Social Design — What it really is

Sosiotech
4 min readAug 20, 2022

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Sosiotech. Src: Unsplash (@eduardoequis)

Have you ever heard of a design of developing a housing complex using ethnographic research architectural features to reduce criminal behavior and encourage community activity?

Are you familiar with renovating a school to reduce sick building syndrome?

What about addressing crimes and homeless in America’s Rust Belt cities for revitalization?

Do you know about connecting hundreds of thousands of women to prenatal and infant care in Kenya, and inspiring people to stop sending almost as much as edible food to landfills as they eat in the U.S? Those are how social designs are used for solving social issues. But what social design really is?

What comes up in your mind when you heard the word “design?”

People agree that designing means creating something intended to serve specific purposes. It could be a product or a service.

Let’s say Graphic design, it is a visual craft to communicate information. A designer, Alexandros Clufetos said that it takes graphical and textual elements and implements them into multiple types of media.

The scopes are website design, user experience (UX) design and motion graphics design. Graphic designers create and sell their products commercially.

Social Design & Society

Social design is in the meantime to some degree comparable. It’s designing a product or a service. Social design as a portion of graphic design isn’t as it were a matter of concepts; it is in a general sense mindfulness of what is planned and what is done.

It’s a realistic plan looking for understanding between the designers and society through communication. Undoubtedly, numerous get it social design as the dependable, moral work out of the plan, or as aggressor plan following to political and social development, or as an exertion included to common social change.

As seen in its different implications, social design points to characterize itself as the thinking about connections between design and society. The products of social design are more looking for the social issues within the society that might be unraveled utilizing human approach project design.

Solve Social Problem With Design

The outputs of social design scope really complex social issues. It’s more like a strategy for solving social issues employing a certain set of principles.

Social design is utilized to set or change social conditions at the scale of cities, organizations, companies, NGOs, and communities that emphasize the values ​​of equality, equity, creativity, and social wellbeing. At that point what recognizes social design from other designs is that it can be seen from the framework utilized by social designers.

Social design principles can be applied in various fields and influence decisions that produce outputs that are in accordance with social design principles.

For example, at the government scale, it can produce policies that uphold equality and create security in society, in arrange to diminish the crime rate.

On the economic and business scale, it can create environmentally friendly products that pay consideration to environmental issues such as global warming, air pollution, and so on.

It can also create a free trade policy that is reasonable for individuals. For Health Care and Education Scale, social design can be used to create adequate and affordable health quality for all people.

Within the field of education, it can be used to facilitate equitable education. For the NGO scale, all aspects of life, in general, can be optimized for long-term programs in agreement with the principles of social design.

To get things to work as it is aimed, here are some essential principles of social design.

  • Thoughts come from the inside, not the top.
  • Questions are more vital than answers.
  • It depends on experiments rather than plans.
  • Making isn’t the same as understanding problems.
  • Limits motivate invention.
  • The real story is within the context.
  • How individuals see themselves is most important.
  • Innovation needs a network.
  • Communication is the primary act of liberality and inclusion.
  • The method is the strategy.
  • Human capacity is the goal.
  • Other than that, Social Design shapes issue-publics by making shared, open-ended tries with communities through collective discourse, purposes, needs, values, and consequences.
  • Social Design builds unused shapes of majority rule relations between places, living creatures, and things.
  • Social Design is critically aware of its political, systemic, institutional,c and environmental situatedness.

The Goal of Social Design

In such a way, what are the goals of social designers? To begin with objective of social design, it comprises in knowing what is, how it surges, this social self-representation, and how designs impact it, whether it is to communicative purposes or to information of the impacts it produces.

The second objective is, that the study of design is aimed to impact the cultural norms and the society’s structure, whether it is to give an impact, to give a change, or to separate them. A third and exceptionally goal of social design is to facilitate humans communications.

On the off chance that great information of social connections, of the culture where they move, in expansion to specialized and aesthetic components of social designs, at that point it is conceivable to contribute to human communication.

Therefore, the objective of social design is to discover aesthetic solutions in its works between the designers and society. It avoids one-way flow from occurring as it typically happens in institutional or commercial design.

Why is it matter? The social design takes one step further — planning a framework that underpins the individuals and that creates the products, offers assistance to be more incentive, and is innovative. It answers the future problems with nowadays solutions. It provides an opportunity that allows voice to those who have been disappointed or marginalized by design.

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Sosiotech

A Movement To Build Digital Product With Sociological Approach