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Design, When Everybody Designs

An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation

Part of Design Thinking, Design Theory

Author Ezio Manzini
Translated by Rachel Coad
Paperback
$24.95 US
The MIT Press
On sale Sep 02, 2025 | 256 Pages | 9780262554008
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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.
Series Foreword vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Innovation, toward a New Civilization 9
Social Innovation 9
Distributed and resilient systems 17
Multiple sustainable qualities 22
An emerging civilization? 25
2 Design in a Connected World 29
Conventions and design 29
Problem solving and sense making 33
Diffuse and expert design 37
Design mode map 40
Emerging design cultures 43
Social innovation in design 47
Design, a new description 53
3 Design for Social Innovation 55
What is is 55
What it is not 63
How it works 67
A new design knowledge 71
Part 2 Collaborative People
4 Collaborative Organizations 77
New social forms 77
Collaborating by choice 83
Enabiling ecosystems 90
5 Collaborative Encounters 93
Dimensions of collaborative encounters 93
Mapping collaborative encounters 105
Collaborative encounters, in practice 110
Part 3 Making Things Happen
6 Making Things Visible and Tangible 121
Mapping and amplifying 121
Creating stories 125
Scenario building 129
Visual Tools for Social Conversations (12 Visual Examples) 133
Credits 147
7 Making Things Possible and Probable 151
Supportive environments 151
Networked governance 157
Places for experiments 161
8 Making Things Effective and Meaningful 165
Problem Solving 165
Sense making 170
Trust building 173
9 Making Things Replicable and Connected 177
Small, local, open, connected 177
Replicating as scaling out 180
Connecting as scaling up 185
10 Making Things Local and Open 189
Place making 189
Places and resilience 191
Planning by projects 195
Cosmopolitan Localism 202
Design for a New Culture 203
Notes 205
Index 235
Ezio Manzini, a leading thinker in design for sustainability, founded DESIS, an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). He is Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Chair Professor at University of the Arts London, and currently guest Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, and Jiangnan University, Wuxi.
Ezio Manzini View titles by Ezio Manzini

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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

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

Author

Ezio Manzini, a leading thinker in design for sustainability, founded DESIS, an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). He is Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Chair Professor at University of the Arts London, and currently guest Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai, and Jiangnan University, Wuxi.
Ezio Manzini View titles by Ezio Manzini

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