Triggering Things

While design has always engaged with other disciplines and knowledge, the case presented here shows how interdisciplinarity is fundamental in addressing issues of social marginality and extreme urban poverty. The article describes the "Crafting Beauty" (CB) project, an experimental outcome of an action-research to tackle homelessness conducted by a research group of designers and anthropologists. CB is a permanent participatory design workshop for social inclusion and interdisciplinary education involving homeless people, students of design, anthropology and educational sciences, social workers and educators, craftsmen and artists, who work together to create various kinds of products and projects of creative and expressive experimentation. The project’s core are the practical and participatory activities that bring participants together in a horizontal and inclusive way. CB is a place where it is possible to experience forms of shared democracy and to train complex skills such as the “ability to aspire” (Appadurai, 2004), both of which are important in the fight against serious adult marginalisation. The project, which is the result of the alliance between design and anthropology, is inspired by a perspective that enhances the public and political dimensions of research and its application for social change. We will discuss how collaborative design and the hybridisation of knowledge have been key ingredients to this aim. On a disciplinary level, allowing us to fully grasp the complexity of the homelessness phenomenon; on an individual level, involving all participants starting from their skills and desires; on an institutional level, fostering an exchange between the public and private stakeholders, and so promoting mutual influence and the development of far-sighted system transformations.