Making Futures ― Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy

Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation anddesign can start in people's everyday activities. They can encompass local services, culturalproduction, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory,collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It isconcerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This bookdescribes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassrootsorganizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.

These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successfulinnovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challengingthe creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include acollective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of anopen-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point tothe possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcingin the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally byoften-marginalized publics.

ContributorsMans Adler, ErlingBjorgvinsson, Karin Book, David Cuartielles, Pelle Ehn, Anders Emilson, Per-Anders Hillgren, MadsHobye, Michael Krona, Per Linde, Kristina Lindstrom, Sanna Marttila, Elisabet M. Nilsson, AnnaSeravalli, Pernilla Severson, Asa Stahl, Lucy Suchman, Richard Topgaard, Laura Watts

Pelle Ehn has been a member of the participatory design research community for many years. He is a coauthor of Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts, Design Things (MIT Press), and other books. Elisabet Nilsson is a media, games, and learning researcher. Richard Topgaard is a digital media strategist. Topgaard and Nilsson coedited Prototyping Futures. Ehn, Topgaard, and Nilsson are part of Malmo University's "digital Bauhaus."