Design Participation and Social Change
DPSC course provides students understanding and competences to practice design participation for social change. 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. DPSC features lectures, readings and a set of hands-on exercises on key aspects of planning and running different types of design participation in different settings. To these ends the course also covers also theories for analysing sociotechnical change and sociotechnical contexts for design projects and how to bridge such contextual analysis to the nitty gritty details of design participation action (… and back again).
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 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;
- Assess potentials and pitfalls of different approaches to design for social change.
