STREAM 2: DESIGN THINKING: USEFUL TOOLS & DIVERSE CRITIQUES

Description: 

Design thinking exploded into the social impact and social innovation space over a decade ago, influencing practices, thinking, and research and teaching.  We have seen calls to diffuse design thinking skills to generate social innovations and educate changemakers, and we are seeing calls to decolonize those same practices and purposes—to challenge the roots and liberate design thinking from its European, capitalist, and modernist foundations and assumptions. This stream invites contributions that span this diverse scholarship on design thinking in relation to social innovation. 

What arose as a methodology for product and service innovation (mostly in design firms and social enterprises in the global north) (Mulgan, 2006; Brown and Wyatt, 2010; Wyatt et al 2021) has evolved around the globe as ways of addressing social, political, and environmental challenges. Design thinking models or frameworks spreading globally include IDEO’s “HCD” to Stanford d. school’s (previous) 5-step process (EDIPT), the design squiggle, and the Innovators’ Compass. DT language of empathy, ideation, rapid prototyping, and mindsets (“Yes, And!”, “bias to action”, and “fail fast”) are ubiquitous in our social innovation vernacular and teaching of social innovation and social enterprise. As its popularity has grown, organizations, educators, and designers are reworking DT models, training methodologies, and theories, such as Diffuse Design (Manzini, 2015). The body of empirical evidence of what works for social sector (e.g. Ku and Lupton, 2020) is growing. 

Meanwhile, new language is spreading to communicate the value of design, what design means, and who gets to design. In particular, critical design scholars, especially from the global south, call for “decolonizing” design, among the many dominant practices of capitalism and European thought (Mignolo, 2018). Scholars are challenging the popular approaches to DT as embodying white privilege, capitalist and corporate values, and as  alienating and oppressive in its assumptions of what entails design and of how problems are identified, offering models of critical design, equity-centered community design, speculative design, emancipatory design (Noel, 2016), pluriversal designs, and others (OCAD & DRS, 2021) 

In this stream, we invite papers that investigate, explore and share insights into these diverse traditions, practices, discourses, and dynamics of design thinking in relation to the field of social innovation. We seek empirical work from any discipline as well as conceptual contributions across the epistemological spectrum. We welcome new theoretical stances, frameworks, and critical perspectives on dominant practices, as well as rich case studies. We aim to offer space for sharing of practical lessons, such as from applications of DT for generating social innovation in specific contexts, as well as for presenting new visions. What are the formulations and theories of design thinking for our 21st century pluriverse?  

Examples of types of papers/ topics we seek:  

• Empirical research (from any discipline) on an applications of design thinking for social innovation across organizations and communities of various sizes, sectors, structure, and profit orientations (i.e., DT for more effective and sustainable social enterprises).  

• Expositions and examples of bringing decolonial thinking into social impact-oriented design education, research, and practice. 

• Synthesis of learnings or “best practices” in applications/adaptations of design thinking to meet a variety of conditions and contexts. 

• Reflections on experiences in translating design processes into other socio-cultural contexts, organization settings, identify limits/blind spots of design thinking and situations where design thinking should be avoided. 

• Methodologies and models for design thinking (approaches, methodologies) across knowledge frameworks or cultural settings. 

• Tools and cases of co-creation and participatory design for social innovation in community settings (i.e., cooperatives, community development). 

• New pedagogies that embrace new thinking and challenges in design for social innovation. 

• And others. 

References  

Brown, T., Wyatt, J., 2010. Design Thinking for Social Innovation. Stanford Social Innovation. Review (SSIR). 

Escobar, A., 2018. Designs for the pluriverse : radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham : Duke University Press, Durham. 

Ku, B., Lupton, E., 2020. Health Design Thinking: Creating Products and Services for Better Health. MIT Press. 

Manzini, E., 2015. Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation, Design thinking, design theory. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

Mignolo, W., 2018. On Pluriversality and Multipolar World Order: Decoloniality after Decolonization: Dewesternization after the Cold War, in: Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge. Duke University Press. 

Mulgan, G., 2006. The Process of Social Innovation. Innov. Technol. Gov. Glob. 1. 

Noel, L.-A., 2016. Promoting an Emancipatory Research Paradigm in Design Education and Practice. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.21606/drs.2016.355 

OCAD & DRS. Pivot 2021: Dismanting.Reassembling Tools for alternative futures.  PIVOT 2021 Conference on https://pivot2021conference.com/ 

Wyatt, J. T. Brown & S. Carey, 2021. The Next Chapter in Design for Social Innovation. Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)