Design4Citizens aims at fighting lack of legitimacy faced by public reprensentatives in developing design solutions into public policies.

The project aims to facilitate between two public policy approaches the challenge of territorial inequalities. On the one hand, social policy actors are familiar with projects directly linked to citizens but unfamiliar with a co-construction approach through the design of public policies. On the other hand, the development of public policies co-design is a challenge for unfamiliar designers of truly inclusive approaches to struggling populations. In fact, the paths taken by social innovation actors in urban poverty zones are not similar to those of other actors: the difficulties encountered (less financial security, less access to business networks, discrimination, etc.) constitute frequent obstacles. The challenge is to explore the notion of empowerment understood as giving more power to individuals or groups to act on the social, economic, political or ecological conditions they face. For a democracy to work, according to the philosopher John Dewey, it is necessary that the public authorities can always be questioned by an "experimental public". The policy challenge is to find the forms that could concretely take the ideal of a participation that is both emancipatory for individuals and civil society and that generates social justice.