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Looking for trouble
Published in Peter Joore, Guido Stompff, Jeroen van den Eijnde, Applied Design Research, 2022
Eke Rebergen, Sebastian Olma, Wander Eikelboom
Within the design field, there is a current that engages with more urgent design challenges and tries to find effective ways to address them. Often, this falls under the label of ‘social design’,15 i.e., projects addressing social challenges and societal problems. However, the present-day application of such ‘social’ design projects often avoids the necessary analysis of the broader social context in which a specific local “problem” is “solved” by a design intervention. Thus, it tends to ignore the conflicts that are inherent to fundamental change. As a result of such lack of analytical rigor, even socially-oriented ‘humanitarian design’ projects have been exposed as a new kind of imperialism.16 Social change through ‘design thinking’ has been described as a lucrative kind of ‘business consulting’17 that does nothing but confirm the status quo.18
Teaching design in real contexts to preserve local identity and memory
Published in Ana Cristina Broega, Joana Cunha, Helder Carvalho, Manuel Blanco, Guillermo García-Badell, Diana Lucía Goméz-Chacón, Reverse Design, 2018
This insightful background of the concept of industrial design thus provides us with the requisite platform for construing the concept of social design. In the world of design, social design is often construed as the design process that is aimed at improving man’s livelihoods and wellbeing. The primary aim of a social designer is often to create new products and processes that profitably develop both human and social capital (Chen et al., 2015). Despite the existence of a universally agreed definition of the term “social capital” (Robison, Schmid, & Siles, 2002), based on various existing attempts to define it (Portes, 1998; Lin, 1982, 2002; Christopoulos & da Rocha, 2015), social capital entails man’s capacity to conveniently access and adequate utilize resources at his disposal. In this regard, collaboration and continued human-human interactions are of the essence in a functional social design system. Therefore, Bachman (2016) notes that in a post-industrial society, social design emerges as an important tool for correcting the large-scale isolation associated with the previous eras, in terms of promoting macro human-human interactions, encouraging systematic reasoning, making cybernetic decisions and dynamic assumptions, encouraging scenario planning and value motives, promoting team attribution, as well as embracing reasoned principle, wisdom, and theory.
Empathy, Values, and Situated Action
Published in Rachel Beth Egenhoefer, Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Design, 2017
Whereas sustainability is defined throughout other sections of this book, it should be noted that in this chapter the term is used broadly, encompassing environmental, social, economic, cultural and humanitarian responsibility (see Pilloton, 2009). People should be empowered with agency to live their lives with fulfillment and self-worth, and with the economic means to maintain sustainable levels of health, education and general well-being, with respect for personhood and culture. Elements of design oriented in this direction are encompassed under “social design,” which is focused on real change for the betterment of human life and the planet. When human centered design is used as a mechanism toward positive social and environmental change, the approach has much to offer in these broader terms of sustainability.
Confronting bureaucracies and assessing value in the co-production of social design research
Published in CoDesign, 2019
Social design research includes producing knowledge to inform the straightforward fashioning of objects that, for example, improve efficiency, enhance well-being or promote inclusivity for societal benefit (Armstrong et al. 2014). Examples include designers working with specialists such as public service managers and stakeholders such as residents in (re)designing artefacts and services offered by the local government as part of public service innovation in a context of neo-liberal austerity (e.g. Thorpe 2019). As a form of research, it generates problem-solving, practical outputs as well as producing new understandings of the socio-material world into which it seeks to intervene (Ehn, Nilsson, and Topgaard 2014).