Artifact - Current Issue

Today, co-designing for social innovation is explored in many western democracies to transform political agendas and develop sustainable societies. For social innovation to have a radical and wide-reaching impact on society, scaling is crucial. Scaling social innovation after ending a project requires a focus on making innovations sustainable in the long run and how they can foster organizational or institutional transformation. Despite increased interest in design for social innovation and scaling, little attention has been given to how the scaling of social innovation unfolds in practice over a longer period. A qualitative study was conducted following the continuation of a social innovation project called SeniorInteraction, which ended in 2012. Through interviews and field visits, we examined the attempts at scaling by different public and private partners and citizens after the project ended. The social innovation concept in question is an open exercise community in public parks for senior citizens supported by the local municipality. The research provides a deeper understanding of scaling in practice and identifies four important drivers for scaling social innovation: ownership, documentation, infrastructuring elements and rehearsing new practices. Additionally, we discuss challenges related to the way we understand and evaluate the scaling of social innovations.

The design of woven smart textiles presents a discrepancy of scale where the designer works at the level of structural textile design while facets of the material express at scales beyond one’s senses. Without appropriate methods to address these unknown (or hidden) material dimensions, certain expressional domains of the textile are closed off from textile design possibilities. The aim of the research has been to narrow the gap that presents when one designs simultaneously at the scale of textile structure and electron flow in yarns. It does this by detailing a method for sensing, visualizing, and discussing expressions of electromagnetism in woven smart textiles. Based on experimental research, a method of textile surface scanning is proposed to produce a visualization of the textile’s electromagnetic field. The woven textile samples observed through this method reveal an unknown textural quality that exists within the electron flow – an electromagnetic texture, which emerges at the intersection of woven design and electromagnetic domain variables. The research further contributes to the definition of specific design variables such as: field strength and diffusion expanding the practice of woven smart textile design to the electromagnetic domain.

This article considers the pedagogical importance of noticing nature at the hyperlocal scale, and the role that design can play in nurturing and supporting these processes. Biodiversity Logbooks are a set of educational resources that promote direct engagement with everyday environments through a variety of creative methods, including cyanotype photography, physical computing, collaborative mapping and journaling. These tools are intended to be used in combination to develop skills of noticing plants in their habitats and understanding how different environments support different life forms. This article argues that while complex environmental phenomena are often addressed at the global scale (with local impacts presented as scalable outcomes), focusing on small, often overlooked details can have beneficial pedagogical outcomes. These consist of increased attentiveness and care for the needs of other species, better retention of knowledge generated through embodied experience and stronger connection with place. In the article, the impacts of the project as described by the teachers who participated in the experience are discussed in connection to broader epistemological issues. These include plant blindness as a widespread phenomenon in urban populations, and the importance of observing messy entanglements and non-scalable dynamics when building knowledge about the environment.

Spatial densification is an ongoing process in most cities today, but has an uneasy relation with the liveability of our environments. In this article, we approach this uneasy relationship between densification and liveability as a ‘matter of scales’ and work consciously with the tensions which arise, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. We analyse a case of urban design and discuss how the participatory design approach of ‘experiential evaluation’ as a ‘scaling device’ was deployed to support the formation of a ‘scaling platform’ around this matter of scale. This scaling platform has the ambition to connect the multiple actors across multiple scales to make the tensions between scales constructive. In the discussion, we present the learnings of the design process and the challenges that we encountered.

This article explores the methodological considerations regarding the organization of a site-specific exhibition in urban space and the design research experiments that may be part of such an exhibition. The aim is to encourage design research as ‘exhibition’ and to propose a format that allows theory to enter the exhibition programme for the purpose of aligning exhibition contributions with theoretical contributions. Through the proposed analytical approach, we offer a method and a model to analyse interventions in public space in relation to agency and the participatory agenda for humans and non-humans. The main contribution is an exploration of the specificalities of curating an exhibition in urban space as a distinct practice-based design research project, where programme, research questions and experiments create knowledge on scaling agency in regard to temporality, citizenship and the value of urban space.