Social design

Social design is the application of design methodologies in order to tackle complex human issues, placing the social issues as the priority. Historically social design has been mindful of the designer's role and responsibility in society, and of the use of design processes to bring about social change. For good or bad, all design is social. There is a prevailing tendency to think of the ‘social’ as something that exists separate from materiality as if it is a force hovering in the ether. We speak of social problems, social good, or social decline as phenomena that are unconditionally human, negotiated, and enacted between individuals with unlimited agency. Material-oriented thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Tim Ingold have sought to dissolve this distinction of the social from the material. They emphasise that things matter, as they are fundamental parts of the intricate and inseparable connections, webs, meshes, or networks of human-material relations. Remarkably, this mentality of seeing the social and material as distinctly separate, as if existing on different plains, also permeates in the practice of design—despite its material media. Design often treats material as exogenous to a social context, an exotic appendage, or a foreign object being introduced into a non-material milieu. This may be the result of a deep desire to elevate human affairs above that of materiality or simply from a fear of acknowledging the overwhelmingly complex set of socio-material relations in which design is embedded, and which constitutes our world.