Social Design. A new Design Thinking Method.

Social Design. A new Design Thinking Method.

The amount of social business, policies, CSR strategies, educations and companies focusing on Social Innovation or Social Design has grown exponentially all over the world, during the last five to ten years.

Paul Hawken, an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author working within the field of writing and teaching about the impact of commerce on living systems, and consulting with governments and corporations on economic development, industrial ecology, and environmental policy, called social innovation; “the largest movement on earth”. (article)

According to the edge leading columnist, lectorer and social designer, Cheryl Heller, Chair of the MFA Design for Social Innovation, Department at the School of Visual Arts, New York, ”its all about a major change”. (article)

The western economical idea of ”endless consumption” and producing our way out the crisis, as eternal means for growth, change and social prosperity, or the conception of the citizents as consumers, are about to change. 

For years the western civilisations have had their believes in ”creating creative communities” or expanding the creative industries as means to produce artefacts for a market or consumer. 

The markets of consumption will still be there, off course, but the new means of production derives from co-creational and social rather than economic rationales. Cheryl Heller puts it this way:

”Design for social Innovation has now emerged as a practice, and as with all new ways of thinking (mental models), it has caused a bifurcation between the old world of guilt-free capitalism and a new, still mostly uncharted world which we are both discovering and creating as we go along. To generalize shamelessly, business doesn’t understand what social innovation has to do with business, and social innovators mostly blame business for screwing things up.”

The EU has its social innovation programme launched which can be inspiring to visit, please visit here.