Shaping Social Design with communities

Fonseca Braga, Mariana; Perez Ojeda, David; Owen, Violet; Zhang, Linfu; Kwon, Nuri; Brewster, Lee; Galabo, Rosendy; Changede, Sejal; Summers, Sharon

Abstract

This position paper presents key Social Design work being conducted in the Design-led Research Centre, ImaginationLancaster, at Lancaster University in the UK. We position our local and global research in the Social Design landscape, defining the design approaches and methods we have been utilising across projects as well as their limitations. As the Social Design Special Interest Group in ImaginationLancaster, we also clarify what Social Design encompasses in our research and its practice. These were explored through a workshop series with our team and through five case study examples from Brazil, China, India and the UK. The workshop series generated maps that clarified what characterises our research work in this area. Together the workshops' outputs and the analysis of the cases showed that our Social Design work has focused on underserved communities aiming at collective community purposes and social impact at local and global scales. However, there are still several challenges to advance the field, including designers' skills in this area, particularly around community trust-building, empowerment, and ownership besides the social impact dilemmas. We define those challenges based on the cross-case analysis, defining future directions that can contribute to advancing our Social Design research. This aims to contribute to the debates in this emerging field rather than set propositions of what Social Design is and how it should be carried out with communities.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: IASDR 2023: Life-Changing Design
• Start Date: Oct 9, 2023
• End Date: Oct 13, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Sep 6, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Oct 4, 2023
• Publication Date: Oct 4, 2023
• Deposit Date: May 2, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: May 8, 2024
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.295
• Keywords: social design; community engagement; empowerment; ownership