(HOW TO) DRAW A PROCESS - An Architectural storytelling of a social innovation case
As architecture is shifting its focus from construction to regeneration, we architects should rethink our role: from designer of spaces to interpreter of processes. If architecture has instruments to produce complex spaces, why can't it realizes image storytelling of social innovation processes? Is it possible to make processes more understandable, reproducible, inclusive, and to prevent regenerated places from falling back into cycles of abandonment due to a lack of attention to social aspects?
National
Italy
Florence
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
The project aims to explore the possibilities of graphics in implementing the communicative capacities of social innovation. Today we live in a highly complex world where orientation is often difficult; in this context, social innovation is often overwhelmed by contingencies. One of the greatest difficulties is communication in a bidirectional sense, i.e. communicating outwards and being received by potential stakeholders.
Developed at the Florence University Architecture Faculty, this project proposes a paradigm shift in the architect’s role, exploring the possibility of operating a transposition of the subject's tools to read complex processes.
The project developed an approach starting from the analysis of case studies in the social innovation field and the communicative and participatory design tools used in it. The next part of the analysis serves as theoretical support to understand social-anthropological relational aspects in the field of social innovation and care systems. The project applies a series of graphic storytelling strategies to one of the case studies, the Lumen project, a culture-based regeneration project active in Florence since 2021. Graphic design moves on several levels of storytelling according to the different types of architectural representation (framing, elevation, axonometry, details) to represent intangible aspects. The final part of the research project intends to make the developed storytelling method and the development processes relates replicable and available to anyone.
In a multiple crises global context, social fragilities are the most invisible and at the same time, community networks contain the highest potential for resolution of many problematics. The tools designed in this research project can give real support to communication for social innovation and the natural consequence is the possibility of implementing community networking in the field.
Social innovation
Processes storytelling
Diffuse empowerment tools
Community networks
Reorganizing complexity to invent
Sustainability is a concept that risks to be overly simplified due to its complexity. That issue is reflected by the many categories of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; these goals imply progressive processes to approach widespread sustainability. My proposal aims to make these processes visible, focusing on paths of social innovation, that includes experimentation of new lifestyles or ways of producing culture, generative welfare, reactivation of disused spaces into new cultural or hybrid experimental spaces.
Architecture is increasiling dealing with regeneration, but many existing funding calls do not support the immaterial processes that keep spaces alive by preventing them from returning to the cycle of abandonment. The aim of the project is therefore to overcome this lack by implementing communication skills through the creation of specific graphic tools, useful to make the processes more accessible, receptive, and therefore reproducible.
I create a visual language for the storytelling of processes and then applied it to a case study of cultural regeneration, also reporting all the information about the process of making the tools. The idea is to implement a sustainable communication mechanism in terms of open-source access to the tools, and transparency of information. The consequent goals are to increase the habilitative possibilities for the birth and success of new socially sustainable projects, capable of creating profitable relationships with the natural environment and innovative economic systems.
The project is exemplary because the focus on the processes puts all the stakeholders on the same level, overcoming inequalities. Forcing attention to the relationship between resources (human, ecological, material, cultural, temporal) available in the context, needs, and future goals generates a systemic logic of sustainability that links and reads progressive steps, within specific useful timelines, building fractal and robust sustainability.
The aim is to support the empowerment of living-nonliving care networks by overcoming the imperceptibility of their paths and making them comprehensible to all through images. The results have potential to improve the quality of life cause social innovation means independently reorganizing contextual conditions when welfare no longer meets emerging social needs, but also developing projects that conventionally don't exist.
Considering the social fragilities that are difficult to resolve (psychological distress,disability,loneliness and loss of autonomy for the elderly,unemployment,migration), no service can ever be effective, universally accessible, and provide the security of a solid social network, even taking into account the benefits of good relationships.
The availability of this enabling method will allow the relationship between human care and the built environment to evolve from the extraordinary to the ordinary, creating an aesthetic of spaces that is peculiar and the result of shared work. There would be a natural interruption of the mechanisms of "broken window" by the birth of spaces in which self-designing groups can identify themselves and stimulate respect for a place that coincides with that for the community, overcoming any possible imposed rules. These are also safe spaces for cultural experimentation with benefits for related production, the creation of dialogue spaces between artists, activists, and bringing the public closer.
All this will be achieved by strengthening the planning and operational capacities of people and communities; thanks to the tools developed, it will be easier to communicate, create networks and develop new projects, manage them even in the difficulties of everyday life and ensure their survival.
The project is exemplary because it focuses on supporting the circularity of care, promoting a virtuous circle that, starting from intangible aspects, can have positive effects on the space that increases people's well-being.
The aim is to wide the range of stakeholders in social innovation by increasing the accessibility of information through the process visual storytelling. The research I made on communication in the field, and on participatory processes, has shown that there is a lack of images: the content is often described by long texts that risk being exclusive for reasons of time and contingency in the current accelerated context. Insiders, but above all interlocutors who are culturally far from the processes, as well as the most vulnerable, such as children, the elderly, foreigners, and people with cognitive disabilities, are in principle excluded from the possibilities of planning. Instead, they are the categories that are most exposed and can understand the fragility of the context, they could benefit from the support of a community network and make a contribution based on the perceived criticalities.
Images, with a widely understandable language, can instead be tools for widespread empowerment. The images developed can stimulate creativity, leave space for imagination and thus further experimentation. In addition, the structure of the research is inclusive because of its flexibility: the reader can approach the text from the first page, but can also choose to start from a topic of interest and then move through the chapters following specific suggestions in the pages that are useful in developing a personal reading path.
This concept is exemplary because the communication strategies take into account all the interlocutors (and potential ones) involved, both in terms of the content represented and the ways of reading it, according to specific needs and abilities. Moreover, the feedback mechanism necessary to develop the images leads to the inclusion of additional interlocutors in the system and they can contribute becoming actors capable of implementing its inclusiveness, creating a self-inclusive process in continuous expansion.
Citizens can concretely benefit from the concept because it aims to be enabling by providing practical storytelling tools. The research consists of three volumes; the first is theoretical, the second concerns design experimentation, and the third is operational for the interested user. For now, the third volume includes a series of worksheets and a detailed explanation of the process of creating the graphics. The future of this third volume will be a real tutorial with formats, exercises, and tools that will lead the user to reproduce the storytelling graphics according to his own needs.
The impact on citizens will also result from the benefits that the groups will have in terms of improving their communication skills; this allows to diffuse informations about access to experimental spaces, cultural events, and possibilities of inclusion in social or associative networks. At the same time, enlarging the active groups should increase planning capacities, possibilities of obtaining funding, and approaching new stakeholders.
The research considers civil society in the diversity of its components, looking at the complexity of different interests and needs towards this project or processes. I have already involved some categories, such as academics or activists, to verify the effectiveness of the visual elaborations and to gather the data necessary for their development. The dialogue has led to many useful adjustments to increase the comprehensibility of the images, including the opportunity further to clarify the characterization and needs of potential stakeholders.
The method I used generates a gradual process of bringing the project closer to the real needs of the citizens, and progressive clarification of suggestions for them useful for freely moving in the research. As the project progresses, stakeholders will have an increasingly useful tool at their disposal, linked to the possibility to widen their group of interest and also design capacities.
To date, I realize only one graphic experimentation of the project tested on the Florentine case study Lumen, in which I collaborate. Mensola Urban Lab is a culture-based regeneration project carried out on a site consisting of a 300m2 building and a very large open space, concessioned by the municipality to APS ICVCV for free use in exchange for ordinary and extraordinary maintenance. Lumen opened first time in the summer of ‘21, it has been active for two summer seasons receiving 6000 new card members.
Lumen has some bureaucratic and urbanistic characteristics that make it unique on the national scene so, if it continues, it would be a forerunner for the development of other similar projects. For this reason, it was interesting to experiment on Lumen the tools I designed.
The project development mainly involved old members of the association, i.e. people with different roles, responsibilities, and therefore different perceptions of the project. The members were asked for information that I did not have, but also to give feedback on the images. I also interviewed outsiders to the association, grouped into three categories: those who knew nothing about Lumen or my research, those who had been to Lumen at least once, and those who knew some of both. The interviews were fundamental in gathering information, clarifying the accuracy and comprehensibility of the representation, and suggesting improvements. An important aspect of the project is the possibility of developing it further only by involving people at different levels.
Next step will be to conduct interviews with administrators, local associations, citizens, and students of different grades to disseminate what has been achieved and gradually increase its comprehensibility. Another next step will be to test the project on other transcalar processes with the parallel evolution of the scale of interlocution, a fact that will give the possibility of further breaking down boundaries and increasing inclusiveness.
The architectural method leads the design experimentation part (Vol. 2), where the changing drawing scale of architectural design is used as a visual guide in the storytelling of the Lumen process. For the project development, I used digital graphic tools through various software, studied representative styles from new fields such as graphic facilitation, and I worked on image perception.
To build a research based on the relationships between elements can be found at the theoretical level and in the editorial structure suggestions from complexity theory (E. Morin) or quantum physics (C. Rovelli): if each thing exists only in relation to something else, the reality is made up of connections, and the perception of each element will be specific to the existing relationship with the observer. Looking in these terms at the context, and possibilities of graphic design help to understand that, we need to create unseen connections by recomposing contextual conditions to be innovative.
Aspects of mathematics, such as group and graph theory, or the use of different types of diagrams, are used to structure the reflection on social relations. There are also references to urban sociology and the anthropology of housing, which are useful for reading the case studies and reflecting on how each of them can have a potential form determined by the internal or external relations with objects or context planes (including intangible ones such as platforms) to which they relate.
The innovative editorial form is made by the composition of themes and the disciplinary areas mentioned in a discourse network that can be read starting from the first page or a point of interest, and then moving backward and forward by following the specific suggestion. This is done to create a product with inclusive usability according to the reader's time and ability, allowing exploration according to a personal path.
The first aspect of innovation is in the structure, which involves many disciplines. If any process is complex by nature, to construct a narrative that is close to reality, it is necessary to include all the interlocutors involved (human and non-human), giving them equal dignity. In architecture field, it is innovative because it shifts the focus from material to immaterial processes and then explore what the changes are, in comparison to the classical spaces design development.
In the communication field, for social innovation or participatory processes the process outputs are classic images (photos, icons, or simple diagrams...) and a predominant textual component. In my project narratives are realized in images to build 360° inclusive, lighter and faster enabling tools. For example, in the process prospectus graphic, I drew all the interlocutors, giving them recognizable appearances and relating them to each other. The narrative develops on two parallel planes: the software that contains information about the intangible dynamics and the hardware that allows us to visualize what is happening in the lumen space in relation to the events. The prospectus is accompanied by text, insights, and a legend in pictures; each reader can choose how to read it and how much time to spend on it. (here the video version https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zEBn17vH0J1fBZXfgVVtaDwqQej2gEZb/view?usp=share_link )
Finally, the socio-anthropological field is explored by providing textual and graphical reasoning tools useful for developing reflections and projects on social structures. These areas of knowledge, are almost not representable; in my research I made an attempt to shape them, mixing theoretical aspects with mathematical schemes, following formal evolutions of the schemes and associating them with evolutions of the reasoning stages. In this way I propose a method that is quickly reproducible and usable in conversations with many participants.
The replicability of the project is one of the core elements in its development; the third volume aims to provide what is necessary for the reproduction of the process storytelling graphics developed. I can give some useful examples to clarify how this could be configured. At this stage of the research, several social innovation case studies have been brought together in a framework of interests that places them in relation to each other and then to the Lumen case study. The graphic designs, referred analyses and explanation allow the user to read a recognizable method that provides a replicable tool in other contexts, such as cases of thematic or spatial proximity, useful for a thematic mapping of all the associations in an area, or those working in the field of culture, mapping public or private educational institutions with specific characteristics,..
Same can be said of the process prospectus; once the limits of the narrative to be constructed have been identified, it can be reproduced for any process that is considered useful to observe. I have made observable the process that led a cultural association to obtain a space in concession, but it can be used to narrate other stories. For example it is possible to realize a prospectus that tell about the process of emptying or activating a square, a burgh, or a district...
The graphic-relational interpretations can be also applied to different social contexts, such as associations, relations between institutions, or more restricted ones, such as family units or relations between more family units in a district.
The same goes for elaborations such as space-time axonometry, which can be reproduced in any other context and can change depending on the interlocutors that are considered fundamental (in my case space, time, and sociality, for a natural park it could be space, time, animals and vegetation - here for the video https://drive.google.com/file/d/17PZxTRb_4rMglyQb6Ff1svUZ6mgy7hKf/view?usp=share_link ).
The project seeks to support social innovation processes, i.e. anything that people can do starting from contextual conditions when the welfare state is no longer able to respond to emerging social needs. The project's tools are designed to strengthen these kinds of enabling connections between people, the potential that social groups can have and project capacities.
If we think to start with a group of people, being able to recognize (more or less explicitly) its network, and being able at extending this network: the possibility to draw and tell clearly what happens in a similar process means being able to recognize it even at the institutional level when the perception is more about situations linked to the idea of voluntary work or informality. The evolution of the research could also lead to the development of storytelling tools capable of representing processes on a global scale.
Recognizing social groups can also means facilitating more sustainable ways of dealing with production in general and reality transformations, without feeding the causes of the climate crisis. Moreover, there could be also an increased potential for self-building, often on very low budgets, using local and reused materials, as well as projects for food self-sufficiency, km0 agriculture, and self-production of food and handicrafts, with a necessary focus on circularity. These are all recurring themes of attention in groups working in the social innovation field, which by definition and necessity is detached from conventional ways of life, and which has a positive impact on social and environmental well-being.
The aim is to promote the survival of inclusive ecosystems of solidarity and diffuse comprehension of their processes; doing so new similar organisms could emerge, capable of operating at a speed commensurate with internal needs regardless of the global context, and able to take into account the capacities of individuals while integrating the most diverse situations of fragility
