HI Victor and Lubomir,
I would like to emphasise some of your points. The first is Victor
Margolin's specification of the target for social design: Various social
actors or stakeholders that do not necessarily qualify as simple
customers. I think it is important to pinpoint those relevant points as
the basis for the generation of a paradigmatical structure of this
disciplinary area. Victor's statement is probably not absolute: in some
cases, like the one mentioned by Maria Camacho, design for social
responsibility can also be targeted at improving the economic condition
of a small group or a person, because this means the improvement of the
conditions of a community. However Victor definition is still important
to identify the focus (or one of the focuses) of the question, and this
is vital to give more power to this area.
The second point, from Lubomir, is the invitation to look around to
those areas of study that are very close to the area we want to
identify, or, as Lubomir say, can be considered as the "parents" of
Socially Responsible design. Planning is certainly one of them and
design for sustainability may be (it may be an "older brother" rather
than a parent). I am not an expert in design studies, but I suppose
Victor and Sylvia's agenda for Design for social responsibility proposed
in the paper for the Common Ground conference is originated from Social
planning. Am I wrong, Victor?
Given this, it remains to understand what is the specific role,
methodology and characteristic of design action in a social context,
i.e. where do the difference between social planning and social design
start to emerge? What can design do to complement social planning?
Nicola


Nicola Morelli, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Institute of Architecture and Design
Aalborg University, Denmark
Web: http://www.aod.auc.dk/staff/nmor
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Lubomir S. Popov [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 25 October 2002 02:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: social design

As a follow-up about social design -- social design exists for quite a
while. In its present-day format it also has a good history -- however,
under the name of "planning." In this respect, I refer to Gerald
Nadler's
"The Planning and Design Approach" where he looks for the underlying
principles of human constructive action. In a open definition, planning
is
design or vice versa. I will agree that in a domain specific definition
there will be a difference. But, as long as we started transcending the
conventional boundaries of types of human activities, we might think in
terms of social design about what is often referred as planning. In the
last decades, organizational planning became organizational design and
social planning - social design. The reason for this terminological
transcendence is that as the scope of physical planning started to
broaden
and the innovations started to emerge from the engagement with the
social
realm, it is more natural to talk about social design and to include the
former "social planning" activity into the design realm. Whether it is
community planning or community design, as long as we think in a
sociospatial way, it doesn't matter any more. It is actually a matter of
domain specific terminology rather than major differences in the
thinking
approach. And here I would like to mention that the major differences
stem
from the nature of the ontology and its implication for the domain.

Just a few thoughts I wanted to share for some time.

Lubomir

At 06:19 PM 10/24/2002 -0600, Victor Margolin wrote:
>In response to Nicola's points, perhaps we can think about different
>models of social design that range from working specifically with
>disadvantaged populations to addressing issues of community
>sustainability. The interpersonal and technical requirements would
>differ in those two cases as they might in other cases as well. What
>is most important is to begin to articulate models that fall outside
>the conventional market model which puts product sales as the top
>priority. What, for example, sustainable design and social design as
>we define it have in common is their rootedness in a social situation
>and the involvement of various social actors or stakeholders who are
>not simply customers.
>Victor Margolin