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Understanding Design Interventions in Democratic Innovation: a Toolkit Approach

This paper explores how the design of interactive toolkits could promote citizen-led innovation. The groundwork for this approach was laid in the production of an interactive toolkit for the Homesence project. Funded by the ERDF energy company this aimed to help people understand their energy consumption through the creation, by participants of new energy meters using the Adriano electronics system. Using this as a case study, the paper describes the deployment of an interactive toolkit that enables participants to create their own energy sensors without expert help. This toolkit documented in the paper was part of the Talk to Me exhibition in the New York MOMA in 2010.

The paper explores what it means to create a toolkit that enables this type of interaction, innovation and exchange. It also poses some critical questions, especially how to avoid simply giving participants a ‘recipe card’ that reduces the possibilities for creativity and the participants developing their own ideas.

The notion of providing scaffolding that is both supporting and flexible as a fundamental component of toolkit design for democratised innovation comes into focus in this paper. This led to a more advanced theoretical exposition of this and the proposal of second order tools to help people design their own toolkits (see the paper Innovation through the Design of Knowledge Exchange and the Design of Knowledge Exchange Design in the DMI in Boston 2012). It also leads to a track called making Together at the European Academy of Design conference in 2013.

The understanding of tools and toolkits emerging in this paper was critical for a number of research projects to which Cruickshank contributes, including The Lancaster Catalyst Programme (£5 million HEFCI) promoting UK/China commercial collaboration, PROUD (€3.2 million INTERREG) and The Creative Exchange (£5 million AHRC), London Fusion (€2.6 million ERDF).