ABSTRACT
Looking attentively at the complexity of contemporary society, we can detect a variety of creative communities involved in sustainable social innovation. Behind each of these initiatives stands a group of people who have been able to imagine, develop and manage something new, beyond the standard ways of thinking and doing. They have succeeded in challenging the apparent hegemony of mainstream ideas about how problems need to be solved by providing valuable alternatives. A primary common feature of such creative communities is that most of them have sprung from collaboratively confronting the problems of everyday life. Facing up to these, they have conceived new models of thought and action where everybody wins – individuals, society and the environment. A second common feature is that they produce and are, in turn, driven by new notions of qualities: new qualities of their physical and social environments. We can refer to these as sustainable qualities: qualities that require more sustainable behaviours in order to enjoy their benefits.
This chapter introduces and discusses these qualities, particularly the deeper underlying frameworks that define them, such as: the recognition of complexity as a value; the search for dense and long-lasting relationships; a redefinition of work and collaboration as inherently human experiences; and the human scale of supporting socio-technical systems and its positive role in defining a democratic, human-centred, sustainable society. The qualities that these frameworks generate are far more diverse than those in the mainstream models that spread across the globe in the twentieth century. The chapter concludes by asserting that these sustainable qualities clash with many – if not most – of the mainstream ways of thinking and doing and, by indicating that, in this battle between cultural (and behavioural) models, several different social actors play a part. Designers – who are, or should be, influential players when the quality of daily life is at stake – are thus a very relevant group of social actors in a process that is shifting contemporary society from a paradigm characterized by individualism, consumerism and unsustainable behaviours to an alternative one, of which the contours are gradually emerging.
