Overview
What does design have to do with democracy? Democracy is usually a matter of politics, of debate of ideas, of governance but democracy is hidden also in the folds of our daily life.

This workshop aims to examine products, public and private services we use in everyday life: do they contribute to increasing the average level of democracy in society? Or, on the contrary, do they represent attacks, obstacles, limits to democracy? What do we intend by increasing the diffuse level of democracy in our daily lives?

[…]We do not have to share exactly the same idea of what democracy. To defend it as a core value, it is enough to recognize the strong convergence between democracy and design […] say Ezio Manzini and Victor Margolin in the open letter Stand Up for Democracy they recently launched to tease the design community.

European Lab, a 3 days creative laboratory organized in Lyon 24-26 of May will host a talk on “Design for Public Policy Renewal” with Gael Guillou, Nantes’ school of design, Olivier Ryckewaert, former Head of Cabinet at the Pays de Loire Region and Consultant in Public Innovation, François Jégou, Leader of Strategic Design Scenarios. The session will discuss the ability of design to “re-enchant” the relationship between citizen / user and public action. By extension it will discuss public action in terms of democratic effectiveness (Bason, 2014, Design for Policy) and the potential of High Democratic Quality designs along 6 questions:

How might we design solutions that:
_ actively stimulate constructive conversations between heterogeneous users?
_ facilitate heterogeneous people to live and collaborate together?
_ respect and improve equity between users?
_ empower people with design capabilities?
_increase the accessibility to a variety of stakeholders?
_ that facilitate facing and navigating complexity?