What Exactly Is Social Design and Whom Might It Serve

2018

Design in India has a unique character, defined by the nature of society, the colonial past and the academic design culture. Through history, it has been aligned with institutions of power: the government, whether imperial, colonial or post-Independence, and industry as the wielder of technology. With class structure and social hierarchy repli-cated throughout the profession and its concerns, the goals of design tend to reflect an orientation that is administrative or prescriptive, where the designer plays the expert who has no need to consult the people on their needs and wants. Design thus ends up relying on a notion of society as it ought to become and not as it is or was. A broad research agenda for social design must begin by addressing a number of questions. What role can a designer play in a collaborative process of social intervention? What is currently being done in this regard and what more might be done? How can agencies that fund social welfare projects and research gain a stronger perception of design as a socially responsible activity? What kinds of products meet the needs of vulnerable populations? The paper paints the backdrop to social design in India and explores the potential for it to affect the lives of people. This century is going to see a proliferation of the social through information and communications technology and through a new kind of philanthropy. This will call for people trained in new tools with a deep sympathy for the social and for real people. The shift away from the market focus is bracketed by many challenges — in this instance, with the school, the challenge is being proposed as a curriculum. It is therefore time that we, as design academics, rethink the developmental paradigm along the lines of sustainability and equitability — a goal that can be achieved potentially through social innovation but most certainly by proscribing an elit-ist practice of the profession. It is this desire for design as an agent of change that defines the School of Design project for the Ambedkar University, a new university in New Delhi. The name 'Ambedkar' refers to an ideology of social reform, a commitment, as its charter states, to " Ambedkar's vision of promoting equity and social justice ". The specific notion of equity here is one of affirmative action; the name 'Ambedkar', when associated with an agency, conveys in India a focus on the improvement of the lives of those from the untouchable castes. For such an institution to have in its charter a school of design raises the question of what kind of design school that would be. A design school with a curriculum that can nurture the spirit of Ambedkar and social inclusion can act as a greenhouse for a specific engagement of design with a specific India. The programme could bring students to the forefront of service innovation and design via supervised development training that would combine academic rigour with managerial relevance through working on independent projects with a BoP focus. In this paper, the authors lay out the framework that would define their construction of a design cur-Sustainability in Design: NOW! 2 riculum founded in the social context and arrived at through a process of negotiation with stakeholders.

2018

Design has a long tradition of relation with the social. A recent British report classified social design into social entrepreneurship, socially responsible design, and design activism [1]. Social design has gained momentum in design research during the last ten years, a development which can be seen as having several roots. Some of these roots go back a few decades, to the writings of Papanek [2] in 1984, while others are of newer origin, as for instance in the area of service design that intersects with public sector innovation and the emergence of new societal challenges.

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

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.

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.

Last century, a new design area bond with new aims and principles emerged, committed to answer more urgent and relevant needs of humanity. Multiple terms come forward to identify it and because there isn't a unifying language among its practitioners, questions have been raised about whether they refer to a general area in design or to single design practices. This “social” vocabulary, caused so far enormous controversy and dispersion of this area in design that wants – and today it needs – to assert itself practically and theoretically. In this paper, we propose to clarify some of these questions. By searching in written records we intend to analyse how “social” design practitioners identify and describe their work and approach, while aiming to better understand this area and discipline the existing multiplicity. Moreover, the aim of this paper is to verify the possibility of encompassing all expressions – and practices, if demonstrated – into a single umbrella term that can include all the disparity between them and simultaneously reinforce their similarities. This will lead to a more concise and precise identification and recognition of this area and its practitioners, helping to build a stronger case for its assertion.

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.

LA Landscape Architecture , 2024

The review explores the challenges of forming a design public in India. It highlights the importance of inclusive, participatory design practices to ensure design represents diverse voices and marginalized communities. T here's been an uptick, over the past decade, in conversations around publics and their responsiveness to acts of participatory design and codesign. Publics, as is commonly understood, are assemblies of people who come together because they are concerned about the actions of individuals or institutions. Publics care about the direct or indirect consequences of such actions and wish to have a say in facilitating them. There are, though, a few pragmatic considerations related to where and how publics come into being. Usually, the actions of individuals or institutions by themselves do not prompt people to assemble and become a public. Rather, somebody or some agency has to make these actions into a matter of conversation. Only conversations prompt people to reflect and take positions. Conversations enable people to reckon with the implications of becoming a public. Crucial questions remain, however, about the exact identity of the intermediaries facilitating conversations. What, for instance, does it mean to say that designers, particularly participatory-designers and co-designers are increasingly tasking themselves with stewarding reflexive, deliberative dialogue? How does abductive thinking: a form of reasoning centered around cooperatively proposing 'what is' and 'what could be' questions help bring publics into being? [1] In what ways does co-design as a process of conjoint inquiry and reflection-enable people to envisage a future or what the philosopher John Dewey once alluded to as "the projection of the desirable in the present"? [2] How indeed to invent or dream about instruments that are conducive to the realization of a collectively imagined future?

Human Dynamics and Design for the Development of Contemporary Societies

The proliferation of Higher Education (HE) programmes of study in the broad area of social design highlights the instructional challenges of how to educate the social designer. The evolution of HE programmes of study in this academic area has developed without agreed-upon criteria. It is characteristic, however, of social designers’ working practices that they deal with complexity that often requires multiple stakeholder participation and cross-disciplinary knowledge. It is a challenging task to strike the right educational balance to provide the appropriate skills. The unpacking of instructional trends in social design programmes of study can provide a stepping-stone to further elaborate on the education of the social designer, and this is the aim of this paper. Through a textual analysis of forty-two (42) programmes of study in social design in thirteen (13) different countries, this paper explores emerging instructional themes with a particular focus on competencies, entry criter...

Review of Japanese culture and society, 2017

Essence 1: Encounters and Connections When I consider the roots of the issue+design office, 1 I am brought back to the year 2001. At that time, in my advertisement job I was dealing mostly with design related to gathering spaces-such as those found at commercial institutions and hotels. I was visiting New York for a business development job for a hotel, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened. This shocking incident seemed to presage what things would be like in this new century. I didn't just see footage of it-I was very close to the World Trade Center and witnessed the event first-hand. This experience left me with a completely different understanding of myself in relation to the world and society. Confined in the hotel and unable to travel back home, I wondered what would become of the United States, the world, and also Japan. With a vague sense of unease, I started thinking about various things, like nations and religions, competing views on life and death, war and disaster. Looking back on it now, I feel like it was a precious time for me, because I was able to completely forget about my job and reflect on the big picture. With these reflections as a starting point, I became interested in the communities that support the lives of people-nations, regions, cities and villages-and the various social issues related to such communities. And I decided to attend graduate school. 2 There, I encountered Yamazaki Ryō and this connection led to the establishment of issue+design. 3 At the time, Yamazaki had just started a design office that mainly operated in the field of landscape design. Even though his field was different than where I was coming from in the advertising world, a lot of things resonated with me when it came to "design." Skipping class, we would go to Korean restaurants in the Hongō neighborhood and talk about a lot of things. We discussed many things: the problems accompanying the decrease in population in the transalpine areas; 4 Japan's provincial cities and isolated islands; how