What Do Designers Have to Offer When Facing Societal Challenges?
Mascha van der voort, thomas binder, jacob buur, per linde, robert-jan den haan
University of Twente, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, University of Southern Denmark, Malmö University, University of Twente
contact: m.c.vandervoort@utwente.nl
Keywords: design for social innovation; design objects; designers role; societal challenges
Conversation Overview
Objects, artifacts, things. All these words are part of design, sometimes as synonyms, sometimes with different meanings. Since the establishment of design schools, designers have been trained to create new or improve existing products; we are good at designing these objects, artifacts and things. However, when we as designers involve ourselves in societal challenges, when we engage in designing for social innovation, how can we use our expertise of designing objects? We will investigate this main research question in this conversation through interactive case study reviews, introduced by the catalysts, and bold propositions. Participants will be asked to take position on these propositions in order to address some key characteristics around designing for social innovation.
This conversation is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence.
→ download conversation details (PDF)
This conversation took place on Tuesday 28th June at DRS2016, find it in the conference programme