DESIS and Covid-19: It’s Time to Hit the Reset Button

Abstract

DESIS-Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability is a network of design-led research labs based in universities around the world created to trigger and support social change towards sustainability. The network started in 2009, in the wave of social innovation that characterized that period: innovations emerging mainly from grassroots initiatives aiming to solve, in a collaborative way, problems that people had to face in mature industrial societies. It is not rhetorical to say that the context we were in when we started, seems a century ago. The tragedy of Covid-19 is, in fact, one of those events that force us to push on the reset button. Where, in this case, “resetting” means the need to adjust what we are doing, and how and why we do it, considering what the Covid19 crisis has taught us and could still teach us. The double special issue of SDRJ we are presenting here goes in this direction.