Social design: an introduction

Abstract

Social design has gained momentum in design research during the last ten years, a development which can be seen as having several roots. Some of these roots go back a few decades, to the writings of Victor Papanek, Nigel Whiteley, and Victor Margolin (Papanek, 1984; Whiteley, 1993; Margolin, 2015), but others are of newer origin, including some initiatives in interaction design and service design. Important research in this regard has been done in Italy (Meroni, 2007; Manzini, 2015), Australia (Dorst, 2015), Scandinavia (Binder, Brandt, Ehn, & Halse, 2015), and the UK (Kimbell, 2014), among others. Several consultancies, such as Participle, IDEO, and Think Public, have also contributed to this development, and at least one book has been published on the relationship between design and the social sciences (Frascara, 2002).