Kindness as a collective wish to co-design with communities using physical installation

This paper reports a co-design intervention experimented with ‘kindness’ as a community value for social innovation during Dutch Design Week 2014. We discuss the insights gathered from the practice-based research aimed to envision and enact community’s creative imagery as a shared space for co-creation. The co-design intervention visualized,
enacted, connected and structured community’s ideas by projecting “kindness” as an idealistic social value to inspire the community’s collective wishes. The activity was instrumented by Collective Imagery framework supported by two co-design tools: Collective Imagery Weave as a physical installation using tags and threads to envision creative complexity; and Mind Weave Theatre as drama sketches to enact design solutions through narrative reasoning. Collective Imagery Weave was presented in a public space and continued to engage the community to co-design for social innovation. The physical installation’s aesthetic quality evolves in its static form, the interactive process of being constructed, as well as stories resulted from this intervention, which demonstrated a structuring process possible to innovate from the abstract concept of “kindness” as the community’s ideal collective wish into concrete design solutions.