Hope against hope: tackling social design

Design For All VOL. 12 #1 Agency by design, 2017

Since my studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (School of Arts and Crafts) in the 60ies I have participated in many design projects but I never was questioning myself if a project was social or not. My understanding of design is based on the conviction that design is problem solving, and design has in any case a social component. The many projects I managed since then where commercial, social or cultural without distinction. Also principles like “participative or user centered design” are in my understanding intrinsic of any design process – there is no constructive and productive design process without teamwork, dialogue, participation, users and interdisciplinary approaches. The article discusses arguments such as "Design as economic driver and our approach to innovation" in order to illustrate a design process in detail and to document the implementation of the method by means of projects from Mozambique, India, Madagascar, Macedonia and Morocco. The article contains images and explanations of a number of student projects that were created between 2012 and 2016.

Design Philosophy Papers, 2011

is the Head of Undergraduate Courses at University of the Sinos Valley (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos) and design professor at Unisinos Design School. His research is focused on innovation, social innovation and learning organization, in which he is also consultant for companies.

JAE: Journal of Architectural Education, 2020

Despite its popularity, the high-design approach to social design has inherent flaws. This is the case even when the high-design project involves community participation. Indeed, participation in and of itself is not enough to address issues of power that affect the practice of social design as a whole. The mere application of participation does not ensure an equal relationship between practitioners and users. Instead, a possible solution arises from subverting the horizontality of participatory design by adopting a bottom-up approach, in which designers position themselves at the bottom of the design hierarchy. This approach is exemplified here with a water-focused housing project in Guyana, designed by the author following this positionality shift principle.

Art and Design Review, 2016

Through practice-based research, we explore how interdisciplinary design projects can function to address social issues concerning environmental and social problems. Using two case studies developed between London in the United Kingdom, and Delhi and Ahmedabad in India, we discuss the importance of engagement with the people who the design ultimately serves. Finally, we argue that design concerned with complex social problems require equally complex, multidimensional responses, informed by bodies of knowledge, practices and approaches that lie outside of traditional design approaches.

2013

This paper presents and discusses an in-progress action format developed through a reflection on several design experiments aiming to make things happen. It brings to the already rich debate on social innovation a designer’s perspective mainly focused on action research and field actions. It is an action format of design for social innovation, the ‘Social Innovation Journey’, structured on a non-linear sequence of steps and actions that progressively engage a community and help it to set up and prototype a social innovation. This happens through an event-like pilot initiative: a ‘farewell’ initiative that, while prototyping the innovation, releases its full ownership to the community. The action format is illustrated through research projects and training activities which have brought designers to design ‘with’ the social innovators, that’s to say side by side with the them, in a pretty immersive way. The ‘Social Innovation Journey’ is an open, in-progress, framework for intervention set up by the Polimi DESIS Lab, the Politecnico di Milano based laboratory of the international network DESIS – Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability. It comprises a network of researchers adopting a strategic and systemic approach to design, with a specific focus on designing for services and design activism. It explores how design can enable people, communities, enterprises and organisations to kick off and manage innovation processes by co-designing and setting in place experiments of new services and solutions.

2016

Partnerships with local actors are quite common in social design projects developed in unknown contexts. Several design researchers describe them as positive and supportive elements for project development. However, setting up a partnership may bring several unexpected challenges to the designer’s agency and have strong implications on the design process—with a level of influence that changes according to contextual conditions too. This paper aims to point out and discuss them. In order to do this, it explores what a local design partner could mean for the designer and the design process, by describing and analysing action research undertaken on a participatory design project conducted in a Brazilian favela in partnership with a local NGO. Three under-discussed issues about local partnerships emerged and are examined through partnership, power, delegation, and agency theory. Lastly, five strategies to deal with them and to strengthen the designer’s practice are presented.

The Design Journal

There is an evident need to shift from focusing merely on designers' tasks and methods towards taking a more holistic approach to socially responsible design. In order to do this, this paper looks firstly in retrospect at the global design research work done by the World Design Research Group and secondly examines an ongoing research project in the development context. In both cases, the connections and differences between social design and service design are highlighted. As a concrete outcome this paper proposes a framework that can be applied to the development context. In other words, in design cases where the aim is to collaborate, share knowledge and experiences as well as co-design change in a multinational group. The framework itself gives designers an understanding of how to both navigate in the development field and work for improving the livelihoods of communities.

Tired of the lack of criticality present in many 'socially engaged practices' in design, I wrote this post as a way of starting a discussion on what 'social design' might mean. The post was originally published in my website / blog, where it trigger some important -and somewhat missing- discussion: http://www.pablocalderonsalazar.com/?p=2430

Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Design at FAUL - Faculty of Architecture, University of Lisbon, 2020

This thesis is an exploratory study of moves and movements of the design discipline towards social and activist critical practices. It departs from a growing concern for design as a socially committed activity that has been around since the 1960s. The social turn, as we describe it, was a historical plea for designers to expand the nature and complexity of the problems addressed by design, moreover, to involve the users and stakeholders in designing processes. Turning to work with different sectors and diverse publics, the ‘social design’ movement emerged in opposition to the industrial and the commercial paradigms. As participatory and co-design approaches spread to general practice and for all kinds of purposes, social design became increasingly seen as a culture to represent a wider historical actualisation of the discipline. Still, in recent years, authors point to the difficulties of becoming socially engaged. Although literature on the ‘how of’ collaboration abounds i.e. the motivations, structure and techniques to involve others in design processes; it appears co-design entails ambiguous practices where designers often find themselves without a discipline. Struggles to craft a role for design in initiatives coordinated by networks of communities and institutions too often has led to actions imported from other fields hence the end of design. Coming from a background in graphic design, taking steps to become a social designer, we experienced how difficult it is to do away with the discipline. Specific gestures, actions and products in our social engagements that destabilized the visual communication design process also revealed visual communication design practiced in unknown or unexpected ways. Shifting the perspective to consider, beyond destabilization, it is indiscipline that happens to design in the encounter with others we articulated the question: what if choosing to become social is not to lose the discipline? This matter is worth to research because while social design became known for its risky participatory moves, some authors point to shifts in the politics of designing that have not yet been clarified. Through a mixed methodology based on action research and grounded theory we devised case studies to better describe, explain and explore, from a performative perspective and deeper anthropological stance, all that happens in co-design beyond exclusive attention to the design expert. While disclosing different social form-acts of social interaction within design, four images of indiscipline emerged. 1) IT’S ABOUT THE HOW, 2) DESIGN IS THE SITUATION, 3) BEGININGS NOT ENDS, and 4) DESIGN IS A LIVING THING, all point to different sides of the performative and politics turn that happens to design when it becomes social. Addressing the lack of discourse that does not treat the social as a irreducible complexity, this thesis develops a theory of design that reclaims the encounter with others as the space and possibility to grow the discipline in ways that even unexpected may also be radically social. The main conclusion is that indiscipline is not anti-design but an expansion of design possibilities in the encounter with others, which not yet seen or made visible can potentially represent moves from conventional practices towards critical socially engaged designing. Recommendations for future research are to expand the inventive and pedagogic potentials of indiscipline as a concept to understand the social turn and to practice becoming socially engaged in ways that are deemed better for others and ourselves. Another opening is to understand how indiscipline may be articulated in design education how and when students may be ready for design practice to become a more living thing.

2013

Ryan Kough Gibboney, M.F.A, Purdue University, December 2013. Community as Client: Defining Social Design as a means of Design for Good. Major Professor: David L. Sigman. Approaching the design field today is a significant quantity of societal needs that have potential to be resolved through systematic design initiatives. There is increasing curiosity around the designer’s role and responsibility within society; a belief that designers have the power to make social change happen in their own communities. Many neighborhoods with driven community members and professional designers are working together to turn to design as problem solving, as social activism on a local scale. But how do we make this sustainable? To create a systematic change, designers must rethink the processes in which they view the problems and work to solve them, thus working in a systems thinking approach I call the Community Design Ecosystem. Within the Community Design Ecosystem the client is no longer a singul...