The Social Design Toolkit

Abstract

Designers are instigators of change, and the decisions they make can impact people’s lives in unexpected ways. The ideology behind social design is that designers have a social responsibility to create positive change by prioritizing people in their decisions. However, the commercialization of design practice often puts several degrees of separation between the people who design products, the people who make them, and the people who consume them, leading to design which elevates the designer’s process above people’s needs. There are several human-centered methodologies in existence across a range of disciplines (from cultural anthropology to design thinking), but these usually operate independently of one another, and each has its own unique constraints. The Social Design Toolkit offers a hybrid workflow called participatory design thinking that provides opportunities for these methodologies to overlap, placing human experience at the core of every design decision. Herbert Simon defines design as “courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones” (Simon 111), and social design is a holistic way of embracing cultural difference and reducing the social gap between the creators of culture and those who experience that culture. It is through this that we make design accessible and strengthen its output for everyone.