What Precisely Is Social Design and Whom May It Serve?

“Social design” has gained prominence as an expert discipline up to now decade. It’s not unusual to see product designers, service designers, architects and user-interface and user-experience designers tagging their skilled tasks as social design undertakings. Efforts at instituting social design as an academic paradigm have additionally been underway. As an example, Maryland Institute Faculty of Artwork initiated a grasp’s programme in social design in 2011. In India, Dr B.R. Ambedkar College, Delhi launched its grasp’s diploma in social design in 2013. 

However what precisely is social design and whom would possibly it serve? Why is social design pondering proliferating in skilled settings? To reply to these questions one must recognise a longstanding demand for design to grow to be extra inclusive. Design follow, which entails processes of planning and producing a spread of objects, services, confronted criticism within the Nineteen Sixties and 70s for focusing too narrowly on the wants of solely a small section of elite society.

In his 1971 tome Design for the Actual World, for example, Victor Papanek, the Austrian-born US-based product-designer and advocate of socially engaged design inveighed towards design as “a luxurious loved by a small clique who fashioned the technological, moneyed and cultural elite of every nation.” Constructing on his personal work in various settings internationally, Papanek drew consideration to communities who had, on account of their impoverishment, by no means “been inside respiration distance of [a] designer’s board or workbench.” If the career was to be on the aspect of social good, it needed to rise, in Papanek’s view, above its exclusivity and market focus, and manifest the pursuits of society extra inclusively. It was time for designers to think about and make merchandise for big numbers of the underrepresented, underserved and underprivileged in society.

Papanek’s enchantment for extra inclusive design, nevertheless, got here with a rider. Whilst he pushed for merchandise for the underprivileged, he additionally concurrently sought to differentiate design as a singular type of exercise. Not the whole lot that had sample, order or magnificence on this planet got here into existence on account of design. The method of design had very particular entailments. On the very least it encompassed, in line with Papanek, a six-faceted “operate advanced” that comprised technique, use, want, telesis, affiliation and aesthetics. The vocation of design, subsequently, concerned partaking within the “dynamic actions and relationships that make up [this] operate advanced.” Design was particular as a result of it arose purely in a matrix of function-oriented associations between various components. 

There’s an irony on this articulation, nevertheless. No sooner does the design course of grow to be a particular mode of affiliation, it additionally verges on changing into an imposition. Whereas designers may go in the direction of serving underprivileged communities, the very entry of these communities into the world of design is mediated by unequal energy. The underprivileged, in essence, might not carry their very own explicit modes of affiliation to the desk however accede to the fiat of designers or design discourse coming in largely from a White, Western, male perspective. 

It is not going to suffice for social designers then to attract on Papanek alone and promote design as the method of taking an already given, abstractly conceived “operate advanced” into the areas of the underrepresented, underserved and underprivileged in society. Quite the opposite, social design, notably in the best way it’s evolving in academic {and professional} settings at present, is extra akin to an try at rendering design susceptible to the modes of affiliation that it encounters among the many individuals it serves. Which is to say that from a present-day social designer’s perspective, the design course of is significant if and provided that the designer uniquely recasts it in response to her personal involvement with individuals. As an example, environmentally induced disasters yearly trigger appreciable injury and destruction to homes in a wide range of areas within the Indian subcontinent. Within the face of such disasters, the duty of catastrophe administration specialists, architects and designers, conventionally understood, is one in every of relocating individuals and rebuilding their homes and shelters. 

Autos on the waterlogged Outer Ring Highway in Bellandur, September 7, 2022. Picture: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak

Nonetheless, as social design college students at Ambedkar College learnt via engagement with flooding and landslide-affected communities in a wide range of settings throughout their studio work on housing and catastrophe resilience, the duty of rebuilding the house is usually distinct from that of rebuilding the home. Not like the home which is an inert or useless container, the house is extra of a dynamic community of relationships between individuals and scarce sources. The house includes, amongst different issues, the situation of the home and its distance from workplaces, the work of repairing, sustaining and upgrading the home, the affinities and kinships of the house owners, the service suppliers who cater to the maintenance and the wants of homeowners, and the divergent types of tenure that might allow individuals to make financial savings over time. There’s a entire spectrum of behaviours and modes of cultural affiliation that underlie settlement exercise in communities riven by inequalities centred round caste, class and gender. And it’s this spectrum of in situ relationships, and never a lot the relocation or the reconstruction of the home within the standard sense, that the social designer is tasked with addressing. 

College students within the studios at Ambedkar College, for his or her half then, tried to create in situ companies for the individuals affected by disasters. One group, for example, proposed Jibika, a transportation service for the Mising group in flood-affected Molaul Miri Village in Majuli, Assam. The blueprint for this service was designed to make it simpler for individuals to entry and use the present healthcare companies obtainable at close by PHCs and hospitals. There have been different undertakings, similar to a service-design initiative to assist disaster-affected youngsters via interim education in Puri, Odisha, an in-situ vernacular housing upgradation undertaking in landslide-affected Uttarakhand, a coverage proposal to stem energy outages throughout cyclones in Rajkot, and a name, based mostly on fieldwork in Kusheshwar Asthan Purbi, a block of 36 villages positioned within the Darbhanga district of north Bihar, for offering in-situ stilted housing in flood affected areas.

No examination of the class referred to as social can proceed at a take away from an appreciation of the particular relationships individuals discover themselves in. Certainly, if something in any respect, the social designer’s instruments, similar to service-design blueprints, architectural plans, journey maps, group engagement playing cards, group murals, group collages, group pictures and participatory makes an attempt at artefact making, are methods of expressing present or rising relationships between individuals. The social designer’s instruments present individuals with the fabric and aesthetic means to make themselves noticeable as communities. Equally, they empower individuals to consider themselves as a group centred round addressing generally shared issues. 

Social design, to place it succinctly then, is that craft which invests in creating an array of indicators, symbols and artefacts that may assist render a individuals’s need for collective motion seen and recognisable. There’s, nevertheless, a clarification. Any try at making the group or “the social” itself into the precept information and criterion for design exercise should additionally deal with the facility hierarchies which might be latent inside these classes by way of class, caste, gender, ethnicity and different variations. We’re, at present, faraway from the time the American pragmatist and thinker John Dewey uncritically wrote concerning the social as an inclusive class within the late Twenties. Any copy of the class referred to as social within the current can not transpire with out addressing the inequalities which might be additionally concurrently reproduced with it, and certainly as part of it. 

Definitely, the social involves life as individuals come collectively to envisage outcomes that enhance their residing situations. Social designers have a crucial position to play in addressing the inequalities inherent inside present design approaches. However they have to additionally keep vigilant in the direction of the inequalities which might be inherent inside the social, and be cautious of reinforcing them, whilst they work with communities. 

Venugopal Maddipati is an architectural historian who teaches on the College of Design, Ambedkar College, New Delhi.