Polina Bogatishcheva, DMI, Social Design, 07.03.2022
What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear a term “social design”? And if you heard this term for the first time, what would you imagine? Maybe you will imagine design related to public transport and other social services. At least, this is what I did. Probably, you will think of something different. If we question the meaning of this collocation, we could wonder: “Why would people create a term such as “social design”? It can be hard to get because, first, everything we do (including design) is already more or less social because we are people. Second, does “social” mean “for the benefit of society” or “design for people to socialize”? And finally, isn’t social design the same thing that the government does? Then why do we need this another term for the government’s job?”
Well, as I understand at the moment, social design is quite a broad concept that can cover a lot of issues in our life, but at the end all these issues must address new better ways to live in a society. Social design certainly meets sociology, anthropology, ethnography and psychology. “Design”, in a “market” meaning as most people perceive it, intersects those domains too, but not in an obvious way and mostly for profit. However, adding a word “social” changes the perception of design from “something that helps to sell” into “something that helps to live”. Perhaps this is how the term tries to distinguish itself from the market paradigm.
Margolin & Margolin in „A „Social Model“ of Design: issues of Practice and Research“ (2002) argue that designers should put more effort into designing for the needs of society and not only the market. This is a clear and straightforward understanding of social design, which I agree with. However, sadly or not, in our economic monoculture, the market is the one of the main mechanisms for the way society works, so from this point of view social design may be not that different from the design in the market paradigm. Or social design can become a new design paradigm too. But of course, social design does not have to be completely non-profit to still work for improving our living.
And what about all the people who do social work? They do not call themselves designers, yet what they do can be called social design. Gorb (2011) calls such a fact as “silent design”. I think it is not so important if these people realize or not that they are taking a design approach in their work – the main point is still what they pursue.
In simpler words, social design is about creating more pleasurable, healthier way of living and working as a society. Without suffering, crisis, wars, hate, poverty, slavery, discrimination, hunger, insecurity, even if it sounds utopian. Social design can be silent now and hard to understand, but I think we can look at it as the way of designing that we should aim for.
This is how I see it at the current stage of my learning.
Bibliorgraphy:
- „A „Social Model“ of Design: Issues of Practice and Research“, V Margolin, S Margolin, 2002.
- „Silent Design“, P. Gorb, 2011
- „Monoculture. How one story changes everything“, FS Michaels. 2011