so we'll jump right into what social design is we like to start with this quote about the role traditionally of a designer and most of you would be familiar with the role of the designer as someone who interprets information after it's already been determined by someone else and in the case of social change you see that a lot with social scientists or economists okay here's what we think is going to be the best approach so now the designer might take it on in a visual way what we're doing now in the social design field as its emerging is we're actually participating in the process and we're using the process itself to move the social issue forward in a different way making connections so it just to give a really simple analogy those of you who are who may be familiar with communication design or graphic design would know that you're usually looking at form and function as the formula are the approach so you're going to design with a form in mind so let's say brochure and the brochure is going to raise awareness that's kind of an easy way of looking at it the way that we look at approach social design is that we're actually using participation as part of the formula so we're doing form and function but that's multiplied by the input who's involved and then you're looking at how its implemented as a really key aspect of the approach if you don't have participation and you don't have implementation in mind then you're not doing social design effectively and I'll get into that in a second with the core principles alright so just a couple brief things because we're going to go into depth into it but just to give you a really cursory sense about how social design works it's human centered so there's a user in mind and it's empathetic that means that we are always looking at who's involved that means it's not just a one sided thing like oh it's the end user there's often more the people in between and what's really unique about this is that people are often actually neglected in how we do how we work so it's unusual to put people first and foremost in the process the second component is that it integrates social responsibility and social justice so if you are doing something and it's not for the purpose of positive social change it's not it's probably not social design and then the third element is that it's collaborative it's with not for and this is really important because the social designer doesn't assume or shouldn't assume that they know what's best for a particular group or a particular case it's all about working with people and trying to determine the outcome together and just wanted to throw this in their social designers have fun too it's not even though we're working on serious issues it isn't about being serious all the time even though most of these issues are very grave and have issues that go back you know years decades whatever people still want to have joy in their life and the process should be joyful so as we go through this you'll see pictures with post-its you'll see people working together the social designer tries not to be argumentative or confrontational with theirs there's always a way to bring fun into the mix and so just remember that as we go through this okay so we're going to outline some core principles there's a big long list here thankfully this webinar will be available to you for posterity so you don't have to write it all down but we're gonna start first and foremost with ethics and empathy now what we say about ethics and empathy I mean the key question here is what is the role and responsibility of the designer in society that's really how social design started especially at mica most designers look at well you know what does the client want to need and how can we help the client well in this case there's a bit of a proactivity on the designers part the social designers part to say what can I do to get something started and so maybe the social designer is the one moving forward or maybe the solution center is linking up with someone who has an issue there's no clear sense of where to go with it well ethics and empathy are so important because you want to first of all understand or at least try to arrive at an understanding with the audiences and the people you're working with that's always important and objectivity is key as well and then ethics is how can you do this in and as responsible away as possible because it's when you're working with people it's really easy to overlay your own issues and also to have your own agenda and so you have to be really clear about what that is and so starting up front with this with the audience is extremely important so a second one that we find extremely pivotal to the process is teaming and collaboration in the social design program we look at teaming as how do we work together in the graduate program but out in the world when you're working on these projects teaming is critical because you want to be working on these things together with your partners and that means that you're forming a team together and they're often or they should be interdisciplinary and for any of you who've worked with people in different fields or contexts you know that if it was easy everyone would do it well and the fact is it's really challenging so social designers try to facilitate and enable the process in a way that everyone can contribute and be of value but not assume that everyone is going to work exactly the same way or have the same thing to contribute so it's really important that we find ways to work with different personality styles to be self-aware and intentional on how we work and then that allows us also to facilitate other types of things like workshops for example sometimes we're coming in and we're helping other people figure out how to move forward in the process maybe they've gotten stuck or they're just trying to look at something in a new way so as social designers we can come in and be objective and also help help them work through some of these things in a fun and effective way social literacy is ten at number three and this is something that's extremely hard to do because whenever you go into a new context let's say you come into the master's and social design program and you come from you're not from Baltimore you come from another part I I and from outside of DC so it's not that far but I'm still coming into a city but I don't really understand all of the different issues at stake in terms of race in terms of policy how people work with each other and and what the history is of other types of efforts that have been going on all of these things are interconnected and they're extremely difficult to understand so social literacy is not just trying to get a sense of what it's like on the ground but it's also having humility coming in and saying I don't know all the answers and I don't know necessarily what's right and people will respect you a lot more if you can come in and say that instead of just saying oh this is what you need to do if any of you who have ever tried to look at a problem or issue that's affecting you in your like exactly where you live you'll know that sometimes it's even harder to see all those issues when they're right in front of you so there is value to going into a different environment and providing and maybe an objective stance at the same time you can't do it without realizing that you need to have sensitivity of the situation and again be humble and ask for other people to participate because they're the ones who are really going to be the key to moving forward so principle number three design research and this is important it's not just something you do by yourself on the internet you want to work with other stakeholders and you want to try to define problems you can't just go in and say or you well a lot of people will say oh I know what the solution is we're gonna develop this well social design would say you don't know the solution or you can't develop solutions until you know what the problem is that you're trying to solve one of the methods we do for this is called problem definition where we actually redundant need to say we wanted to find the problem and an example of that would be that let's say there's in a neighborhood people aren't talking to each other you might say oh well we should have a monthly meeting where everyone can get together well before you say let's do a monthly meeting of to say what is the problem we're trying to solve is it communication amongst the neighbors is it that they feel alienated from each other maybe there was a real estate transaction that happened a couple years ago and a whole lot of people moved out and then there's a new group of people and they don't know each other very well so you have to really sit and analyze like what are the different things that are happening in this context and when we say qualitative and quantitative research methodologies which is in the second sentence we're talking about is we use a variety of ways to collect information and some of those are from the social sciences and a social designer needs to be really familiar with those even if the methodologies themselves aren't done in the same way that a social scientist might do so Design Thinking many of you may have heard of this this is a framework that has come out of originally from IDEO which is a really awesome company that does that works globally and the framework itself it has empathy defined which is also what we call research ideation testing and prototyping and it's not necessarily a it's not a linear approach that can be many different ways to enter into it and exit it and then circle around multiple times the way we use it in social design is that we are specifically using it to address social problems so design thinking on its own can be used to to do anything really you could use it with a mattress company or a college but we use it in terms of trying to help us underline the process as we go through it and it is a really useful framework although there are multiple ways to look at solving problems so it's just one in our tool set visualization now one of the things that people find really difficult out in the world is to take a huge amount of data and translate it into a digestible bits information so the social designer while isn't necessarily expected to be a graphic designer per se still is anchored in the visual there we're trying often to take all this information and then find a way to make it compelling to tell a story and to help people understand it better and this can be really enlightening for the people we work with because they're so used to looking at things in spreadsheets that seeing it in a forum like the image on the left for example can all of a sudden illuminate things that they had never thought about so it's one of the things that we try to do and it is it can be difficult if you're talking if you're looking at a ton of information but it's also really gratifying when you found a way to distill it to the essence alright so design entrepreneurship this is really key and one of the things that's actually emerging from this area is that social designers in many ways can work with other people to advance other things and it doesn't have to end up being some actual sellable idea but when a designer can turn their idea into an act sustainable lasting solution that means that you're actually addressing the problem in the long term and instead of just kind of swooping in and working with someone and then leaving and going to do something else you're actually putting in time to to develop this idea and in a lot of ways that we've seen we've seen a lot of success with that so yeah Jonathan before I moved into your case study do you have any input on design off the project it's it's critical and just kind of creating that sustainability not just in terms of economic but just kind of long-term how do you see this change take place and how do you make sure the change stays in a positive influence and doesn't necessarily get adopted or kind it's adapted to something else by somebody else right and and one thing we should mention that's not covered in the principles is that social designers are heavily reliant on out like funding in order to get the ideas to in order to basically do anything you have to have funding if you want to be paid a daily wage and so you know whether that's grants fellowships like jonathan and i just completed the fellowship at mica i mean there's a lot of different ways to do it but social designers have to be really resourceful and so design entrepreneurship is one way to do that without just relying on one grant funding all the time if you're creating a way to actually sustain yourself there's no that's a win-win