Li Haoda
Li Haoda
Sep 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Social innovation general view

I as a designer is encouraged to do design for social innovation. There are some questions I want know around social innovation, through answering these questions I hope to make sense why designers should be encouraged to do design for social innovation. And how to design for social innovation.

what is the contemporary social-culture context?

what is design?

what is social innovation?

what is design for social innovation or what design do for social innovation?

what is social innovation hope to achieve? what kind of well-being does scoial innovation hope people to own?

how expert designers can do and need to do for achieve social innovation?

contemporary social-culture context

the world that we are facing is a characterized by a high and growing level of connectivity, because of the development of transport and communication systems led to an increase in the connectivity, reducing the solidity of organizations and the stability of social conventions and cultural traditions. Therefore, the world is also a fluid world, Zygmunt Bauman called it as Liquid Modernity. People have to negotiate and choose from a multiplicity of possible options and referents, they are free to choose and formulate their own life projects. So in our modernized society, people find themselves seeking to design their life and having to do so alone, which is very often quite difficult and generates frustration.

what is design?

From industrial revolution design alway about making things that would sell, which always about making things beautiful, disirable. this is continue to be a misunderstanding of design.

best designers are analytical thinkers with a playful approach to considering the contexts around them.

here i am going to review the book “design, when everybody design” by Manzini to find the answer of what is design.

design is seen as a problem solver, an agent for solving problems at all levels, from those in everyday life to those on a global scale. and design is also concerned with making sense of things, to create new meaningful entities, becoming the producer of sense.

our current highly connect and complex context encourage people to design their own lives, every human have design capabilities. Like everyone can sing, but not everybody is professional singer, although everyone has ability to design, but not everybody is expert designer. so we got a design model map to describe the interaction of different elements.

what is social innovation?

“everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”

— Herbert Simon

social innovation driven by necessity or the desire to use people’s “natural” designing capacity, and sustained by the diffusion of digital media and the new social networks, many people take active part and collaborate to creat new forms of organization (creative communities and collaborative organizations), participating in solving complex problems and becoming content producers for the new digital media.

it means that in our complex, highly connected, networked society, design process tend to be a co-design process, involved general people and design experts who are willing to accompany them in the design process.

so social innovation accurs when people, expertise, and material assets come into contact in a new way that is able to create new meaning and unprecedented opportunities. we concerned with here — when it leads to the creation of collaborative oragnizations — demonstrates that it is also possible to follow another path and separate the quesiton of life projects from that of individualization as we have know it up to now. we think life projects based on the idea that doing things with others may lead to better results, and may even be more interesting and enjoyable.

what is design for social innovation or what design do for social innovation?

“design for social innovation is everything that expert design can do to activate, sustain, and orient processes of change toward sustainability.”

“design for social innovation entails a sociotechnical transformation driven by and oriented toward social change.”

socialtechnical — 社会技术,社会技术是人类认识自然,改造自然的活动和产物,有其相对独立性;科学技术作为整个社会大系统的一部分,与社会大系统中的其他子系统密切相关。社会技术就是构成社会的“个体”对“他人”跨界反应的响应方式、方法于途径的总称。社会技术的研究对象是“反应”和“响应”。在社会群体中,反应和响应的常见表象手段有竞争、合作、顺从、关心、漠视,支配等,有效应用这些手段协调反应与响应就是社会社会技术。

“design for social innovation starts from quite different premises. 1. it takes “social” in its more precise sense. 2. is that it produces are meaningful social innovations; that is, solutions based on new social forms and economic models. 3. is that it deals with all kinds of social change towards sustainability:the ones that concern the middle and upper classes, changes making it possible for them to reduce their environmental impact, regenerate common goods.”

“designer is no longer that of developing finished products and services. instead, their task is to design to expand the capabilities of people to lead the kind of lives they value.”

but how designer do to activate, sustain, and orient the processes, what the role of general people, what the role of organization and what the role of design expert?

Li Haoda

Written by

Li Haoda

Goldsmiths, University of London Design Department

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