Designing for Social Change: Articulating the Steps in the Social Design Process

Despite the negative associations with the term, social design is about creating new social forms (or buttressing existing ones) through leveraging the features of social settings. Recent years have seen more of a trend towards understanding social design as social interventions meant to create positive change for a greater good. At the same time, there lacks a clear articulation of the steps needed in order to engineer a social design project. Through an examination of the Fun House Project, the purpose of this paper is to show how a social design project can be presented in a design process format. Our goals are to explicate the social design process, to make it visible, to articulate it, and to provide an example of a procedural format for social design projects.