Dear colleagues:
i would like to follow up Jan Coker's comments about design for
social responsibility. At the Common Ground conference I presented a
paper on social design, written with my wife who is a professor of
social work. In the paper, we argue that social design can become a
new paradigm for designers as a complement to market design. We don't
say that social design is independent of the market but rather that
in the market product sales are the first priority and for social
designers, addressing human needs, particularly those of marginalized
populations, is the top priority. This is not to say that socially
valuable products can't be designed for the market. We see a
continuum between market design and social design. But we argue that
by considering social design as a paradigm rather than an instance of
the broader concept of design, we give it more power as a project and
can begin to delineate how a designer would work according to this
paradigm in a way that is different from the way other designers
work. We believe that a designer working with social workers and
helping professionals needs to understand something about
intervention strategies in the social welfare fields as well as what
the social situation of such people is. In fact, we propose a
research agenda for social design and argue that it is possible and
valuable to create a distinct Masters program for social designers
that would involve internships with social service agencies, courses
in social welfare, social policy, and other social sciences, etc.
I support the idea of an organization called Designers for
Social Responsibility or something like that as it serves as a focus
for a new kind of thought that is concentrated on problems that have
been neglected. Papanek made a start years ago but he had no training
in social work/social policy and, although he and his students had
good ideas for projects, he was naive about intervention strategies.
There is a new organization, Design for the World, about which Ken
Friedman recently posted some information that I sent him. Design for
the World, supported by all the international design organizations,
has made a good start to develop a program of projects that are
driven by social need. Check out their website (I don't have the url)
and also subscribe to their electronic newsletter (which I believe
you can get information about on the website). The paper I presented
at Common Ground is available on the CD-Rom that contains the
conference proceedings and will also be published sometime this fall
in Design Issues. I think the discussion of social design as a
distinct form of design practice can be a fruitful one and I want to
reiterate my own belief in the importance of thinking about it
separately from the wider practice of design so that it does not
continue to be subsumed within another paradigm that undercuts the
need to develop it fully on its own terms.
Victor Margolin
Professor of Design History
University of Illinois, Chicago
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