The integration of needs mapping and community-centered design

Our Dynamic Community Map proposal

Abstract

This contribution proposes a methodological advancement aimed at strengthening engagement in marginal communities, considering Italian inner areas as laboratories of innovation for design for social change.

The research originates from observations conducted in selected eastern areas of Salento delle Serre (PPTR Puglia), where a profound identity fracture emerges between young people and their local territory. This disconnection, fostered by limited awareness of local heritage, leads younger generations to perceive their context as inadequate for self-realization. Combined with the weak activation of local civic networks, this condition highlights the need to move beyond standardized models of participatory design.

The study adopts a mixed-method and iterative approach to define a working protocol that, starting from the results of Needs Mapping (NM), enables the evolution of its final phase, namely restitution, into a co-design action grounded in the Community-Centered Design (CCD) approach.

The Dynamic Community Map is theorized here as a third place, capable of operating simultaneously both as a shared and open artifact and as an infrastructure able to sustain an active process of co-design, dialogue and community participation. The construction of trust-based relationships, informality, and the facilitator’s enabling stance integrate the process, preventing extractivist or individualistic tendencies while supporting the emergence of local agency. Reinterpreting marginal areas through SDGs 4, 11, and 17 means transforming fragility in a design resource. From this perspective, marginal contexts cease to be passive recipients of intervention and become generators of new design paradigms capable of activating situated and sustainable processes of territorial transformation.