Beyond social innovation: design as cultures active-action

This essay aims at contributing at the theoretical debate on design and social innovation focusing the issue from a specific perspective, that is a social innovation based and centred on culture and cultural heritage. The cultural asset is a distributed heritage of values and knowledge embodied in people, rooted in activities and places, continuously shared and socialised, therefore, it has an eminent social dimension as ambit of design; in addition, according to the more contemporary design practice and processes, always more socially distributed, the field of cultural and local asset enhancement has a social dimension also for a design approach called ‘cultures active-action’