What does design have to do with democracy? Democracy is usually a matter of politics, of debate of ideas, of governance but democracy is hidden also in the folds of our daily life.
This workshop aims to examine products, public and private services we use in everyday life: do they contribute to increasing the average level of democracy in society? Or, on the contrary, do they represent attacks, obstacles, limits to democracy? What do we intend by increasing the diffuse level of democracy in our daily lives?
[…]We do not have to share exactly the same idea of what democracy. To defend it as a core value, it is enough to recognize the strong convergence between democracy and design […] say Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin in the open letter Stand Up for Democracy they recently launched to tease the design community.
Hack Belgium 3 days creative laboratory for the future in Brussels 4-6 of May will host 2 innovation workshops: each of them will be the occasion first to explore a selection of products and services that we use every day wondering each time whether the design choices are rather vector of democracy or rather reducing democracy. It will then focus on generating ideas of High Democratic Quality designs along 6 questions:
How might we design solutions that:
- actively stimulate constructive conversations between heterogeneous users?
- facilitate heterogeneous people to live and collaborate together?
- respect and improve equity between users?
- empower people with design capabilities?
- increase the accessibility to a variety of stakeholders?
- that facilitate facing and navigating complexity?
