Presenting your product and/or your process
An article from Sander van der Zwan about his research
Many social designers struggle with describing themselves, their approach and projects in a suiting manner. According to some, this struggle of describing social design is met with inaccurate ways of doing so.
“Many social design projects are all too often still presented as a final product, while precisely the process is so important”
In collaboration with Afdeling Buitengewone Zaken and funded by the Creative Industries Fund NL, I have been working for four months on a project that aimed to address the latter concern. I was asked: how could social design be represented in a good way? During the project, I have oscillated between analyzing ways of representing social design, creating representations of my own and trying to understand what good representation might be. In two short articles, I hope to share some of my insights. Let's dive in.
In the last article, I wrestled with the question of how to represent the field of social design. I did so by engaging with and analyzing the Social Design Lobby calendar of 2022. I left behind the idea of representing social design as a whole. It is more relevant to provide concrete individual stories of social design from which we might learn what social design could be like in different situations. This can be done by for example showing, as the calendar did, particular design studios and their employees, methods used, visions made, challenges addressed, projects done, and so forth. In this article I will pay closer attention to describing a social design project: how might a social design project be represented? I will particularly address a concern mentioned in the introduction: social designers often present their final product, while the process is the thing that counts. To explore this question, let's compare two descriptions of the calendar. The left is more focussed on presenting a final product and the right on the process:
Is the right always a better representation of a social design project than the left? I personally don’t think it is. They are very different projects, and so, what makes them valuable might be very different things. By only describing your process you lose other aspects that might be very relevant to point out in your particular project. For example, it would be very valuable to highlight what your final product affords and how it addresses a particular challenge, as done in the left description. It might also help to show a potential client that compared to many other consultants, social designers can make beautiful things to address the challenges to be dealt with rather than only advice on paper. Only presenting your process also loses a lot of concreteness in the sense that people might be left with the question: but what did you end up with? Did it help anybody in the end?
But of course, there can also be very good reasons to highlight your process instead of a product. A danger of only describing your product would be that the readers would equate that particular product, for example altered bikes, vans, etc.(to facilitate participation in a neighborhood), with the value you may add. In that case you might want to point out that your value can be much broader than any particular final tool. You can show that your added value was rather your skillful search for alternatives. In the case of the right project, a search for an alternative neighborhood centre. And so, it might be wiser to have a more activity / process oriented description.
So what can we learn from this when it comes to representing your social design project?
A particular way of representing a social design project can be good for some things but bad for others. What a good representation of your project is depends on the particular project, your concerns, who your audience is and under what circumstances it will be received. In this line of thinking, presenting your process rather than a final product is not necessarily better. But while the nuances just mentioned are important in each attempt of representing your project, let me also be a bit more blunt. Having read through over a 100 project descriptions from the calendar, I have come up with a few suggestions that I would now personally attend to when writing my own project descriptions for my website. They might be helpful for you as well:
I would shortly describe the context and reason why the project was undertaken, in order to give the readers some grip on how to understand the activities presented.
I would aim to show how my prototypes were part of a process, rather than focussing on my final products or process alone. I might, for example, structure my text by means of the activities undertaken and mention my insights and prototypes as part of these activities instead of mentioning my prototypes first and then discussing how I got there. This hopefully shows how I can skilfully navigate a pathfinding and uncertain process, without leaving out the making of ‘things’ from the picture.
I would try to make the insights the designers had along the way look important relative to the rest of the text, to point out that insights just like prototypes, form a constructive part of the process. For example, I could make use of large quotes from my stakeholders.
In order to show that the process is more like pathfinding than a mechanical execution of methods and procedures, I could mention what surprised the designers along the way which made them go in different directions, and discuss how they reframed the initial question.
I would like to shortly pay attention to the quality of my prototypes and what they afford in relation to the particular question or challenge at hand. This hopefully shows how making things can contribute to traditionally linguistically oriented practices.
I would highlight and exemplify the methods and vocabulary used to introduce potential clients to the broader applicable ways of working that might be relevant for them as well.
In terms of pictures I would try to use pictures in which you see people jointly working on something, to show how we constructively work together. As well as detailed pictures of the things made to highlight the quality and use of my prototypes.
Here is my attempt to represent a project based on these suggestions:
