In addition to there being a confusion of different kinds of social designing, there are also a confusing set of processes that social designing, whatever its aim, tends to use. What follows is the terminology that the Amplifying Creative Communities project adopted to weigh up how it could best do its work of co-designing social solutions and design-enabled social innovation:
Platforms
Platforms seem to be to 'social business design' what portals were to the first dot.com era. Platforms are areas that can focus social design work. Whether a physical or online location, or a combination of the two, a platform convenes background research, tools and appropriate people, allowing focused work on problem-solving or innovation with particular communities around particular themes.
The rationale for a platform is that other kinds of problems—business innovation, policy formulation and education, for example—have dedicated institutions in which solutions can be developed and applied. Social issues arise when problems manifest that lack an institution which can resource work on those problems. Digital domains and social software have enabled the creation of almost-free platforms—the primary cost is the service system design of the technologies into a productive and elegant platform—allowing social issues to convene a combination of expertise, community knowledge and cognitive surplus. There seem to be four kinds of problems that platforms attempt to solve:
Platforms may have more or less designed processes and structures to make contributions convenient or relevant—see Formulae and Toolkits below.
The Amplifying Creative Communities project has, for each of its two years, used an exhibition as a platform. Rather than the exhibition being of completed research, summarizing what has been done, the Amplify exhibition is a platform for the design research. It curates some contextual research and presents it in a way that mobilizes it as the focus for a series of workshops with social service system design experts and local community representatives. As propositions emerge from those workshops, they are incorporated into the exhibition, and only at the conclusion of the exhibition-as-platform are there 'results.'
Themes
Innovating alternative ways of living and working is both a complex and a wicked problem. It is complex in that many different kinds of social issues are interlinked; a change in one will lead to a change in many others in not always predictable ways, especially over time. It is wicked because, of course, people are involved, and people are not consistent or unchanging, so the conditions in which work is done is constantly changing. To deal with such situations, it is necessary to 'bound' conversations so that some criteria can be developed by which to evaluate what should be done. These rationales limit the complexity somewhat and attempt to keep conversations at least temporarily focused on agreed-to terms-of-engagement. Ideally, the themes chosen to focus social design work structure larger, later interconnections. For example, working on food systems is a way to approach community health and environmental health; but it is also a way of working on financial viability, insofar as food production can provide employment or even livelihoods outside conventional employment-based economies.
An important example of poor framing of social problems/innovation work is 'sustainability.' It does not help how broad and contested this term is to talk of the triple-bottom line. Sustainability is merely a placeholder for a community deciding what it is going to value.
The Parsons DESIS Lab brings together Design, Social Innovation and Sustainability. To some extent, The DESIS approach should be read backwards: it defines sustainability as ways of living and working that are innovated by creative communities. Their inherent focus is on local economies that are consequently smaller and slower, without severing connections to neighboring and international communities. DESIS therefore seeks to lend design research and practice to the social innovation of these 'slow, local, connected,' (Ezio Manzini's phrase) alternative ways of living and working.
Within this broad approach, DESIS Labs always follow the priorities of local communities. For either iteration of the Amplifying Creative Communities project, initial research involved interviews with 'gateway' community organizations (i.e., visible and well-established community initiatives that could guide us to less visible initiatives: the Lower East Side Community Gardens in Year 1; and Northwest Brooklyn organizations known to ioby) to learn about local priorities.
In Year 1, these were identified as: Taking Care of the Elderly Eating Healthy Living Together Retaining Cultural Diversity
In Year 2: Healthy and Local Food Initiatives Sharing Economies Environmental Wellbeing (the waterfront) Alternative Transportation
Methods
Social design has tended to go hand-in-hand with 'design thinking.' The latter tends to refer to the use of design processes in traditionally non-design domains, whether business management or social issues. In such cases, designing is reduced to a creative process, a method that can be applied to any context. Ordinarily, this means a sequence, in one or another order of:
The Amplifying Creative Communities second year in Northwest Brooklyn used the exhibition venue as the opportunity to run 5 different workshops, each of which involve versions of these creative 'design thinking' processes.
1. The longest workshop involved graduate students of the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design and local community organization representatives, and was led by IDEO.
2. The second involved project partner ioby.org and comprised community representatives testing a guide designed for community groups wanting to undertake environmental improvement projects.
3. The third involved project partner Greenmap Systems, exploring how mapping could promote sustainable innovations in the Northwest Brooklyn area
4. The fourth was organized by Laura Forlano as part of the Cornell University's NSF VOSS Grant on Design Collaboration; it brought together a range of academics and practitioners in the field of urban informatics and set them to work on some issues briefed by the community organization hosting the exhibition following some observational research in the neighborhood
5. The largest workshop was the Share NYC event organized by project partner Shareable.net which broke into 3 working groups on its second day (following the first day's panels by sharing economy activists and entrepreneurs) to explore: a) the processes of establishing new sharing economy social enterprises b) ideating sharing economy responses to the needs that emerged from the Amplifying Creative Communities research in Northwest Brooklyn (facilitiated by the MFA Transdisciplinary Design students) c) the Solidarity Economy as models for how to amplify the projects being started by the Occupy movement's Alternative Economies working groups
Formulae
Design, the art of mass production, is always looking for templates to make its processes for getting things 'to scale' more reliably. As the field of social design matures, patterns emerge about how this kind of work can be done and how these can then be turned into meta-heuristics. These kinds of 'formulae' are especially useful for curating large-scale conversations such as the ones that occur on crowd-sourcing platforms, though there are clearly risks of reductivism.
At the beginning of its second year of research, the Amplifying Creative Communities leaders were in discussion with IDEO about using their Open Innovation Platform. As a result, a DESIS formula was developed, and though the project did not in the end use IDEO's platform, the formula was used to structure the initial interviews with local community representatives that generated the Themes for the second year's exhibition:
(Creative Communities + Underutilized Resources) x Social Problems = Social Innovations toward more Sustainable Futures
Creative Communities All DESIS work begins with the presumption that creativity is not only the remit of creative professionals, that there are communities who can be very creative in response to developing ways of living and working that are more resource productive—though these communities are often innovating more out of necessity than choice (due to the withdrawal of government services and the disinterest of market forces in meeting those needs). A challenge however is the dominance of 'cultural' notions of creativity. Sometimes in communities there are creative organizations targeting social design work, but more often, creative people are directing themselves toward the production of cultural artifacts and events. Identifying these sources of creativity in a community, and redirecting them to work on social issues was what this component of the formula tried to accomplish.
Underutilized Resources As economic restructuring takes place, there are often spaces and even equipment that are abandoned or not used to capacity. Redeploying these toward the task of social design work can be a crucial part of social innovation. These could be anything from spaces that can become platforms for conversations and creative work, to tools that can be used as the basis of new kinds of livelihoods. If these spaces or equipment are in good condition and appropriate to the task, these can resource the social designing of creative communities; if not, creative communities can work first on redesigning those resources into equipment that can enable alternative ways of living and working.
Social Problems As noted above in relation to Themes, social innovation work requires focus. So this formula allows communities to nominate their priority issues.
Social Innovations toward more Sustainable Futures The formula therefore identifies agents (creative communities), means (underutilized resources) and ends (solutions to targeted social problems). The intention was that the formula would allow users to move from problem-solving to innovation, by mix-and-match-ing different agents, means and ends, responding to existing social situations in novel ways.
Recipes Previous DESIS research projects have synthesized large data sets of cases of social innovation toward more sustainable societies into a series of model scenarios, often grouped under themes. The Creative Communities project for instance promoted a series of model 'Collaborative Services,' centered around micro-businesses (or barters) within apartments, with one tenant producing meals for others, another performing laundering services, or childcare services, another running a walking bus, etc. The aim of each model is to articulate key aspects of the shared provisioning, from the service flow to some of the key pieces of equipment. These recipes are very schematic and would require detailing particular to each context, but they nevertheless afford quick ways of promoting the adoption of innovative ways of living and working.
In social innovation work, these kinds of how-to guides, are often called toolkits. It seems that the social design thinking world is saturated with toolkits right now, but this is perhaps because the word is taken to refer to everything from methods cards to software programs. At the Parsons DESIS Lab, we have been reserving the term toolkits for literal kits of physical tools (see Toolkits below); so Recipes, by contrast, are more like guidebooks: verbal (and pictorial) descriptions of how to create particular instances of alternative economies.
The primary community partner for the second year of the Amplifying Creative Communities project was ioby, a platform for crowd-resourcing local environmental improvement projects. ioby's primary function is to provide small community groups with the not-for-profit tools to fund-raise through micro-donations. However, ioby is not only the passive recipient of projects, but also an advocate of environmental initiatives. To this extent, it also provides project management advice to small groups. Over its 3 years of operation it has enabled a wide range of projects—as part of its role as Amplify Partner, ioby worked with Clarisa Diaz to produce a set of cards with recipes for different kinds of environmental initiatives: from community organizing through government approvals, to fund-raising tips. This almost industrializes ioby's capacity to facilitate environmental change.
Toolkits When creative communities innovate new ways of resourcing everyday life, they tend to do so with what is at hand. They struggle with inadequate tools because they do not necessarily have the skills to find or build more appropriate ones, but also because they have strong enough commitments to the initiative to 'make it work' despite their not-ideal means. The DESIS method involves lending design expertise to social innovators precisely so that bespoke tools (and service flows) can be developed that would make the lives of those innovators easier. In so doing, the improved social innovation can be more sustainable; both in the sense that it is more systemically efficient, and in the sense that that group of innovators will be more likely to persist with what they have created, with what is now more resilient to changing circumstances. These service innovation improvement tools can also then be given to other communities who might then be enabled to replicate those innovations. If I am interested in starting a home day-care or home restaurant or home laundering service, then having access to a kit that would make my home safer for children, or up to health standards for meal production, or semi-industrialized for larger loads of laundry, would greatly increase the likelihood of me succeeding.
The MFA Transdisciplinary Design students involved in the week-long Amplify workshop facilitated by IDEO developed proposals for toolkits in each of the Thematic areas. A group [Francis Carter, Howard Chambers, Jacqueline Cooksey, Amanda Lasnik, Kiersten Nash, Jayson Rupert, Kelly Tierney] working in the area of sharing economies designed a portable set of stairs. The intention was to create a mobile 'stoop stop' for: convening small groups of community members who could build the social relations necessary for subsequent sharing of resources; or for creating observation posts for community members wanting to re-imagine an area of their neighborhood, like a dangerous intersection or a vacant lot.
Amplifying Creative Communities:
» The Opposing Designs of Urban Activism
» Kinds and Products of Social Design, Part 1
» Kinds and Products of Social Design, Part 2
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