Events
Public Lectures
During spring 2012 a public lecture series organized by Ezio Manzini and Eduardo Staszowski will bring together leading European and local New York City designers with New York City public policymakers to explore the intersection of social innovation and public service.
Following are the speakers in the series, which will also feature panels of respondents comprised of public-sector leaders, designers and other experts. All four lectures will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Kellen Auditorium, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, at Parsons The New School for Design, located at 66 Fifth Avenue.
Ezio Manzini: Active and Collaborative People
Tuesday, March 20, 6-8 pm
The need to radically re-think public services can be challenged by the question of what public services could become if they were conceived as platforms to trigger, enable, and support citizens’ active and collaborative behaviors. From this framework, Manzini introduces European experiences of participatory and community-centered design. Manzini is a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Parsons The New School for Design. For more than two decades he has been working in the field of design for sustainability and social innovation, considered as a major driver of sustainable changes. From this perspective he founded DESIS, an international network of design labs active in the field of design for social innovation and sustainability (http://www.desis-network.org). Manzini was recently awarded 2012 Sir Misha Black Medal for Distinguished Services to Design Education.
Christian Bason: Design for Public Sector Innovation
Tuesday, March 27, 6-8 pm
The current financial, economic and social crises occurring both in the United States and Europe have placed renewed pressure on public sector organizations to radically reinvent themselves, and to generate more value for society and for citizens. Design holds massive potential as a way to achieve more significant innovation in public policies and services, but to generate real system-wide change design must also be anchored and practiced within governmental agencies. Bason is Director of MindLab, which for more than a decade has functioned as part of the national administration of Denmark as an innovation platform for the ministries of Business & Growth, Employment, and Taxation. Its mission is to involve citizens and business in co-creating new public policies and services. Prior to joining MindLab, he led Ramboll, a leading public organization and management consultancy. He is the author of four books on leadership, innovation and change in the public sector, most recently Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society (Policy Press, 2010).
David Boyle: Co-Production: A Preventive Welfare System
Tuesday, April 10, 6-8 pm
Why do public services get increasingly expensive yet often decreasingly effective? Boyle explores how the ideas of co-production, developed in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, have been brought into the debate in Britain. He explains what happened when the National Health Service began using these processes, and looks to the future – and whether co-production might provide a clue to the Holy Grail of welfare reform: services that are able to reach upstream and tackle causes, rather than just waiting to deal with symptoms. Boyle is a fellow at the New Economics Foundation, the pioneering think-tank in London, and has been at the heart of the effort to develop co-production in Britain as a critical element of public service reform.
François Jégou: From the Design of Public Services to the Design of Public Policies
Tuesday, April 24, 6-8 pmBuilding on the experience of a series of recent action-research projects, Jégou, founder of the sustainable innovation lab Strategic Design Scenarios, will question the current way public action is conducted and discuss opportunities and limits for design to support a co-evolution between social innovation and public innovation. Jégou is active in various fields and research projects from investigating Creative Communities for Sustainable Living in China, India, Brazil and Africa, to European research projects diffusing social innovation to support sustainable transition and exploring the future of innovation. He is also the scientific director of the public innovation lab 27e Région in France and the coordinator of DESIS Europe, the European branch of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability network. He teaches strategic design at ENSCI Les Ateliers Paris, La Cambre, Brussels and Politecnico Milano.
Symposium
In the Fall of 2012, a one-day symposium will be held to analyze and evaluate the program activities, and discuss next steps.
