The Cumulus conference in Denver organized by the Rocky Mountain College for Art and Design featured a Design Expo. It combined both case studies collected during the DESIS Light Expo back in May 2011 at the Cumulus Conference at Strate College in Paris, and case studies from DESIS Labs in the US. Mariana Amatullo and Eduardo Strakowskij, curators of the exhibition, selected and presented the projects into different thematic areas.

The workshop, that will be held on March 2nd 2011 in New York City, is organized in parallel with the Inter-governmental Preparatory Meeting (IPM) of the 19th session of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-19) and according to the organizers, will adress essentially "research and policy analysis, social innovation, awareness raising and communications as well as education for sustainable lifestyles", allowing participants to "explore existing initiatives and tools, good policies and lessons learned in the fields of sustainable lifestyles."

DESIS network members Lara Penin (DESIS Lab Parsons, USA) and Mugendi M'Rithaa (Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa) will contribute to the workshop by presenting DESIS' vision, structure and example projects and participating in the day-long activities. We will be reporting about the workshop results in the following newsletter.

Scenarios for Creative and Sustainable Lifestyles on the Lower East Side (LES)
August 10, 2010

Amplifying Creative Communities is a project of the DESIS Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation New York City Cultural Innovation Fund 2009.  The project aims to:

Scenarios for Creative and Sustainable Lifestyles on the Lower East Side (LES)
August 10, 2010

Amplifying Creative Communities is a project of the DESIS Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation New York City Cultural Innovation Fund 2009.  The project aims to:

1.    Listen out for Creative Communities in New York City who are taking quiet but significant steps toward more sustainable ways of living and working;
2.    Work with these Creative Communities to learn about their social innovations;
3.    Design with these Creative Communities to expand the capacity of their innovations;
4.    Broadcast what we have learned about social innovation to other communities.

CREATIVE AND SUSTAINABLE LIFESTYLES ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE
The Amplify Project will run for two years. In 2010, we have worked on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan to identify examples of urban activism/creative communities in the area.

AMPLIFY PARTNERS
For this project DESIS Lab is working in partnership with Green Map System, which utilizes mapmaking to promote sustainable community development in over 50 countries, ; the Lower East Side Ecology Center, which provides community-based environmental education and activism opportunities to New York City residents, ; and IDEO, the acclaimed international design consultancy.
 
EXHIBITION
Within the Amplifying project process, exhibitions are used as a research tool to establish public conversations, consulting the general public about some specific issues, showing some in-progress results and hypotheses.

For the exhibition on the Lower East Side (August 5th to September 15th 2010 at Abrons Art Center), we have envisioned five main sections, each one dedicated to a particular aspect of the research, showing findings hitherto but also and foremost, each section aims at creating a specific dialogue with the public, by proposing a specific question.

WORKSHOP SESSION
The workshop “Scenarios for Creative and Sustainable Lifestyles on the Lower East Side” will gather the project partners, local community experts, activists, designers and academics to conduct an analytical and design exercise about the present and future of social innovation in the LES and NYC.

Our research has revealed different layers through which social innovation materializes in the LES. Starting with the community gardens, we have identified some specific areas of interest of social innovation on the LES:
•    Taking Care of the Elderly
•    Eating Healthy
•    Retaining Cultural Diversity
•    Housing (Collaborative Home Services)

A group of Parsons students have responded to the challenge of designing new scenarios responding to these four main areas. Part of the workshop will be dedicated to present and discuss them. Once validated, the scenarios will evolve towards manuals and “how-to” instructables, to be distributed to local individuals and organizations, in this way, completing the Amplification process.

WORKSHOP GOALS
The workshop aims at:

•    Share the results of the research synthesized in the exhibition at Abrons gallery
•    Visit the LES neighborhood and observe its characteristics and dynamics
•    Discuss the findings related to areas of social innovation in the neighborhood
•    Assess and refine the new service scenarios developed by our students responding to local demands (discuss their feasibility, usability, adequacy to local conditions, hypotheses about possible features of each scenario).

The results of the workshop will be incorporated in the gallery space.
After the workshop students will design a DIY toolkit for the new services refined during the Workshop, under IDEO’s supervision. These toolkits aim at encouraging individuals, local non-profits and policy-makers in the adoption of solutions that promote sustainable lifestyles in the LES.

With the aim of settle a research agenda and work on some current questions such as:
_How to explore and promote design-enabled social innovation in the American context.
_How can design help catalyze social resources for sustainable change?
_What is the specificity of social innovation in the U.S.?