Hasta La Ideas

This is the second in a 4-part series from Cameron Tonkinwise, sharing learnings from a two-year project from the New School’s Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Lab. Amplifying Creative Communities, works to research, promote and amplify community-based solutions for sustainability. Read the first piece, on The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism here.

Design beyond design—products, garments, buildings, graphics, interfaces, things—has a perpetual image problem. The kind of service systems facilitated by co-designing in contexts of social issues don’t photograph well. In the absence of shots of people rearranging fluoro post-it notes, social design must try to tell compelling stories. But, as was pointed out at the Winterhouse Symposium at the end of this past summer, the practice of social design now needs critical and conceptual clarity.

Social design is an absurd term that nonetheless circulates widely. It is absurd because it assumes that there is such a thing as asocial design. While there certainly is a lot of antisocial design (designs that do social harm to their producers or waste receivers, and sometimes even their users), the fact that any successful design is going be used by people makes it inherently social. This is why designers are constantly being lectured by ‘design thinkers’ to spend as much time studying people practicing everyday life in their natural (built) environments as designers usually spend crafting materials in blessed isolation.

When it tries to refer to a particular kind of designing, social design seems to refer to four distinct kinds of projects:

Design for/with the Other 90%
Thanks to the prominence of the recent Cooper Hewitt exhibitions (given added resonance for Occupy Wall Street’s use of percentages), there is a recognition that it tends to be only the wealthy who can commission designers to solve their problems—most of which are variations on ‘how can you make me another X that can make me more money.’ As a result, design work that focuses on non-commercial projects, or that services stakeholders who ordinarily do not have access to design expertise, tends to get called ‘social design.’ These could be underprivileged communities in developed nations, or communities in emerging economies.

“Kymmenykset” poster designed by Michell Laurence

Directing designers to these kinds of projects is not recent. To some extent its heyday was in the era of Alternative Technology after the ’70s Oil Crisis and developing economy inflation and defaults. Think of Victor Papanek’s promotion of the tithe: 10% of a designer’s time should be dedicated to social problems for which there are not yet paying clients (though as tweeters at the AIGA Pivot conference cheered, pro bono does not mean ‘for free,’ but ‘for good’—if only you could find some cause marketing corporate sponsor). The politics of these projects are necessarily difficult: Ivan Illich has reminded us of that, as well as the debate last year surrounding Bruce Nussbaum’s comments on design imperialism, to the shift that Cooper Hewitt felt was needed for the title of its sequel exhibition (presumably “Design BY the Other” will be the 3rd installment?). These kinds of social design projects tend to involve product or architectural designs, sometimes extending to systems: water carrying devices, modular emergency shelters, etc.

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