Social design aims to satisfy human needs and improve social quality by designing solutions that empower users. It involves understanding user lifeworlds from phenomenological, sociological, and epistemological perspectives to design with users' subjective experiences, social/material conditions, and life circumstances in mind. Social design addresses wicked problems which are difficult to define and solve due to their ill-formulated nature and conflicting stakeholder values. The social design process involves understanding contexts, identifying problems and user groups, analyzing information through user empathy, creating inclusive solutions that change systems rather than just produce outputs, and measuring both short-term tangible and long-term intangible impacts.
5. Design has become the most powerful tool with which
man shapes his tools and environments (and, by
extension, society and himself)
- Victor J Papanek, Design for the Real world
8. The foremost intent of social design is the satisfaction
of human needs. The broad objective of social design
is to improve ‘social quality’.
It is about designing new functioning to elevate
individual and community capability and propose
solutions that genuinely empower and extend the
capability of the user.
- Alastair Fuad-Luke on Social Design, in book ‘Design Activism: Beautiful
strangeness for a sustainable world’
12. WHAT AM I TALKING
ABOUT ?
2.2 million people
globally each year die
due to _______?
13. WHAT AM I TALKING
ABOUT ?
2.2 million people
globally each year die
due to Diarrhoea
hp://www.who.int/water_sanita6on_health/diseases/diarrhoea/en/
35. Lifeworld:
(German Lebenswelt)
hp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld
A state of affairs in which the world
is experienced, the world is lived.
A universe of what is self-evident
or given.
Cannot be understood in a purely
static manner as all things appear
as themselves and meaningful.
36. This collective inter-subjective
pool of perceiving, is both
universally present and, for
humanity's purposes, capable of
arriving at 'objective truth,' or at
least as close to objectivity as
possible.
Lifeworld:
(German Lebenswelt)
39. Phenomenological
(- Husserl Schütz)
- see the lifeworld to be the study of the structures of
subjective experience and consciousness
- to understand that we each individualistic,
“I-the-man” and all of us together, belong to the
world as living with one another in the world
- the world is our world, valid for our consciousness
as existing precisely through this 'living together.’
40. Phenomenological
(- Husserl Schütz)
- One has to place oneself in a context comprised
of the various others and the collective shared
experience of individuals and objects.
- It is therefore not about the individual ego of the
designer; rather we, in living together, that we
understand the world.
WHAT IT MEANS
42. Sociological
(- Habermas)
- Viewpoint of an objective reality of the society,
taking account the social and material
environmental conditions and their relevance
-The view of the lifeworld is more or less the
background environment of competences, practices,
and attitudes representable in terms of one's
cognitive horizon
-lifeworld as consisting of socially and culturally
sedimented linguistic meanings
43. Sociological
(- Habermas)
WHAT IT MEANS
- the focus here thus is not on the consciousness
of the individual, but to understand the practical
rationality that is being governed by the rules of
that system
- Social coordination and systemic regulation
occur by means of shared practices, beliefs,
values, superstitions, alternate and parallel
governing bodies and structures
44. Individual (subjective) understanding of the lifeworld
Rules of
governing
Practices
Beliefs
Superstitions
Agreements
Lifeworld
View from the rules of the system
Towards an objective reality
Of that what is agreed upon and
governed by and followed
45. Epistemological
- touches upon the notion of ‘life conditions’ as a
further reference point to understanding the social
space.
- life conditions include material and immaterial living
circumstances as for example employment situation,
availability of material resources, housing conditions,
social environment (friends, foes, relatives, etc.) as
well as the persons physical condition.
46. WHAT IT MEANS
- It is entrusted on top of the lifeworld and the
Social and material environment conditions.
Epistemological
47. Individual (subjective)
understanding of the
lifeworld
Understanding the life conditions that are a result of the
rules and the individual’s positioning in the lifeworld
Viewing within and
Of Life Conditions
Rules of
governing
Practices
Beliefs
Superstitions
Agreements
Life conditions
48. BELIEVE
IN WHAT YOU SEE
IN WHAT YOU HEAR
IN WHAT YOU FEEL
INWHATYOUEXPERIENCE
50. WICKED
PROBLEMS- Rittel Webber [ 1973]
With social design you would run into Wicked Problems
51. “Some problems are so complex that you have to be
highly intelligent and well informed just to be
undecided about them.”
- Laurence J. Peter
52. It is a class of social system problems, which are
• ill-formulated,
• the information is confusing,
• there are many clients and decision makers with
conflicting values,
• the ramifications of the whole system are
thoroughly confusing,
• it is messy, circular, and aggressive,
extraordinarily difficult to categorize or define.
CHARACTERISTICS
63. Multiple starting points and often no clear end mark the
characteristics of wicked problems as the solution are
intermingled with another problem within the same social
space and share a causal relation to each other
Anand
K,
Haag
J;
“A
framework
for
teaching
Design
for
Social
Impact
,
Feb
2013