Democratizing design: lessons from a case study in the Alpine area

This paper focuses on the democratization of the design culture through the design knowledge transfer (DKT) analysing the empirical activities of an academic design research laboratory as a case study. The analysed laboratory is born as a research and development project, mainly funded by the local government for introducing the human-centred design culture through service design at a local scale. As a result, a strategy for introducing service design in the local systems is identified. The strategy can be also considered a scale of complexity for transferring the design knowledge and a possible way for democratizing design to the local entities that do not systematically use design. Despite this aspect needs more investigation, the strategy is actually adopted by the laboratory as their free offering system to be experimented with the local entities by envisioning and following the conceptual framework of 'Research through Transfer through Design'.