Designing services for sociality and conviviality: the role of a meta-design study in discovering unexpected needs to design an innovative system of services for a closed condo

Social behaviors are becoming much more stratified and diversified than ever before. People are today living alone or in communities. Communities can be a family, a condo, a neighborhood or a network of friends and peers. A person that is living alone can have different needs of sociality as well as a person that lives in a community can never feel the need of being part of it. Traditionally the architectural project for housing solutions mirrored people needs in terms of their social habits. Today this phenomenon is changing and designers and architects are spending much more attention on supporting people needs of sociality as network of relationships where their private place can never enter in. Facing this multitude of possibilities this paper aims to present a meta-design study conducted for a service design project to be nested in a “condominio fechado” under construction in Porto Alegre (Brazil), where nearly 10.000 inhabitants are expected (Celaschi et alii, 2012; Webster & Lai, 2003). The preliminary study has been conducted by applying a set of tools and techniques borrowed from sociology, ethnography, user studies and urban studies: the context analysis and focus groups, the cases based analysis, the analysis of the main theories on cities development. The paper stresses the strategic role of the preliminary knowledge produced by the meta-design study as the step that reviled an unexpected space for innovation (Deserti, 2007) in the typologies of services designed for the new “condominio fechado” under construction in Porto Alegre. While the architectural project foresees many spaces for services (swimming pools, common kitchens for parties, gyms etc.) it doesn't really address the design of services and moreover the conception of a new system of advanced services for the residents based on a new need of sociality. The study showed that it will be highly probable that future residents of the closed condo (single or families) will constitute a “basic community” (since they will share the place where they will live) likely to be served by designing a basic system of services supporting their initial needs, but also scalable in order to support future needs like sharing, mutual helping, taking care of the common goods, improving people life in terms of conviviality, sociability, and security of the whole neighborhood.