Designing For and With Society
What Is Social Design?
Over the past 150 years, design has evolved from a product-based practice to encompass complex processes, services, and social systems. While traditional design has historically excluded non-experts’ lived experience from the design process; social design, in contrast, is rooted in participation and co-creation. Turning the notion of “the expert” on its head, social design suggests that people themselves have the most effective solutions to the problems they are experiencing. It instills a belief in human agency and builds capacity for communities to reimagine new stories and new realities for themselves. In this approach, the designer’s role shifts from ‘design expert’ to facilitator and translator of user-experts’ needs.
Social design modifies Herbert Simon’s definition of design as “[devising] courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” for the greater good. I believe that social design one of few approaches that can effectively address wicked problems like climate change, poverty, and social inequality.
Start With Why
The practice of social design starts with adding a step in front of the traditional design process — it begins with why you want to change something, not what you want to change. In traditional design, you might redesign a voting ballot in isolation from the rest of the voting experience. A social design approach would first examine the greater system of voting to ask: Why are we trying to redesign the ballot? What will change if we do? Who will be affected? Social design is about problem-seeking, not problem-solving. Understanding the conditions, people, and influences that have created the current reality are critical to informing any solution you create.
Asking why requires that designers take time to question the context of their work and actively adapt to evolving realities that emerge through the question-asking process. In my practice, I use Cheryl Heller’s five social design process questions as a guide:
The Proof is in the Process
Recently, my company Do It Better Design collaborated with Borderless Studio on an arts engagement project at Chicago’s historic Maxwell St Market (MSM). I used Heller’s five questions to guide and develop our stakeholder engagement process. First, we worked with the project team to collaboratively create goals and identify how we wanted to measure success. The group articulated three primary goals: to grow market attendance, attract new vendors, and establish MSM as a cultural destination. We then identified the market’s stakeholders, conducted outreach, and established communication channels to both ask questions and receive stakeholder input and feedback. A formal advisory group was created to offer guidance and support throughout the process.
By engaging stakeholders in our design approach, a very important insight was revealed: that vendors’ primary barrier to attracting new visitors is a lack of parking near the market location. Before these conversations, we were unaware that parking was an issue at all, let alone one of the vendors’ biggest challenges. After this realization, we recommended that the advisory group pursue a community-led parking solution to help meet our goal of growing market attendance. In this situation, our question-asking led to an unexpected outcome — the need for more accessible parking — that could never have been anticipated without first understanding the market’s context.
Redesigning Society
For professionals already practicing human-centered design or co-creating with their stakeholders, the social design process probably feels very familiar. So what’s different? Beyond stakeholder engagement and collaboration, social design aims to redesign society itself by creating new ways of interacting and being. The following eleven principles offer direction towards achieving positive social change:
Essential Principles of Social Design:
1. Ideas come from the inside, not the top.
2. Questions are more important than answers.
3. Rely on experiments more than plans.
4. Creating is not the same as solving problems.
5. Limits inspire invention.
6. The real story is in the context.
7. How people see themselves is most important.
8. Innovation needs a network.
9. Communication is the first act of generosity and inclusion.
10. The process is the strategy.
11. Human capacity is the goal.
Credit: The Intergalatic Design Guide
Ultimately, these principles are rooted in the values of equity and mutuality. When put into practice, they have the potential to redefine the relationship between people and the power systems and structures that govern our lives.
Field Notes
Through the course of my career, I have participated in many projects guided by one or more of these principles. Here are a few memorable examples from my experience that illustrate social design principles in action:
Communication is the First Act of Generosity and Inclusion
In 2017, I worked on a food justice project facilitated by Archeworks in the Altgeld Gardens community of Chicago. Myself and another facilitator worked in collaboration with a local advisory council to design the project objectives and approach. Early on, we identified that council members preferred to receive project communications via text message, as opposed to email. Knowing this, we developed a protocol for text messaging as the primary method of communication and made ourselves available via text to respond to requests and receive feedback. Inclusive communication was an easy, simple, and no-cost solution that ensured all project participants could fully participate in the design process.
The Process is the Strategy
One of Do It Better’s current clients is Brave Cooperative, a Vancouver-based tech coop developing digital tools to prevent accidental deaths from opioid overdose. Brave works directly with people who use drugs and advocates in the harm reduction community to co-design their technology products. Brave relies on everyday experts’ lived experiences to drive the company’s product design and participants are compensated for their time. In practice, Brave’s co-design process is also a winning business strategy; with high rates of user adoption, their digital tools are saving lives through a bottom-up approach to this systemic health crisis.
Human Capacity is the Goal
A few years ago, I worked on UX research and design for Mighty Deposits, a fintech startup and web-based platform that helps people find banks that match their values. Instead of banking with a bank like Chase (where your money might fund oil pipelines), Mighty helps users discover community banks that provide financing for low-income communities, small businesses, local farms, and more. During the project, my efforts were focused on developing effective UX to enroll new account holders — but the potential impact of our design decisions were actually much greater. Accounts opened through the Mighty platform will funnel investments to banks and loan recipients with a social impact mission, increasing capacity to make change in communities across America.
Make It Happen
As designers, we are being asked to create systems and experiences in a world of increasing complexity. Social design and its frameworks offer a guide to designing for and with society in a way that is more intentional, more equitable, and more successful than traditional methods. As you move forward in your work, whether in the private or public sector, consider how you might put social design principles into practice. If each of us adopts this mindset, we will be one step closer to designing a future we can be proud of.
Social Design Resources:
Design, When Everybody Designs | Ezio Manzini, 2011
The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing the Creative Potential of Social Design | Cherl Heller, 2018
Social Design: Participation and Empowerment | Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2018
