Design og Aktive Welfare

Public administration is challenged by increasingly complex problems, due to the emergence of new social issues, such as ageing of population, new diseases, immigration and cultural integration, new work patterns and high unemployment rates. Services and infrastructures that should address those problems often refer to old models, based on a social and cultural context that no longer exists. New solutions are needed, which are based on new policies and criteria for the development of public services, also based on the revision of the role public administration, private companies and citizens can play.
Some of those solutions have been proposed by cooperative initiatives at the local level. These are interesting cases of social innovation; however those initiatives would remain weak and isolated without an accurate planning process.
In the last few years an area of the design discipline is focusing on how to support those initiatives. This project builds on this area and aims at exploring the landscape of cooperative initiatives in Denmark, considering the possibility to generate a platform of infrastructures (products, services, technologies and organisational forms) that support their development and, possibly, their extension to different local contexts.
This project will analyse existing cases and select some of the most promising for a more accurate analysis and a co-design process together with the actors, institutions and organisations directly involved in such initiatives. The aim of the project is to work out methodological reflections and practical indications about how design can significantly support and organise cooperative initiatives.