Making Futures: Innovation, Design and Democracy

Experiments in participatory design and democracy — futures imagined and built locally by often-marginalised communities, beyond corporate crowdsourcing. It enacts the SDF's Partners component under the Social-Responsibility motto: who gets to make the future. Published by MIT Press under the fuller title Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy, the book documents experiments in innovation, design and democracy that search not for a killer app but for a collaboratively created, sustainable future. Most of the cases come from grassroots organisations, non-governmental organisations and multi-ethnic working-class neighbourhoods, including a collective of immigrant women performing collaborative services, an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. The editors argue for a democratised form of innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and corporate crowdsourcing, toward futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalised publics.