Design as a tool for social change

Part I: Why

We’re at a critical point in time to make a difference for future generations and the liveability of our planet. Many of our planetary boundaries are being passed due to the excessive consumption of the world’s wealthiest 10%, and the production patterns of companies producing the services and goods they buy. Historically and still today, design has been an active contributor to this consumption economy.  So it’s time to reflect:

How can we channel design skills and resources to reverse ecological damage and contribute to regenerative futures?

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Design interventions for sustainability

Multilevel Innovation Framework, Ceschin and Gaziulusoy, 2020

Designing interventions for sustainability can happen at various different levels (see Multilevel Innovation Framework, Ceschin and Gaziulusoy, 2020). For designers working at material or product innovation levels, this might look like designing technical improvements to product quality or reducing energy use. For more human-centric design disciplines where the focus is on community and location based interventions, the overall approach becomes much more systemic - and it’s in these areas where the biggest impact is possible. With these radical sustainability transformations to socio-technical systems, designers can impact consumption culture, habits and societal behaviour that is contributing to unsustainability.

But whilst we’re seeing a lot of fantastic innovation at those lower levels - with circular design tools, ethical digital guidelines and climate friendly approaches - interventions at the higher, more systemic levels are facing barriers and are unable to move fast enough.

Barriers to system innovation

So what are these barriers to system innovation that the design industry is facing? To answer this we need to inspect the current business models framing the role of design:

1. Design is a tool to help a client reach its goals
   When design is employed to serve KPIs, increase profit and growth, budgets are pre-defines to achieve a goal and implement a strategy. Designers working in this way must wait for the perfect brief, with the perfect client and budget to come their way, before they have the opportunity to use visionary design to see future possibilities, build new connections and imagine unimagined opportunities
   

2. There is no ONE client for wicked, societal problems
   Systemic design interventions for sustainability, such as Transitions Design approaches, look to improve future society’s wellbeing. But when such wicked problems are interlinked and embedded in multiple systems, there is no singular client or actor who owns this issue.
   

3. Where do the pioneers work?
   Accelerating radical transitions needs a variety of actors who can together disrupt dominant systems in order to bring in new ones, whilst maintaining stability. If all of our design efforts go to meeting current market demands, then we will keep reinforcing unsustainable business models - and when we try to implement new models in these old paradigms, potential is lost. 

Untapped powers of design for transition

If we’re able to overcome these barriers, where then can design create impact?

At Falay Transition Design, we see three untapped powers of design for transitions: 

1. Design can frame systems and ideas
   Design has a history of making the invisible visible - prototyping, for example, is an abstract concept that design concretised and provided as tool. Similarly, it was design that gave us the language to describe customer experience, something which we can all feel and experience, but lacked the understanding of. For sustainability transitions, the designers’ eye and imagination can map, visualise and comprehend everything from systems to relationships to new economic models.
   

2. Design is a connector and translator
   Tools that work for our current paradigms do not work as we shift towards new ways of working and being. The creative, interconnected, intuitive and abstract nature of design has the potential to connect and translate between these systems - unlike the dominant work culture which relies on rational, mechanistic, causal and tangible thinking.
   

3. Design brings the pluriversal imagination
   We are stuck in a solution mindset, in which current ways of working think there is one best way to solve problems. But the interlinked nature of wicked problems is messy, and many connected, parallel interventions are in fact needed. Design can bring this lens of multiplicity, where designers are comfortable exploring multiple ways of exploring and experiencing, and integrating plural perspectives into our processes.

With these untapped powers recognised, we must therefore understand how we can overcome barriers and unleash the capacity of creative practices and design to contribute to transformation.

In part 2 of this blog, we will explore concrete examples of design interventions that navigate this space. And if you can’t wait until then - check out Zeynep’s recent talk at Sitra for their Heräämö event on “Design as a tool for social change”: