Socially responsible design

The great design movements in design history were, for the most part, guided by utopian, political, or at least reformist aims. They combined the question of what today is called 'material culture' with the more general question of how we want to live. Today, faced with the global challenge of creating sustainable economies and societies, design has rediscovered its ethical, social and critical tradition. However, due to their global nature, today's problems have reached an unprecedented level of complexity and inertia. These problems are deeply ingrained into global policies – and the chances to face them are the highest when employing political means. As a consequence, if design aims to contribute in these challenging domains, it has to conceive itself as political.

The process of translating messages into images or facilitating visual communication is an activity that involves responsibility towards the public on the side of the author. Even when occupied with commercials, corporate identity, or other so-called non-political goals, designers are actually making decisions towards the preservation and reinforcement of social and cultural assumptions. Since the days of the Modern Movement there has been a great deal of debate on questions as to who the actual clients are and who should take part to the negotiation process from which design emerges. A few years ago when the Helvetica typeface, one of the icons of the modernist search for the standard, celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, these questions were revived, this time without attempts to agree on a set of rules. This seminar draws on these questions, which developed alongside the whole history of the graphic design profession, and explores notions as design ethics, social commitment and public role of the designer.

The seminar featured a presentation by Silvia Sfligiotti of Alizarina Milan on the role of the user in the design process—do designers work with, for or against the users? Annelys de Vet of the Sandberg Institute Amsterdam and Annelies Vaneycken of Trans-ID Brussels also presented on their recent works, in which visual communication is used as a tool to chart and highlight tensions and cleavages in culture and society. The seminar was chaired by Gabriele Oropallo, and ended with an open round table discussion with the participation of Ken Garland and Richard Hollis.

In this contribution we discuss the value of empathic experience as a result to achieve through design driven solutions. Following a phenomenological framework, we draw attention on empathy as an intersubjective experience human relationships are grounded in. Accordingly, we argue that design approach should address the issue of how to create the conditions for the empathic experience, for it is “the very means by which we create social life and advance civilization” (Rifkin, 2010, Chapter 1, Section 2)). From this perspective we reconsider the role of empathy as it is acknowledged in design, shifting it from being a tool for designing more ‘marketable’ and human centred products and/or services, to a pursued effect for products and/or services concerned with relational issues. To achieve this shift we will review the literature about empathy and design, on the one hand, and the application of the Relational Aesthetics theory to design, on the other.

Past research has indicated that if designers could gain involvement at a strategic level, they would have greater potential to have a positive impact on the sustainability agenda. In recent years, changes to the way that consultant designers are interacting with their clients, means that a contribution to strategic decision making is now a possibility for many established consultancies. This paper reflects on whether these changes in the industrial designer’s role are improving their opportunities to incorporate practices such as ecodesign, sustainable design and universal design into their work. Founded on empirical research collected from consultancies in the UK and Ireland, the paper reflects on the nature of the opportunity that this shift in role has provided, and whether it is the opportunity that was anticipated. It concludes that despite increased influences in strategic decision making, the opportunities afforded industrial designers are less significant than anticipated a...

Tasarımın sosyal sorumluluk boyutuna olan ilginin kökleri derin olmakla birlikte, kavram özellikle
son on yılda artan bir ilgiyle daha fazla öne çıkmaya başlamıştır. Buna paralel olarak,
alanı kapsayan tartışmalar da artış göstermiş, özellikle kavramın adlandırılması ve kapsamı
konusundaki fikirler çeşitlenmiştir. Tasarımın toplumları ve sistemleri dönüştürücü gücüne olan
ortak inançla, tasarımcıların sosyal sorumluluklarını hatırlatarak konuyu vurgulayan öncülerin,
kavramı benzer amaçlarla fakat farklı yaklaşımlarla ele aldıkları görülmektedir. Örneğin, Victor
Papanek tasarımcıları, özellikle ihtiyacı olan insanlara yönelik ve daha sürdürülebilir bir
dünya için tasarlamaya davet eder. Onun bu yaklaşımı sosyal sorumluluk sahibi tasarım (socially
responsible design) adıyla literatürde çokça benimsenir. Sosyal, çevresel, ekonomik ve
etik boyutları içine alan bu yaklaşıma Manzini teknoloji boyutunu da ekler ve kavramı sosyal
yenileşim için tasarım (design for social innovation) olarak adlandırır. Bu yaklaşımlardan farklı
olarak, Fuad-Luke, Di Salvo, Julier, Thorpe ve Markussen gibi, kavramı siyasal (political) boyut
odağında tartışanlar ve tasarım aktivizmi (design activism) olarak adlandıranlar da vardır.
Son zamanlarda bu alan özellikle Birleşik Krallık’ta toplumsal tasarım (social design) olarak
anılırken, ABD’de ise, diğerlerine ek, yeni bir alan önerisi olarak geçiş tasarımı (transition
design) güncel önerilen kavramlar arasında gösterilebilir. Bu farklı bakış açıları ve tasarım
çerçeveleri de, pratikte kavramın gelişmesini ve anlaşılmasını zorlaştırmaktadır. Bu nedenle
birçok araştırmacı ve tasarımcı kavramın berraklığa kavuşturulması gerektiğini savunmaktadır
(Armstrong vd., 2014; Social Impact Design Summit, 2013; Thorpe, 2012). Literatürdeki son
yirmi yılda toplumsal sorunlara odaklanan ana tasarım yaklaşımlarının incelendiği bu çalışmanın
da, kavramlar arasındaki benzerlik ve farklılıkları ortaya koyarak alanın anlaşılmasına
ve gelişmesine katkı sağlaması hedeflenmektedir. Çalışma sonucunda, kavramların sistem
içinde veya dışında konumlanan duruşlarına, odaklarına, amaçlarına, yaratmayı hedefledikleri
etkilere, kapsadıkları boyutlara ve benimsedikleri yaklaşımlara göre benzerlik ve farklılıklar
içerdikleri belirlenmiştir.

Growing recognition of the profound topics affecting society; including population changes, social issues, and environmental crisis; is emphasising the need for industrial designers to address additional goals beyond those associated with purely commercial targets.  Industrial design consultants, however, have a myriad of complex and inter-related elements influencing their work.  This thesis investigates those influences and offers a portrayal of what affects industrial design consultants addressing more responsible design goals within their commercial remits. 

It reviews the literature relating to the nature and role of industrial design, and its relationship with society’s larger needs.  From this, it expounds the methodology underpinning the investigation, and describes the phases involved.  Two main studies were undertaken to pursue the research objectives: an explorative workshop involving 19 participants from design practice and academia; and a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews involving a total of 31 industrial design consultants, leading academics, and design-related strategic consultants.

From the analysis of the data, three sets of key observations and theory are presented in the thesis.  The first set of findings examines the range of influencing factors acting on the consultant and their work by depicting the characteristics of the main elements constructing the product creation context.  The second and principal set of findings identifies what determines the possibility for consultants to incorporate responsible design goals within their work.  Using a framework derived from the analysis, and drawing on interview data for empirical backing, it expands on six key areas, identifying a critical determining factor for each.  The third set of outcomes combines the findings from the primary data with existing knowledge on design actions and behavioural theory, to depict the formation of an industrial design consultant’s behaviour and their tendencies towards responsible design.  In this way, the research offers a thorough investigation of what affects industrial design consultants addressing more responsible design goals, by considering the characteristics of their circumstances; the determination of their possibility to act; and what shapes their individual behaviour.

(To read this thesis click "URL hdl.handle.net" at top of this entry)

An ontology describing the constructs and their inter-relationships for business models has recently been built and evaluated: the Business Model Ontology (BMO). This ontology has been used to conceptually power a popular practitioner visual design tool: the Business Model Canvas (BMC).

However, implicitly these works assume that designers of business models all have a singular normative goal: the creation of businesses that are financially profitable. These works perpetuate beliefs and businesses that do not create outcomes aligned with current natural and social science knowledge about long term individual human, societal and ecological flourishing, i.e. outcomes are not strongly sustainable. This limits the applicability and utility of these works.

This exploratory research starts to overcome these limitations: creating knowledge of what is required of businesses for strongly sustainable outcomes to emerge and helping business model designers efficiently create high quality (reliable, consistent, effective) strongly sustainable business models.

Based on criticism and review, this research project extends the BMO artefact to enable the description all the constructs and their inter-relationships related to a strongly sustainable business model. This results in the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology (SSBMO). To help evaluate the SSBMO a practitioner visual design tool is also developed: the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas (SSBMC).

Ontological engineering (from Artificial Intelligence), Design Science and Systems Thinking methodological approaches were combined in a novel manner to create the Systemic Design Science approach used to build and evaluate the SSBMO. Comparative analysis, interviews and case study techniques were used to evaluate the utility of the designed artefacts.

Formal 3rd party evaluation with 7 experts and 2 case study companies resulted in validation of the overall approaches used and the utility of the SSBMO. A number of opportunities for improvement, as well as areas for future work, are identified.

This thesis includes a number of supplementary graphics included in separate (electronic) files. See “List of Supplementary Materials” for details.

[Since this research was completed, the practitioner visual design tool (the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas) that is conceptually "powered by" the the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology, has been further refined to become the Flourishing Business Canvas - see www.FlourishingBusiness.org for the most recent practice and developments].

In the centrally planned economy of the GDR, where manufacture was not motivated by profit, industrial designers were able to redefine their role in society and engage with the question of socially responsible design in a much more profound and sustained manner than was possible for their Western counterparts. This approach was regularly reflected in theoretical discourse, as well as in designed objects.
This paper will relate a series of design strategies, which were proposed, explored and to some degree implemented by industrial designers in response to the particular social and economic conditions that emerged in the GDR, in the hope that they might inform and enrich contemporary discourse about social responsibility in industrial design.

This paper reports on three iterations of the 'Resilience Challenge' assessment task within the third year Industrial Design studio course at the University of New South Wales. It presents the conceptual solutions proposed by students in the course, which targeted the various phases of emergency management, relevant to catastrophes in developing countries. Learning reflections show that students valued the challenges and rewards encountered through the task and that they saw themselves grow in their understanding of ecological impacts and socio-cultural issues.

The aim of this paper is to show the structure of tourism products by using the model of Smith (1997) and applying it to develop tourism product in Finnish rural area. The other aim is to discuss about the role of creative tourism when developing tourism products. This paper is discussing creative tourism production where the user orientation and engagement are essential.

This workshop will engage participants in a sequence of individual and group activities that utilise real and fictional sensorial modalities to reimagine problems and humanise design thinking. The 60 minutes online session will experiment with sensory scenarios and how they can enhance reframing and responsibly 'tilt' design problems and approaches, leading also to engaging participants in a discourse on the role of design within society and ecology. This workshop stems from wider research being undertaken into a system of teaching interventions that positively disrupt the curriculum, to catalyse and reinforce learning around design action and eco-social consequence. As such, this session seeks to explore creative and humanity-centred pedagogic approaches for reframing design problems and supporting responsible ideation.

The Kunsthal presents the discussion ‘Social design: Dutch and Soviet perspective’ in the framework of the exhibition "Red Wealth, Soviet design, 1950-1980" on Thursday 11 February. During the debate participants will focus on the impact of political, social and cultural factors on design, in the context of socialist USSR in relationship to capitalistic Europe.

The main goal of the discussion is to uncover and understand the best practices by parties and form usefull solutions for the future. Among the speakers are Alexandra Sankova (director Moscow Design Museum, co-curator of the exhibition Red Wealth) and Elena Oranskaia (director of Art-east+Art-west foundation).