Ezio Manzini in NYC on Cherry Lane
Tonight in NYC – May 6, 2009 – join me for a conversation with Ezio Manzini, one of o2 International’s early founders and one of the leading sustainability and design thinkers you’ve never heard about this side of the pond.
Small, local, open and connected
An Evening with Ezio Manzini
Observing society as a whole and in all its contradictoriness, we can see that, alongside numerous unfortunately extremely worrying tendencies, signals are also emerging that indicate the existence of promising cases of social innovation: designing networks (creative communities and collaborative networks) the results of which can be considered as positive steps towards sustainability (and that, even if the moment they are minorities, have to linked to some major on-going trends, as: the demographic change, the growing environmental pressure, the evolution towards a knowledge-based network society).
What does it mean to design for the very peculiar kind of social innovations that is characterizing the contemporary society? What does it mean to steer designing networks towards more sustainable directions? What conceptual and practical tools are needed?
The emerging features, as the cases of socio-technical innovation on which they are based, are characterized by four keywords: small, local, open and connected.