Crossing Boundaries: People, Traces, Events Transforming Peripheries

A people-centred design revolution is taking place. The “everyday people” (Sanders 2006) we serve through design are becoming proactive in their demand for better ways of living: they propose actions, events, temporary moments, and predictions, acts that are ephemeral but at the same time expressions of a community activating itself to recovery and rebuild. New design spaces are emerging in response to people’s needs, developing environments that nurture learning, creativity, and human potential. The set of small things happening in the neighbourhoods make a difference. Their social role and their often bottom-up dynamics are fundamental inputs for breaking down the borders of the periphery, creating alternative centers. The activities of event design merge urban policies, social design, exhibit design, communication design, and storytelling with cultural and economic development. Citizen action is on the rise, more in the peripheries, and city governments are having trouble responding to it. The citizen’s action level is higher in the situations where people have less choice and the government is weaker. Cities can be conceived as constellations of neighbourhoods, and each one of them has one of these event-places as a reference. Through these events and places, we create a social glue. The role of designers, citizens, and politicians is changing significantly. Structure of the paper: Dialogues, processes, places, narrative, Actionscapes, 1. Crossing from Industrial to Digital
, 2. Crossing from Functional to Convivial
, 3. Crossing from Citizens to Users
, 4. Crossing from Linear to Circular
, 5. Crossing from Reuse to U-rise
, 6. Crossing from Boredom to Fun