What is Social Design?
An article from Sander van der Zwan about his research
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 following question: 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 into the first one.
One strategy to figure out how to represent social design in a good way would be to get clear about what social design actually is first. At first sight, this seems to be the strategy of The Social Design Lobby calendar of 2022, which I was asked to analyze. This is what I found there:
“Social design is a young but growing field within the creative industry. There is a great diversity of social designers, which sometimes makes it difficult for (governmental) organizations to understand what it actually is.”
Image 1 Miro board of my analysis
So what is social design? To investigate this question, I have analyzed the calendar further (image 1).
Here are some of the characteristics that I often found in the project descriptions: they aim to make challenges discussable and understandable among laymen. Many of them work towards possible solution directions, alternative perspectives, awareness or just including people. Many of them mention a challenge to be addressed and they often present an open ended creative process in which uncertainty is embraced. Many also talk about the importance of making, and involving stakeholders early in the process and putting ‘the human’ central. They mention an incredible amount of different methods. To name a few, Interviews, pizza sessions, storytelling, walkthroughs, focus groups, always asking the why question, participant observations, critical and speculative design, gamification, presenting scenarios, using metaphors, co-creation, connecting science and citizens, reframing, context mapping, performance & theater, and many more. Finally, many of the projects want to make an impact.
But this is what I learned: While the qualities just mentioned are often presented in the projects of the calendar, they are not important in every social design project and it is rare that all of these qualities are present in a single social design project. In more technical terms, sociale design projects might not have essential qualities. This can be found from the incredible variety of projects in the calendar. Let me give two examples: Some projects might be about a societal challenge, while others are not. While some focus on societal challenges such as climate adaptation and sustainability, the energy transition and residential construction, many are challenges not aiming to address society as a whole such as dyslexia, specific illnesses, making public spaces nicer for youngsters, helping youngsters make a choice for their studies, and much more. Here are two projects that clearly show this contrast:
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Some projects may focus on making things to involve people in conversations and engagements with a certain topic (design for participation?), while others focus on making prototypes that change social relations (social designs?) and again others focus on both making and involvement as in the case of co-creation (participatory designing?):
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The point I try to make is that defining social design leads to exclusion. We might not find essential qualities of social design, and if we tried to define what social design essentially is, we would be exclusive to many of the projects mentioned in the calendar. But, even though there is not one thing that binds all of these projects together, they still hang together somehow. This is what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances: you might have the same nose as your father and the same eye color of your aunt, but there may not be a single essential thing you have in common with your whole family.
I have noticed that the question of how to represent social design is not so much a question of representing what the world (in our case social design) is truly like as in the case of science, or a question of representing needs and wishes of a particular group of people as in politics, but a question of added value. What may social designers reasonably add? What may their value be? Or in other words, what may their impact be? This is a question that social designers struggle with and something that has to be figured out in relation to the practices of clients (often governmental organizations) and other stakeholders. This may be different across situations. In cases where municipalities need to make sure citizens participate in their processes, this may be the designers’ skills in human-centered design processes through which they can productively include people. In cases where clients need to imagine future possibilities, this may be their skills in making prototypes against which potential users can form their opinion, and in cases where clients seem to be stuck in patterns of doing things that no longer work, this may be the designers’ confidence in dealing with uncertainty and searching for alternatives, e.g. alternative ways of organizing, alternative tools, alternative ways of seeing.
So what can we learn from this when it comes to representing the field of social design?
The field is diverse, and defining what social design actually is, would not only reduce its richness, but also be exclusive to many practices. But the question about representing social design is not necessarily about what social design actually is, but about what we as designers may reasonably add. The authors of the calendar took an interesting approach from which we might learn. Instead of making one good depiction of social design, they asked many social designers to provide their own stories. Of course in selecting the people who can add their stories to the calendar, the authors already select what counts as social design and what not. But the idea would be as follows: Don’t try to answer what social design “actually is”, but rather show enough individual stories of what social design could be like in different situations, so that readers may train their sight to see in their own context when and where social design might be relevant. Representing social design from this perspective, is a collective effort that social designers are jointly responsible for by providing their individual stories. We might link these stories by means of, for example, methods used or concerns addressed. By doing so, we might learn both how projects hang together as well as how we do things differently, while not trying to define the field as a whole. Here is a possible way of doing so:
Image 7 This is a website on which several terms can be selected from the word cloud, projects are filtered that contain those terms. By clicking on the load new project button a random project from that selection will be shown. This way, often used terms and concrete projects can be linked.