The True Cost of Social Design

The challenge I face, which I think this group can help me with – maybe we can help each other – is that five years ago, as Ezio mentioned, social innovation and communities, were coming back into our picture, having been very prominent, as some of you know, in the 1970s and 1870ss and 1670s. Now everybody is talking about it, and we have a slightly refreshed question: How do you make sense of this explosion of activity? What can help us decide what is actively going well, and what is going badly? What is the measure?

On my way down here I was reading a book called “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is a very disturbing but very good book. He basically talks about the ways in which we as citizens and humans are disconnected from the consequences of our action when we buy food and when we eat something.

And I was thinking, well the same exact disconnection affects all of us when we make a product, when we design an intervention in a city, when we do a social innovation project.

That there is a kind of sense, which is a bit vague, that these things are good in themselves. But we need to know the costs and the consequences of our actions as designers, and as people changing reality.

The problem is, it’s not just a rational process, so the thing about food is a good example. We all kind of know that terrible and unspeakable things are done to animals, in order for us to get the food that we take for granted, to different degrees. But we are rational, well-informed and intelligent but we choose not to recognise this, or we are not connected emotionally to these facts because it’s inconvenient, or because, one way or another, it doesn’t work for us.

So the question I want to pose to this group is “How do we create this kind of sense of care and meaning about the costs of our actions as designers?”

And at the moment, frankly, this is missing in most cases.

How do we actually make ourselves go the last mile to the source of the product, the animal, the meal or the change that we are proposing - so that we actually do in a mindful way things that we would otherwise do without thinking too much about it.

So how do we do true cost social design, and how do we get motivated to do it?

John Thackara is a writer, speaker and event producer. He is the author of In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press) and of a widely-read blog, doorsofperception.com. As director of Doors of Perception, John organizes festivals around the world, at a city-region scale, in which communities imagine sustainable futures – and take practical steps to realize them. John studied philosophy, worked as a London bus driver, and was later a book and magazine editor. He was Director of Research at the Royal College of Art in London. From 1993 to 1999, he was founding Director of the Netherlands Design Institute in Amsterdam. In 2007, he was programme director of Designs of the time (Dott) a new social innovation biennial in England. He was commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, France, in 2008, and at Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2009. John Thackara lives in France. www.thackara.com