Design For Social Innovation Reflections
A set of informal personal reflections from my design for social innovation class in spring 2020
A Designer’s Purpose
Being a young designer, the process of thinking about what I want my future to be can be quite overwhelming. We are lucky to have so many options available to us in terms of what we think our futures could be: how we could use our skillsets to create some sort of an impact.
I used to think that creating an impact is not in the hands of any one person. That as a designer, my life could not be dedicated to the process of creating positive change. This is largely due to the fact that I had no exposure to this idea of designing for social service and change. Thus far my experiences with design had been limited to what people consider to be the more traditional routes of design — graphic design, industrial design, and all these areas that worked to feed a more consumeristic society.
I am not saying that these fields of design are universally bad, by any means, they just are not exactly what I want to do with my set of skills. However, coming to this university and beginning to understand other areas that we could create for, has allowed me to realign my purpose within design.
Within my field of environments design specifically, I want to use the power of technology and creating experience and changing environments that come together to form the built environment. I also believe that the manner in which we design has to be in complete service of the people that we are designing for. I believe that whenever we create designs we need to be cognizant of the space in which we are designing, in terms of culture, expectations, limitations, and norms, in order to create larger scale impacts.
My interest in design is quite diverging currently. I care a great deal about a good number of issues, so figuring out if there is one I specifically want to narrow in on.
My interest in general design for change comes from my love of not only design, but also a keen interest in the sciences, environmental preservation, psychology, and data. I believe that service design is the best way to use design fundamentals to create positive change in the world.I want to foster my vision of a better future in two main facets. First, how to influence people’s individual behaviors, encouraging them to be more conscious of their daily actions in a manner that would create a larger impact. Second, I want to focus on the process by which we design experiences, products, services, and spaces to make them more impactful. I believe by encouraging a greater degree of consciousness in our actions as designers we will create positive social, economic, and environmental changes that will ultimately lead to better future societies.
However my interest in specific issues ranges from sustainability issues, to immigration issues, to representational and inequality issues.
Where Can I Create an Impact?
As a young designer, I am still quite unsure of the general trajectory upon which I want to take my career. I care a great deal about a multitude of social issues, and have had a hard time thus far locking myself down on a topic I could see myself spend a lifetime working on.
There are so many social issues that I could see myself working in the space of, but recently I decided to consider focusing on the importance of sustainability. However, once again the idea of “sustainability” is so broad, far-reaching, a word that I no longer feel as though it has concrete meaning by itself.
In addition, as a designer working to make the world generally more sustainable, there are an endless number of paths that one could take. I could focus on the actual process by which products are made — thinking of materiality, physical processes, and general environmentally conscious manufacturing techniques. On the other hand I could focus more so on the energy processes that are used in our day to day, and how we can find more reusable and sustainable sources of energy.
While I liked the impact that both of these areas of sustainability promise, I realized I didn’t actually care about these things. I did not want to spend my time understanding the exact science behind these principles, and therefore would not be working in the space that directly aligns with my interests.
My interests more lie in the people, thinking about why people do what they do, how we can modify people’s behavior to be more aware of issues, how we can create things as designers that motivate people to be more sustainable. I think a large impact can be made by thinking about how to encourage people to take more sustainable actions. That could manifest in multiple ways — but particularly the work of Jonathan Chapman is inspiring to me in terms of thinking of how to influence people in terms of sustainability.
We always see people trying to tell people to be more sustainable, with actions that have direct relation to the preservation of Earth’s resources — shower for 5 minutes at most, turn off all of the lights in your house, eat vegetarian, etc. While I think there is an inherent importance in emphasizing a generally environmentally conscious lifestyle, I think the greater problem our society faces in terms of sustainability is the consumerism we are all enveloped in. If we can create an emotional attachment to people and their products, we can increase the products life cycles, and in turn reduce the fast turn around rate of products/waste.
Chapman really emphasizes the idea of emotionally sustainable design, working to create products that people feel a genuine attachment to, rather than something that is so easily bought, and thrown away. This creation of human attachment to both products and services is the space that I specifically want to work in, and is the space in which I feel I can actually create a long term positive impact as a designer.
Final Reflection
Overall this class has been one of my favorite classes this past semester. It pushed me to understand design in a more practical “real world” sense. I really appreciated the amount of time the class spent on thinking about policy and design together, the manner in which funding works for theoretical projects, the manner in which non-profits use design in their practice, etc. Even though we have done some design research and mapping in other classes, this class allowed us to combine all of those elements together to see how all the components stack on top of each other and form a full process.
The topics that I found particularly helpful in the lectures were problem framing, endgames, and the system level intervention lectures. When we started working on our projects it was helpful to see how those concepts in those lectures practically applied to the overall process of completing the project. Generally the structure that was provided for how to approach large complicated projects like this was incredibly helpful, and I will definitely use it throughout future projects that I complete.
For me as a designer, this semester was helpful in understanding the way that I think about problems and what I want to do within complex spaces. I realized I really care about intervening at the individual level of problems and thinking particularly about how people make decisions and how their decisions scale upwards in terms of their impact. I hope to take more classes in Behavioral Economics and Psychology to develop a skillset alongside my design skills that will allow me to better understand and develop interventions that work at this scale.
Overall this semester was great and I am glad that I was able to leave it having learned a great deal and with a project that I am proud of, despite all of the unforeseen challenges. Thank you for a great semester!
