)
• Notes (p. 205)
• Index (p. 235)