Una lunga e bella intervista in due parti di Shareable a Ezio Manzini, uno dei maestri del design dei servizi, la cui ricerca è oggi concentrata sulla sostenibilità. Il concetto dal quale parte è questo: noi 7 miliardi di persone siamo intelligenti: come facciamo a coordinarci con regole e piattaforme che tirino fuori il meglio di noi e non il peggio? E’ anche una questione di progettazione, di design. (Shareable: prima parte e seconda parte)
Ezio Manzini photo via David Barrie’s blog.
Dice Manzini:
“There is, in my view, a new model of organizing society and the
production and consumption and whatever. When I use the words small,
open, local and connected, this is my way of telling the story. People
can tell it in another way, but the result is similar. Of course it’s a
metaphor: having small entities that when connected, become bigger
entities. It’s evident that it comes very strongly from the network. But
once it appears, it’s not only related to what you can do, strictly
speaking, in the network and technologies. It’s a way to imagine the way
in which the social services are delivered in society and the way in
which we can imagine economies that are at the same time rooted in a
place and partially self-sufficient but connected to the others and open
to the others. This is a very interesting relationship between being
local, being related to a certain context and at the same time being
open and connected, not provincial or one closed community that risks
being against the others. This is an idea that is clear and strong if
you talk about the arena where people are dealing with networks, open
source and peer to peer. But it can become a very general metaphor, and
embed itself in some realities to become a powerful way to organize a
sustainable society.”
Persone connesse, con forte senso del territorio, in organizzazioni aperte, itentitariamente chiare: è il punto di partenza. Il viaggio è tutto da seguire. Manzini lo racconta così:
“We can look for example at “zero-mile food”, where not only a new way
of eating but also a new relationship between production and
consumption, and between the city and the countryside, are established.
Or collaborative services where elderly people organize themselves to
exchange mutual help and, at the same time, promote a new idea of
welfare. Further examples are neighborhood gardens set-up and managed by
citizens who in this way improve the quality of the city and its social
fabric, or groups of families who decide to share some services to
reduce the economic and environmental costs, but also to create new
forms of neighborhood.
Once we start to observe society and look for this kind of
initiative, a variety of other interesting cases appear: new forms of
social interchange and mutual help (such as the local exchange trading
systems and time banks); systems of mobility that present alternatives
to the use of individual cars (from car sharing and car pooling to the
rediscovery of the possibilities offered by bicycles); the development
of productive activities based on local resources and skills which are
linked into wider global networks (as is the case of certain products
typical of a specific place, or of the fair and direct trade networks
between producers and consumers established around the globe). The list
could continue, touching on every area of daily life and emerging all over the world.
Looking at such cases of social innovation we can observe that they
challenge traditional ways of doing things and introduce new, different
and more sustainable behavior. Of course, each one of them should be
analyzed in detail (to assess their effective environmental and social
sustainability more accurately). However, at first glance we can
recognize their coherence with some of the fundamental guidelines for
sustainability.”
Il problema è comprendere se si possono costruire piattaforme che abilitino questo genere di soluzioni. Che le rendano replicabili altrove mantenendo tutte le specificità locali. Che incentivino la qualità del risultato. La generalizzazione di tutto questo è una ricerca da svolgere e una pratica da sperimentare. Ma sarebbe interessante comprendere se si possono aggiustare le piattaforme esistenti o se si devono costruire nuove piattaforme.
ps. (In un periodo in cui si parla di scambio di case Airbnb, vale la pena di dare un’occhiata al progetto cohousing a Milano, via Desis)
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