Social Desing Does Not Exist
Based on a conversation with Jan Boelen on April 10, 2020
Text by Maaike van Papeveld
Photo courtesy of: Veerle Frissen (Portrait Jan Boelen)
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There is no such thing as social design. Every design is essentially a form of social design, to a greater or lesser extent. And actually, design that only takes social aspects into account, is no good design either. Design must consider a variety of aspects. Sometimes, social aspects are closely related to cultural or political aspects, in other cases to aspects of sustainability or economical aspects. These can all be criteria that make a design social or not. And in my opinion, these criteria do not only count when designing a product but also when using or disposing of it. So there is no fixed definition of social design. And actually, I would not want there to be one, because in that case, the term social design would become a mandate.
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Design as we know it is a very young profession. It is about 150 years old and started developing during the industrial revolution around the year 1870. Industrial design at that time was concerned mainly with furniture design, until Victor Papanek started speaking of social design in the late 1960’s. He published his book Design for the Real World in 1971. Other authors and practitioners followed, such as Buckminster Fuller, who experimented with technology and scientific methods to design a better world. Those people, at that time, started zooming in on the social and ecological aspects of design. So you could say that social design was the first response to the traditional pragmatic design that supposedly delivers us the products and solutions we need.
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Given the situation we are in [the ecological crisis and the corona pandemic], we all know that these products and solutions in fact cause the problems that we are confronted with today. Globalisation and everything related to it, has caused that we stopped designing and producing products locally and that we have become dependent on the global economy and capitalist movements that are continuously in motion. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we are reaching the limits of development, exploitation and extraction of the earth’s resources. And for that reason, many designers nowadays are looking for a utopia of some sort. Just like the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Bauhaus did in their time. Every 30 to 40 years there have been new design movements with their own ideas on how to reform the world. Now, design seems to have returned to that point. In that sense there is nothing new about this crisis. Of course, the pandemic and ecological situations form considerable crises, but they also indicate the urgent need for the world to be rethought. And designers could play an important role in that. Not just by designing face masks—these solutions alone are not enough—but by fundamentally rethinking economic and democratic systems.
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This text was originally written to create the worksheet Social Design Does Not Exist. Click here for more information or here to get in touch.
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