Hallo Alessandro.
 Recently I submitted a paper with the title 'Design for social
change and design education: Social challenges versus teacher-centered
pedagogies’ for the next EAD12/2017 conference
(http://www.designfornext.org/) [1]. What I enjoyed from working on
and writing this paper, is that it exposed me to different approaches
towards design for social change. 
	I mapped out the following categories, and this indicates – in my
opinion – that there are (to state the obvious) different approaches
and different ‘tools’ that can be used towards design for social
change, i.e. no one solution applies to all contexts and the
objectives determine the approach. Each approach entails a different
level of user/recipient participation. 
	Participatory design / co-design 

	Designers relinquish control. End-users are active participants.
 Design activism 

	Designers promote awareness of social issues through outputs that
avoid excessive and useless designs. 
	Disruptive design / disruptive innovation 

	Designers provide an alternative outcome that is an improvement on
the existing situation that people experience. 
	Critical design 

	Designers subvert social conformity through outputs that question
the prevalent values of capitalist ideology. 
	User input and contribution(s) towards the process declines as we
move from the top to the last of the above categories.  
	It would seem to me that you are interested in the first category
above. Having said/written the above, there is little doubt in my mind
that successful design interventions need to be demand-driven, and
inevitably this pre-supposes the engagement of the
recipients/community/clients etc. The degree of involvement of the
community to a large extent can inform the acceptance (or not) of
outcomes – I think I am stating the obvious here. 
	Top-down interventions can work (think of Technical Action research
as opposed to Participatory Action Research), and the critical
component here is the ‘degree’ and ‘nature’ of involvement
that the recipients will have / bring to the process. 
	Lastly, the challenges posed by design for social change are
open-ended, in the sense that they are not well defined, and have no
right or wrong solutions. Such challenges are often referred to as
‘wicked problems’ (Buchanan, 1992). I suspect that I am saying
here is that there is no ‘one solution’ or ‘ideal solution’,
but rather one needs to find the appropriate approach depending on
context/culture etc. Empathy helps here in that it can guide/inform
towards the choice of appropriate strategy/methodology. Would it be
wise for one to adopt a critical design approach (top-down) to address
a community driven demand (bottom-up)? I think it is a case of
‘horses for courses’. 
	Best of luck with your work. Feel free to contact me off this list.
I would be interested to talk more with you. 
	Take care. 
	Dr. Nicos Souleles 

	www.elearningartdesign.org 
 ------------
 ...This line of thought rises many questions: how do we
(outsiders/designers) approach (insides) community members in the
first place (I’m talking at the stage when designers arrive in the
community after the community invited the designers)? Is something to
do with empathy (there is much buzz about empathy in design but not so
much as a systematic way to approach it)? And what tools do we select
and how to we apply them (is it something to with the
methods/techniques or more with the application of these)? And
considering that design research and practice is mostly Western, can
we even use our tools in the first place or should we think of a way
to “co-design” the tools with the community? Or should designers
simply “step out” and train a “cultural insider” to let her
identify the right tools and carry out the co-design with her own
community? 
 I know, there’s a lot of it in there and I hope it makes some
sense. I’m interested to hear what you think!
 Best
 -- 
 Alessandro Medici
 PhD Candidate & Teaching Assistant
 School of Design 

Links:
------
[1] http://www.designfornext.org/)


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