Action Research for Social Innovation

Vienna.
This session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 continues with Ilan Chabay, who is interested in connecting humanities and other research. He begins by noting an experiment in guerilla science which he’s been involved in since the mid-90s: this put hands-on science exhibits in public spaces from McDonald’s restaurants to cruise ships, and turned out to be very popular as well as to generate educational outcomes.

If we want social innovation, then, he says, this also implies social change: changes in artefacts, functions, organisation, and practice; changes in behaviours at a collective scale; changes in diverse cultures where any one approach isn’t universally applicable; and changes which stem from participatory processes. We need polycentric approaches.

What do we need to do to achieve this? What is the desired state of the socio-ecological system? We need models, first of all. History, economics, anthropology, language, sociology, psychology, and law all have inputs to make here. Further, we must recruit people to new practices that are centred on innovation. This means creating a vision of social innovation, based on explicit or implicit models, and articulating that vision as a narrative (verbal or otherwise).

Such narratives generate affect as well as effect, and should reflect our experiences and encapsulate our ideas for the future. They make our aims communicable to others, and they can also be the object of research itself, through action research processes. This also means understanding the interplay of our knowledge, how it changes, and what we can do with it; understanding and enabling the effective use of the mechanisms and levers of behavioural and societal change linked with knowledge and learning, through communities of practice. It connects knowledge, learning, and societal change.