Mobilizing for community building and everyday innovation Signe L. Yndigegn IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark signelouise@itu.dk Tau Ulv Lenskjold The Danish Design School Copenhagen, Denmark tul@dkds.dk Sissel Olander The Danish Design School Copenhagen, Denmark sol@dkds.dk Maria Foverskov The Danish Design School Copenhagen, Denmark mfo@dkds.dk ABSTRACT This paper presents and discusses two co-design projects that deal with societal issues of community building and everyday innovation in the municipality of Copenhagen. The research projects explore a collection of designerly approaches, here referred to as a design laboratory. The general aim is to establish an open platform, or infrastructure, for community building and everyday innovation. We argue that a key constituent of this approach is to engage stakeholders and participants in mutual mobilization around issues of collective concern. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of this approach as an intentional strategy of democratization. Author Keywords Design research, mobilizing, community building, everyday innovation, design laboratory, democratization, participatory design and social technologies. INTRODUCTION Democratic innovation, as we will position it in the following, is a process that supports social and cultural communities in their efforts to affect and build their own future. This also implies a delegation of the democratic intentions with which the designer engages in the project. Here the act of mobilizing becomes a key issue, because social, cultural and everyday innovation can only take place where the act of mobilizing is continuously performed and distributed among stakeholders. One way of mobilizing for social and everyday innovation is to provide networks of diverse stakeholders with an infrastructure, or a platform, by which appropriate devices and processes for staging dialogues and developing socio- material innovations can unfold. In the projects presented here this undertaking is situated within the conceptual frame of the design laboratory. As a specific framing of designerly interventions, the design laboratory aims at mobilizing participants into long-term relationships. The results are co-created design outcomes, that directly affect the participants’ own life situations. In a larger scope this approach to design research belongs to the tradition of Participatory Design(PD). It is a tradition that strongly denotes the democratic co-operation between researchers and diverse stakeholders, in all phases of the design process. What has often been referred to as the Scandinavian tradition of PD, traditionally emphasized empowerment and democratization in the workplace, e.g. involving workers whose jobs would otherwise be replaced by technology in the development of sustainable solutions [8, 10]. Today the ubiquity of technology and access to new media has gradually shifted the focus of PD research projects from workplace orientated activities to public spheres and everyday life. This shift has been described as a movement from “democracy at work” to “democratic innovation”[3:41]. If we consider the intentions that drove early PD research projects forward, namely the distribution of authorship and power to those affected by new design proposals and solutions, it becomes clear why a movement from workplace orientated research activities to the less organized and more heterogeneous public sphere, pose some challenges and raise some questions. First of all the design field is vaster and some of the networks that occupy this space will by definition be more porous, than those contained in the structure of an organization or workplace. This means that the mapping of the design-field in itself is a different task to begin with. Secondly the question of what to design and who to include in the design process is fundamentally open and constantly negotiable. PD research activities situated in this highly volatile landscape, intersect and negotiate boundaries between numerous grassroots initiatives, existing organizations and research funding requirements, to mention but a few. Here the mobilization of stakeholders takes on a central meaning. INFRASTRUCTURING Following Bruno Latour [9] innovation can be seen as the activity of connecting humans and non-humans. The notion of infrastructuring [5], initially developed by Leigh Star, becomes particularly useful in conceptualizing this assemblage: “An infrastructure, like railroad tracks or the Internet is not reinvented every time, but is ‘sunk into’ other