Social design: an introduction

IntroductionSocial design has gained momentum in design research during the last ten years, a development which can be seen as having several roots. Some of these roots go back a few decades, to the writings of Victor Papanek, Nigel Whiteley, and Victor Margolin (Papanek, 1984; Whiteley, 1993; Margolin, 2015), but others are of newer origin, including some initiatives in interaction design and service design. Important research in this regard has been done in Italy (Meroni, 2007; Manzini, 2015), Australia (Dorst, 2015), Scandinavia (Binder, Brandt, Ehn, & Halse, 2015), and the UK (Kimbell, 2014), among others. Several consultancies, such as Participle, IDEO, and Think Public, have also contributed to this development, and at least one book has been published on the relationship between design and the social sciences (Frascara, 2002).We cannot say we know for sure the reasons behind this surge in interest, but we can point out a few possibilities. Some of these seem to be external to design. For example, the withdrawal of the welfare state in Europe has created markets for semi-public activities, especially in health care and care for the elderly. The financial crisis of 2008 pushed designers to seek more customers from the public sector and from non-governmental organizations. The traditional manufacturing focus of the market for design has, in many key areas, become smaller and more concentrated, resulting in a reduction in traditional job opportunities for designers. Simultaneously, the growth of design education has pushed many young designers to seek new markets, which are being created by a substantial number of complex societal challenges; and design research has given designers new tools to help them work with abstract entities such as services and communities rather than just with things. Whatever the reasons, design is not what it was in 1990; in 2016, it faces a new type of late modernity in which social activities interwoven with things and services create value.As we noted in the Call for Papers for this special issue of the International Journal of Design, there are currently several interpretations of social design. A recent British report classified social design into social entrepreneurship, socially responsible design, and design activism (Armstrong, Bailey, Julier, & Kimbell, 2014). Known for his work on social activism, Markussen (2015) has added social movements to this classification. By now then, we have seen not only a surge in social design, but also the first steps of scholarly discussion about its forms and limits. We can safely say that social design has expanded design beyond its traditional core and scope. It is much harder to say where the limits of social design are and how these limits can best be extended.For these reasons, it is a good time to take stock of these developments. This is what we have tried to achieve with this special issue, which saw its beginnings in 2014 in the Call for Papers. The call aimed to be inclusive and thus did not set many limits on how social design was to be defined. Rather, it was meant to function as an inkblot that could gather various definitions. The rest of this introduction describes what we saw when the submissions arrived.From Submissions to PapersWhen we saw the considerable crop of submissions arrive in Fall 2015, we were pleasantly surprised. The outcome looked very promising at first sight. We had 78 submissions from all continents. One additional paper was redirected to the call later, so at the end we had to process 79 papers. When we first went through them, we ranked the submissions by two criteria: their quality and their loose fit to the topic of the special issue. About 20 papers were not up to the journal's standards of quality, for reasons ranging from little or no connection to design literature, missing technique, or flaws in execution of the argument. Another group of papers had no connection to the topic of the call. …