Geographies of Design Innovation: Cultural Drivers and Global-Local Flows

Abstract

How might design principles and practices adapt their approaches to create innovation and attend to the diversity that characterize the contemporary world? This reflection leverages the involvement of a plurality of peoples each inhabiting different geographies, including voices from the fringes, outside the mainstream, to pick up on new trends, practices, and future references of globalization. The relationship between Design and Innovation represents the field of research of the Latin Network for the Development of Design Processes, founded in 2008 and now operating through the Advanced Design Unit of the Università di Bologna. It operates as an intercultural zone of encounter and discussion, as a seedbed for creativity and ideas. The paper intends to investigate the roots, processes and cultural flows that characterize design innovation, considering Advanced Design as the framework within which innovation is contextualized, activating research on the geographies of innovation promoted by/with/for the design cultures, considering their changes and mutations: a collective creativity may recover in design its capacity to operate in a more political way, a praxis that works responsibly to facilitate the process and platforms for collaboration at different scales, local, global but always oriented to include and enhance our social capability to aspire, our responsibility to be critical and constructive.