Design agente del cambiamento: cura della città e nuovi comportamenti culturali e sociali

The awareness of being faced with rapid upheavals dealing with the relationship between the human behavior and natural phenomena spheres is increasingly widespread globally. Meanwhile, it becomes more complex to frame the design link between cultural and social behavior in relation to the continuous mutation of the city. How much can design processes, practices and methodologies contribute to anticipate and cure ‒ in the double sense of taking care and designing care ‒ transformations through involvement and empowerment processes? People, faced with sudden change, react by directing design towards sustain- able solutions in relation to their context, creating unpredictable impacts in different areas. From the invention of new models of engagement for the reactivation of places to the creation of original content for unconventional uses of heritage, from the hybridization of communication channels and tools for new processes of cultural production and dissemination activation. e assumption of design as a culture of care and as an agent of change in the city by “citizen-designers” is addressed in this chapter through wide- spread projects that have been conceived in response to a state of uncertainty, exception and necessary transformation. e reference scenario is a selection of experiences, characterized by being prototypes of responsible process in the care of cities and citizens. In this de ned “waiting time”, creativity and experimentation found new spaces, new ways, new tools, new “bodies” to cross the space-time condition in which we are precipitated in the state of exception due to COV- ID-19 pandemic period. During this unprecedented time of lockdown, reports, analyses, research and observatories have multiplied, in order to map just in time the different reactions of citizens, the different solutions adopted by companies and institutions, to observe the responses of cities, to create collective narratives, to unmask fake news, to innovate the models for promoting the most innovative ideas. Through the analysis and systematization of the practices adopted and the prototypes produced, some of the main transformative processes in charge of design are categorized. The question this chapter seeks to answer is whether design can con- tribute to behavioral change in cities, regardless of whether the demand for transformation is accidental, i.e. brought about by natural mutations, or designed, i.e. put forward by intentional and experimental mutations. In the midst of the virus spreading, since the movement of billions of bodies was suspended, imagination and design practices spread rapidly and globally through shared online experiences. e roadmap presented below through the mapped cases attempts to illuminate the latent or potential transformations these experiences already anticipate, presenting themselves as borderlines between a “beyond” with respect to the known; already indicating an “elsewhere” with respect to the conventional places, behaviors and bodies.