[ Social Design Blog MANIFESTO ]

We are part of a growing number of design professionals, design students, and design thinkers who are committed to promoting design as a tool for social change, and who see in the design discipline a far broader role to play than that of a silent accomplice to market strategies, brand enhancement, consumption and the normalization of social and cultural values.

As designers and uppermost as citizens, we witness the rising tautness in the current economic, politic and environmental situation. In our jobs, and in our lives, we long to do more. Particularly as designers, we intuit our strategic placing in the larger capitalist logic we work with/for (some against, or about - but one would have to agree there is always some degree of relation) should grant us great opportunities to bring about positive change. Are we seizing that momentum?

All this, is about social engagement, and that can only happen through critical observation and thinking. This blog aims to be a space for just that.

Kate and Joana, who met while collaborating for the SocialDesignSite, firstly initiated this blog. The SocialDesignSite is a not-for-profit organization that aims to foster and facilitate a discourse on social design by establishing a unique interactive online platform. They present a vast array of innovative projects that help develop and sharpen our common understanding of social design both in context as in practice.

This blog shares with the SocialDesignSite the aim to create awareness and promote reflection towards how we could do things differently, how do we bring about positive change, and why we have chosen to organize ourselves the ways we have.
If the SocialDesignSite has earned its place as a reference for exhibiting and categorizing exemplary social design projects from a variety of fields, this blog will complement that by a deeper problematization on the issues those projects address.

To achieve that, thinkers, writers, critics, scholars and theoreticians of all backgrounds will be called to contribute. Hopefully, this will enhance the tranformation of all the available online knowledge into evaluation and inquiry. This discussion of the developing concept of social design, and the gain of perspective and understanding about models, methods and instruments available, aims to evaluate the impact on the social world and explore the possibilities of what we could do differently.

This blog is a place to ask questions, debate the multitude of answers, and bring completely new perspectives to the table.

The SocialDesignBlog writers and contributors,
November 2008