Join us as renowned international design thinker, Ezio Manzini explores the growing global wave of social innovation and describes the fundamental shift towards a new paradigm of business and lifestyle grounded in sustainable values underway around us.

View Design for social innovation and sustainability - Part 1
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This Eco-Innovation lecture by Ezio Manzini will explore and describe the growing global wave of social innovation occurring around us. Manzini describes social innovation as a fundamental shift towards a new paradigm of business and lifestyle underpinned by sustainable values.

Manzini will describe how a multiplicity of institutions, enterprises, non-profit organisations, and individual citizens can be made capable of moving outside mainstream models of living and producing, in an effort to invent new and far more sustainable ones.

According to Manzini, the ingredients driving social innovation are diffuse creativity and entrepreneurship. He believes that both of these ingredients are vastly abundant, and perhaps undervalued in our densely populated and highly connected world. He argues that the more these two ingredients are recognised, the more capacity social innovation has to become a major driver of change. Manzini believes something has to be done to help this process.

During his lecture Manzini will demonstrate that social innovation cannot be planned, yet it can be made more probable by creating favorable environments and by empowering creative people through the development of specifically conceived sets of products, services and communication tools, i.e by conceiving and developing enabling solutions.

Manzini’s enabling solutions require a co-design process. A dynamic step where end users, local institutions, service providers and manufactures are actively involved in the development of relevant and sustainable products.

According to Manzini the shift towards co-design is already evident in a transformation of the way that some businesses engage with potential end users in the co-creation of products – an area he refers to as ‘open innovation’. For Manzini, this is where the design community in general, and design schools in particular, can make a very important contribution.

About Ezio Manzini