Design for Social Innovation: Emerging Principles and Approaches

Contemporary design professionals have been struggling with the challenges posed by addressing the core concepts of sustainable development in earnest for over thirty years (Fletcher & Giggin, 2001; Fuad-Luke, 2009). The sustainable development agendas are providing an opportunity to ask fundamental questions of design itself. In recent years design professionals have been pushing design beyond being just engaged with consumer culture and exploring new forms of practice. This is particularly evident when design is used to tackle social issues to create innovative solutions (Margolin & Margolin, 2002; Fuad-Luke, 2009). There is growing consensus that design can be a mode of innovation that provides a set of skills, tools and methods that guide people to new socially innovative solutions or improvement of existing ones (Brooks, 2011; Emilson, Seravalli & Hillgren, 2011; Social Innovation Exchange, 2011a). Social innovation is “innovation that is explicitly for the social and public good. It is innovation inspired by the desire to meet social needs which can be neglected by traditional forms of private market provision and which have often been poorly served or unresolved by services organised by the state” (Murray, Caulier-Grice & Mulgan, 2010:10). After a very brief review of sustainable development and how design professionals have addressed the concepts, this paper will explore ‘design for social innovation’, its emerging principles and approaches and the opportunities and challenges for design professionals engaging in it.