Small and remote places rely immensely on their local communities, without which they slowly wither, becoming socially and culturally desolate. Exploring the ways a place can grow resilient when faced with adversity, we discover an amalgam of distributed design, whole systems thinking and the emergence of creative communities. When we begin to design within the embedded networks of a place, a heightened understanding of data collected across
space and time is required. Within the framework of Human Cities’ SMOTIES, the University of the Aegean collected and analysed five case studies that represent the best practises in the field of social innovation in the context of creative works in the public space. This article picks out a couple of them in order to distil and analyse the lessons that can be learned from them.