Design for Social Change - Strategy

Learning outcomes

On successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• understand how design can facilitate social change in different socio-techno-economic settings;
• critically assess potentials and pitfalls of different design activist strategies to social change in particular contexts;
• plan projects so that the merits and downsides of different ways, combinations, intensities and resources for fostering change are adequately addressed;
• develop and assess a design activist strategy for social change and gain experience in doing so.

Content

Designing for Social Change (DSC) courses provide students basic understanding and competences to build design projects aimed towards social change. The course has a two part structure. 

1. Theories and key concepts of social change the course provides a selective overview of most design relevant research on what it takes to achieve significant social change. DSC provides basics of core concepts, including sociotechnical systems, path dependence and path creation, sociotechnical couplings and interdependencies, practice change, social worlds and arenas for action, activist and post-capitalist frameworks, policy issues and economic drivers.
2. Collaborative design for social change (Hyysalo): collaborative design extending design from professionals to impacted peoples and relevant stakeholders is often a prerequisite for fostering social change. The interests, resources, legitimacy and enthusiasm of these peoples need to be met for a change initiative to have a chance to succeed. This is very difficult for designers to approximate these in their studio alone. DSC features a set of hands-on exercises and associated learning materials on key aspects of planning and running different types of collaborative design in different settings. Successful design collaboration requires analyzing the big picture contexts and working from there to the nitty gritty details of designing for collaboration ( and back again). The student groups use these learning to device a plan for use (or non use) of collaborative design as part of their extended project brief and, if practicable, also enact some of the planned actions.