Innovation Capacity and the City: The Enabling Role of Design (SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology)

This open access book represents one of the key milestones of DESIGNSCAPES, an H2020 CSA (Coordination and Support Action) research project funded by the European Commission under the Call “User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation”. The book demonstrates that adopting design allows us to embed innovation within the city so as to arrive at feasible answers to complex global challenges. In this way, innovation can become disruptive, while also sparking a dynamic of gradual change in the “urbanscape” it acts within. To explore this potential, the book puts forward the concept of “design enabled innovation in urban environments” and examines the part that the city can play in promoting and facilitating the adoption of design among public and private sector innovators. This leads to a potential evaluation framework in which a given urbanscape is assessed both in terms of its capacity for generating innovation, and of the nature (more or less design-dependent or design-prone) of the innovative initiatives it hosts. This thread of reasoning holds many promising implications, including a possible “third way” between those who dream of an alternative economic model where revenues and growth are sacrificed on the altar of social and environmental respect, and the supporters of the traditional market-based view, who feel it is enough to add a touch of responsibility and concern to a system that should continue rewarding the profitability of innovations. Foreword 6 Acknowledgements 8 Contents 9 1 Introduction 10 1.1 Cities as Breeding Grounds: What Answers to Global Challenges? 10 1.2 How Can We Accompany Transition Processes? 12 1.3 What Role Can Design Play? 15 1.4 About This Book 16 References 21 2 A Triplet Under Focus: Innovation, Design and the City 24 2.1 The Context of Our Investigation 24 2.2 Positioning Concepts and Definitions 25 2.2.1 Innovation 26 2.2.2 Design 34 2.2.3 Cities 44 References 47 3 Cities as Enablers of Innovation 51 3.1 Innovation and Cities Interplay 51 3.2 Five Interfaces of the City Relevant for Innovation 54 3.3 Scaling Innovation Up and Out Among Cities 60 3.4 Framing the Urbanscape 62 References 66 4 Innovation and Design 69 4.1 Characterising Design Agency 69 4.1.1 Types of Design Agencies 69 4.1.2 The Infrastructuring Role of the Design Agency 75 4.2 A 3D Design-Based Innovation Space 77 4.3 Design Enabled Innovation: Towards the Notion of Design for Scape 82 References 89 5 Design Enabled Innovation in Urban Environments 92 5.1 Changes in and from Urban Environments 92 5.2 The Urban/Design Interplay Towards Innovation 96 5.3 Sensing the Innovation Capacity of Cities 102 References 106 Front Matter ....Pages i-ix Introduction (Grazia Concilio, Ilaria Tosoni)....Pages 1-14 A Triplet Under Focus: Innovation, Design and the City (Munir Abbasi, Joe Cullen, Chuan Li, Francesco Molinari, Nicola Morelli, Pau Rausell et al.)....Pages 15-41 Cities as Enablers of Innovation (Grazia Concilio, Chuan Li, Pau Rausell, Ilaria Tosoni)....Pages 43-60 Innovation and Design (Grazia Concilio, Amalia De Götzen, Francesco Molinari, Nicola Morelli, Ingrid Mulder, Luca Simeone et al.)....Pages 61-83 Design Enabled Innovation in Urban Environments (Grazia Concilio, Joe Cullen, Ilaria Tosoni)....Pages 85-101 This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.