ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, the design community has been interested in contributing to a more democratic society. A growing awareness of worldwide environmental and social issues started the debate about how Design could be used to develop useful, meaningful solutions for environmental and social problems. It soon became evident that Design could be a tool to emancipate, to increase the autonomy of marginalised groups and to reduce the domination of one social group over another (Bonsiepe 2004). Design is a creative activity in which several decisions are made to turn visible and to address an idea (Bratteteig and Wagner 2012), that is to achieve
the expected result. A greater participation in the design process would have represented the possibility of a truly widely shared power (Cross 1975). For these reasons, in the last forty years, several collaborative and participatory approaches have been developed by the Design community to promote a shift in power relations and to include the user in the decision-making process (Greenbaum 1993). More recently, design strategy is being applied in social fields (Meroni 2008) with the express aim of developing social innovations.
