On the 26th and 27th October 2012 DESIS, and in particular the DESIS initiative Public and Collaborative (P&C) will organize two Public and Collaborative Days at the Design Biennale in Liège “Reciprocity” www.designliege.be. These two P&C days will be dedicated to the discussion of the specific theme of Design for Public Innovation and take the opportunity to formulate some critical reflections starting from our P&C projects.

Citizens, associations, enterprises and local governments that conceive of and set up new solutions, as well as those that actively and collaboratively participate in them, do so by choice. Creative communities recognize, in the promising initiatives that they create and produce, some features that are better than those proposed by the mainstream unsustainable production and consumption system. Their initiatives compensate for the reduction in consumption with an increase in something else that the involved people consider more valuable. We can refer to this "something else" as qualities of the physical and social environments that ask for more sustainable behaviors in order to enjoy them. Hence we might call them: sustainable qualities. The observation of cases of social innovation around the world point towards an emergence of sustainable qualities (place, scale, collaboration, work, time, relationships, complexity), which urge us to start a more thorough philosophical refection.

Showcase is a DESIS initiative aiming to create and maintain an up-to-date overview on initiatives of design for social innovation taking place in design schools across the globe. Within the context of DESIS Showcase, design schools are invited to present their social innovation-related projects, using a common lightweight format. These projects are shown, at special events, i.e. the DESIS Showcases, which are organized back-to-back with Cumulus Conferences around the world. DESIS Showcase has been conceived and developed in partnership with Cumulus Association.