ONLINE AND OFFLINE CREATIVITY The aims of social and web communities

Francesco Petronelli - 763873 Network and Services, Master Degree in Product Service System Design, Politecnico di Milano 2011 Service design always starts from social needs, claims or necessities that have not yet been satisfied, or sometimes from intuitions that can facilitate an existing process about living, purchasing, commuting, etc. improving the quality of living. People are not only users but also designers of these systems, since they are fully involved in them: through experience they gained the right to point out problems and solutions, and most importantly, they have the tools to communicate and make these solutions real in a sustainable way. This process uncovered an inherent ability of social communities, that is creativity, and technology can support this ability through the spread of social platforms, where people share their ideas and collaborate to make them more efficient. This report is about how creative communities join forces and work together to improve their lives, and which are the risks coming from technology as an increasingly important factor in this process. The students researches presented in Anna Meroni's Creative communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living are great examples about how people's initiatives and collaboration can make different aspects of living pleasurable experiences. Anna Meroni is an architect and designer, she works as a researcher on Design and Innovation for Sustainability (DIS) in the Department INDACO (Industrial Design) of Politecnico di Milano. She's also professor in Service and Strategic Design and co-director of the Master in Strategic Design, held by POLI.design. She defines creativity as the disposition of thought and behaviour that enables us to imagine and put into practice solutions. The solutions we are talking about are services born from the convergence of interests and needs of a group of people, that creatively rearranges resources and relations, through the art of making do, to create value and benefit and to improve the environmental conditions. These people are not professionals, but ordinary, and this is why the author often refers to them as heroes: they are able to go beyond the obviousness of dominant ideas about how problems are solved. People are often afraid of changes since corporations and politicians established apparently imperturbable social models and solutions, that's why this tendency is manifested through microtransformations, where fewer environmental resources are consumed. This transition towards sustainability gave birth to new design skills, that lie outside the traditional designer figure: he becomes a facilitator, builds scenarios, generates new collaborations and systems of products, services and informations. Design is not only executed in studios but everywhere, and creative communities put the basis of this discipline. The case studies supporting and explaining the author's thesis are divided in six categories: housing, eating, commuting, working, socializing and learning. Each one of this category represents an aspect of everyday life where creative communities have found different solutions, strongly influenced by users, environment, nationality, recent history, current situation, level of development and local economy. Housing can involve living together, organizing activities for a safe and nice living environment or applying environmental energy systems and building material. This sharing activity leads to many environmental advantages but also to social ones: cohesion, safety, friendly environment, especially for elderly people. House sharing, eco-villages and material recycling are very popular in Central Eastern Europe, where the environment represents a free and self-manageable resource to defend. The cases dealing with food are mainly focused on local production, which supports the consumption of organic and seasonal food, reduces transportation and fosters a closer relationship between producer and consumer. This is very common in the underdeveloped countries, where excellent economic opportunities come from local production. Commuting initiatives affect problems mainly related to big developed environment. For example, Milan Car Sharing offers an alternative to the traffic problem: after subscribing users get a MCS card that allows to make reservations on the website. In the category of learning proposals mainly concern social care and helping people by teaching them new skills. This can impact on environmental issue, with the use of common spaces, but mostly on the social field, since most cases focus on child care, criminality, drugs, etc. Working and socializing offers the most interesting proposals from a collaborative and interactive point of view, and I'd like to mention two of them: in the United Kingdom Ayrshire offers a Local Exchange

Trading System (LETS) based on the mutual exchange of services and skills among the members of a community, from catering to plumbing; in Germany, Buchticket.com provides a service offering books for exchange: after becoming a member of the community users get tickets as a kind of score that increases with the number of books you contribute with, and enables the exchange. These two services really make the sense of community through the shearing of products and skills; every user is benefited by helping other users to get benefits. These case studies reveal what the author defines optimism and belief in human potential. At the same time the expectations were different: solutions mostly regards immediate problems and they are more effective rather than utopian. The most innovative aspect is the claiming for participation and welfare solutions to re-introduce different groups into society; but the same groups are split because of social factors. The only chance to have a massive change is a simultaneous operating of many of these initiatives in a larger environment. What is also evident from the research is how local culture and resources can affect creative communities, especially in what the author calls Global South and in Central Eastern Europe. In the Global South creative communities mainly try to reduce poverty encouraging local production, and don't have many concerns about sustainability, even if environmental impact is smaller. In CEE, despite the socialist block, with its centrally-planned economic and political systems, a lot of initiatives were born to support environment, which is viewed as a resource freely available for exploitation. The text offers well-supported theories about how people join together to creatively design new processes. The aim is the improving of our lives with the less wasting of energy and materials possible, and what is noteworthy is how these initiatives come from quick problem solution and organisation, and, in my opinion, this is not a weakness but a demonstration of how people effectively respond to needs without many concern about institutions. Some systems can require long bureaucratic processes, strong hierarchical organisation, money; but personal initiatives and collaboration can still create something big among a little community. The consequence of these fast problem solving is that some of these initiatives work into limited areas, respond to little community needs, especially those regarding food. But some other offer solutions to most common needs and should spread out and be an example for other communities. In some case studies this goal has been reached, for example car and bike sharing, and it's no accident to me that most of them are those that are supported by online platforms. Many of the services presented in the book could never work without the support of technology, specially those dealing with working and socializing, as pointed out by the UK LETS and the German Buchticket.com. Meroni states we believe technology is one way to support the followers to apply to a service the heroes initiated. Or to support a follower to initiate a corresponding service himself. Interactive platforms allow to share, co-operate and customize, and most importantly, they draw the attention of many other potential users, who may need the service or even contribute to the improvement of the service performances. How can technology support a creative community and what are its benefits? And what is the role the user has to accept when he enters the community with a well defined profile with personal skills and known identity? Charles Leadbeater We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity points out how the web helped mass creativity to grow, infiltrated our lives and shaped what we think is possible, and whether is it good for democracy or not. Leadbeater is one of the top management thinkers in the world. His reports on the rise of social entrepreneurship and on the potential for the web to generate social change led to global movements. He worked as a senior advisor to governments: among many he advised the 10 Downing St policy unit, the Department for Trade and Industry, the European Commission and the Department for Education's Innovation Unit. He is also a longstanding senior researcher associate with the London think-tank Demos and co-founder of Participle, the public service innovation agency, which is working with governments to devise new approaches to intractable social challenges. Leadbeater uses the term We Think to comprehend how think, play, work and create together, en mass, thanks to the web. He states that creativity has always been a highly collaborative and cumulative activity and rarely the product of a flash of individual brilliance. However what comes first in We think is the ambiguity of the web as a free platform where people can collaborate, express their thoughts and access to informations. The author states that many people are deeply uncertain about whether the world the web is creating will leave us feeling more in control of our lives or less. On the one hand the web should be good for spreading democracy, knowledge, and creativity, but on the other it cause surveillance, turning away from high quality journalism and may also represent a tool for criminals. The negative and positive aspects of the web collaborative systems with their massive information sources are reflected in Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia which allows anyone to submit an article to be reviewed by expert editors before being published. It is the result of a worldwide collaboration among a big creative community that put its efforts and

knowledge at the web community disposal. It gets more traffic than Encyclopedia Britannica or BBC, but what are the consequences? People assume everything on Wikipedia is true, they cut and paste the answer rather than think. This means that every interaction we have with the web is laced with uncertainty, but, at the same time, it can amplify our combined intelligence if only we can find ways to use it to work creatively together. Wikipedia is also a great example of how the Web 2.0 works. It differs from earlier more static visions of the web because it encourages the community to have a conversation through blogs, forums, social networks, etc., and new ideas usually come from conversations. However, the mass of individual contributions needs to be organised to create something reliable, and some tools allow people to contribute, some other to connect. Social networking sites do not produce collective intelligence, but create conditions for it by connecting groups of people together with shared interests. Blogs and wiki systems allow to contribute, because they focus on shared tasks with some clear goal. The web will work for us best when the power of mass collaboration orders the chaos of mass self expression. This collaborative systems makes We Think the modern and technological transposition of the old ideas from the anti industrial thinking of the 1960s: the commons, peer to peer working, community innovation and folk creativity. A mixing of the brand new with the very old. Leadbeater states that We Think requires some features without which it would not work at all: a core that attracts a community of capable developers around it; dynamic contributions by users, who find their main motivation in recognition and enjoyment; a way to easily connect and organize contributions; collaboration, that has to be controlled by a self-governance; creative talent. These features were put into practice when Linus Torvalds released onto the internet a computer programme he had written: Linux. He put also its source code, its basic recipe, leaving it for software enthusiasts to take away and tamper with, to criticise and propose improvements. At the core is a small band of trusted programmers working closely to Torvalds, and membership of this core group is earned by putting in long hours of high quality volunteer programming. In 1994 there were just 80 people, now they are 635. We Think explains the ideal structure through which a web community can join and work to create a useful and functional service. Some platforms reached this goal, as Wikipedia and Linux, but there's still a big uncertainty about how reliable and clear these services can be. From a designer perspective the web is a big tool, available to everybody and freely editable, but because of its massive use it can receive good or bad contributions and can affect people's lives until you are what you share. So what is its potential for service design? When the service grows directly on the web, the first step, as well as the more effective way to sort the huge number of users and contributions, is directing them to what the author calls core. Search engines and social networks can help users to reach the core, form a community and join skills. These platforms allow users to share knowledge, give contributions to improve systems or also have fun. But in my opinion, since the internet is always laced with uncertainty, as stated by Leadbeater, this kind of initiatives don't have to be considered as tools for learning or life improving, but just a support to knowledge or a way to share interests. They're carefully designed services, but they also have limitations in affecting a restricted community, just like an housing service in a small town in Holland. Leadbeater shows them as probes indicating how any topic can get many more views on the web than in the urban context and how this spreading of conversations can create an underworld where people who have never met can organize so precisely. The web has great potential in joining people but I think the most interesting solutions in service design grow when it acts as a supporter. Web communities creativity and heroes creativity both have the same power, but the first takes advantage of the web as a connecting tool to share informations, the second is strong in proposing useful solutions of service design, affecting people and society, and may take advantage of the web to spread and facilitate operations. The two books both deal with people creativity, but in a different way: Creative communities shows how urgent problem solution can lead groups of people to set up services involving society in its everyday life, and We Think demonstrates how web communities can collaborate to create freely available and constantly growing platforms where everybody can contribute with his skills and knowledge, with the main motivation of recognition. In the first scenario people move away from dominant social models and solutions to rearrange their resources in a more effective and sustainable way, in the second mass creativity and the worldwide free connection of the web put the seed of a new era, featured by democracy and peer to peer working. Anyway both scenarios still have some weakness: heroes are still to much in control to create a big shifting in social rules and habits, while web communities are moving increasingly out of control because of the huge mass of contributions, that can create collective intelligence as well as ignorance. Authors both present these trends as positive changes for a prosperous future, but if Meroni claims for more utopian solutions, Leadbeater warns against the possible dangers that a lack of self-governance can lead to. In my opinion a great opportunity stands in merging these tendency and their benefits: as shown by

some of the case studies in Creative communities, it is possible to use online platforms to support services. Nowadays technology is affecting society as never before, but people need to have both traditional and technological way to access: airline tickets can be bought online, but also in travel agency. Technology can help a service to spread, improve, collect users, and facilitate people to use and access it. But people still need to reach practically their goal, unless we're talking about knowledge. But even then, shall we consider wiki systems as dispensers of reliable knowledge? Shall we throw away newspapers for Wikipedia? The Web 2.0 is giving people voice, and this is good for democracy, but not competences.

References
Meroni A. (2007) Creative Communities. People inventing sustainable ways of living. Edizioni Polidesign, Milano Leadbeater, C. (2008) We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity. London: Profile Books LTD