Surviving in the wild:sustaining design and social innovation initiatives in Asia-Pacific

In recent years, the importance of sustaining social innovation initiatives, once initiated, has gained increasing attention and, in particular, the role that design(ers) can play in this process. However, both the academic study and the practice of design and social innovation are currently lacking sufficient insight into how initiatives are sustained outside of experimental or academic settings and rarely move beyond the involvement of designers and/or researchers. The paper shares experiences from practitioners from Asia-Pacific that are operating in the real world, highlighting their precarious working conditions. The significance of building and maintaining healthy social relations in essential in this context, as these enable the weaving of a strong social fabric around the initiatives that will provide necessarily shelter and to endure long after the practitioners’ involvement. Therefore, facilitating the creation of meaningful social relations should be the key objective for design, instead of designing artefacts

Reorienting and sustaining design and social innovation: Insights from Asia-Pacific practices

This research study investigates what constitutes design and social innovation initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region. Field research conducted in in Hong Kong, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur led to the construction of sixteen case studies, which revealed a broad diversity of design and social innovation practices. Activity Theory was used as a framework for data collection, allowing stakeholders involved in these initiatives to share their insights and experiences within their respective local contexts. Their insights were subsequently analysed using thematic analysis, leading to the identification of three key themes. The first theme highlights the disparity between how design and social innovation is framed in academic discourse and how it is perceived by various groups of stakeholders and actors. The second discusses the tensions surrounding the designer’s role in social innovation. The third out the challenges and inherent paradoxes of sustaining design and points social innovation initiatives. These findings form the basis for recommendations to reposition design in social innovation practice, a reimagination of the role of the designer in the process and a set of pragmatic objectives that can help sustain initiatives who are operating ‘in the wild’. The contribution of knowledge of this research is that design and social innovation as a field of study is in urgent need of reorientation. Instead of solely focusing on the generation and implementation of design solutions, designers should shift their efforts towards creating and nurturing meaningful social relations while understanding their many dimensions and intricacies, as these relations will sustain initiatives in the long run. However, outcomes that are eventually produced should be tangible, to increase their usefulness for the stakeholders involved. Moreover, not only do practitioners need to create enabling ecosystems for the communities they intend to help, they should create these environments for themselves as well, by aligning themselves with the interests of other actors. Appropriate communication plays in important role in keeping the initiative’s social environment stable and healthy by shaping the perceptions and expectations of stakeholders. A paradigm shift is therefore required in order to move forward, with designers working in the space of social innovation being sociable designers, who focus on being social rather than just doing social

Self-designing protests: Exploring participatory design activism through the Colombian graphic (design) explosion

This paper explores the notion of participatory design activism to describe design interventions that fall in between participatory design and design activism, arising organically through self-organisation. Illustrated by three examples from the Colombian graphic (design) explosion, which occurred during the mass protests in 2021, a case is made to decentre the designer from the process, arguing that protests are instead (co)designed by a variety of actors. The nature of the interventions described show that participatory design can make a difference through its marriage to design activism. In this context, designers take a step back and allow others to use, appropriate and expand on their creative concepts, effectively self-designing the protest as well as its surrounding environment

Impact and Evaluation in Designing Social Innovation: Insights from the DESIAP KL Workshop and Symposium

Measuring social impact is hard. If we want to achieve meaningful social impact, we need to acknowledge that dominant impact evaluation models are limited. The dominant models of evaluation prioritises quantifiable outcomes that poorly take into account longer term impact related to social value and transformative potential. There is often a disconnect between funders and communities because of the chain of intermediaries caught between the two constituents that are often tasked to serve different agendas. Impact evaluation was identified by practitioners in DESIAP events as a key theme and challenge in their work. This report is guided by this key question: How can impact evaluation be undertaken in a way that is centred on community-led, culturally grounded and iterative nature that typify most designing social innovation (DSI) projects? We invited 12 researchers and change-makers from Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia and The Philippines, who are designing social innovation to share their experiences and identify challenges and opportunities related to evaluating the impact of their work. This gathering aimed to explore alternative social impact evaluations that are more suited to the dynamic and complex characteristics of community-led DSI projects. This report is a summary of the three days (19-21st December 2017), beginning with an intensive 2-day workshop that led to insights and themes that were shared with the wider public on the 21st of December 2017. The report considers: 1) How designing social innovation practices shape the form and purpose of impact evaluation 2) How evaluation is embedded in designing social innovation processes 3) Questions and propositions for understanding impact evaluation. Alternative and culturally grounded evaluative practices are present if we choose to recognise them. For funders and commissioners, acknowledging evaluation as a form of learning requires a change in mindset from one of monitoring to one of support. We identify existing evaluative practices in D&SI projects, which often goes unnoticed because they differ from dominant or common models of evaluation. Highlighting and surfacing these differences is an important step forward in diversifying existing approaches. Key to undertaking effective evaluation in D&SI is to build trust among commissioners, communities and partners. This can open up discussions about how and what kind of impact could be achieved together. Adopting a culturally grounded evaluative practice enables project teams to be true to the needs of the communities they serve. For funders and commissioners, acknowledging evaluation as a form of learning requires a change in mindset from one of monitoring to one of support. It requires trust in the organisations that they fund and to co-design evaluative practices that acknowledges the transformative potential. It involves expanding evaluation methods and approaches to include a broader spectrum of informal and qualitative evaluation approaches to complement traditional outcome-driven approaches. It is also important to build an eco-system of practitioners who have strong evaluative practices to support people who want to apply a more evaluative practice to their work