This book explores new forms of democracy in practice following the 2011 global uprisings; democracy that comes from below, by and for the ‘have-nots’. Combining theories of social innovation and collective leadership, it analyses how disadvantaged communities have addressed the effects of economic recession in two global cities: Barcelona and New York.

The United Nations, Australia Post, and governments in the UK, Finland, Taiwan, France, Brazil, and Israel are just a few of the organizations and groups utilizing design to drive social change. Grounded by a global survey in sectors as diverse as public health, urban planning, economic development, education, humanitarian response, cultural heritage, and civil rights, Design for Social Innovation captures these stories and more through 45 richly illustrated case studies from six continents. From advocating to understanding and everything in between, these cases demonstrate how designers shape new products, services, and systems while transforming organizations and supporting individual growth. How is this work similar or different around the world? How are designers building sustainable business practices with this work? Why are organizations investing in design capabilities? What evidence do we have of impact by design? Leading practitioners and educators, brought together in seven dynamic roundtable discussions, provide context to the case studies. Design for Social Innovation is a must-have for professionals, organizations, and educators in design, philanthropy, social innovation, and entrepreneurship. This book marks the first attempt to define the contours of a global overview that showcases the cultural, economic, and organizational levers propelling design for social innovation forward today.

Rooted in the places, cultures, histories, and wisdom of the diverse Asia-Pacific region, this book gathers heterogeneous practices of designing social innovation that address various social, political, and environmental challenges. In contrast to dominant notions of design from the Global North that evolved through industrialisation and modernist thinking, the examples in this book speak to designing that is embodied, relational, temporal, ontological, and entangled deeply with ecologies. This edited volume shares rich and detailed stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Samoa, Thailand, Vanuatu and a continent now called Australia, that offer honest and critical reflections from practitioners and scholars on designing social innovation. Contributors explore issues of ethics, politics, and positionality in their work. This book highlights the importance of respecting multiple knowledge streams, worldviews, and practices situated in a place. This then supports a plurality of designing social innovation. In all, this book offers ways to sharpen focus on entangled pluralities as a central condition for designing. It is a contribution of hope and inspiration that are becoming more urgently needed in the volatile uncertainties of this world. This book will be of interest to scholars working in social innovation, service design, social design, participatory design, design anthropology, and Asian studies.

The role of design, both expert and nonexpert, in the ongoing wave of social innovation toward sustainability. In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions, must define and enhance a life project. Sometimes these projects generate unprecedented solutions; sometimes they converge on common goals and realize larger transformations. As Ezio Manzini describes in this book, we are witnessing a wave of social innovations as these changes unfold—an expansive open co-design process in which new solutions are suggested and new meanings are created. Manzini distinguishes between diffuse design (performed by everybody) and expert design (performed by those who have been trained as designers) and describes how they interact. He maps what design experts can do to trigger and support meaningful social changes, focusing on emerging forms of collaboration. These range from community-supported agriculture in China to digital platforms for medical care in Canada; from interactive storytelling in India to collaborative housing in Milan. These cases illustrate how expert designers can support these collaborations—making their existence more probable, their practice easier, their diffusion and their convergence in larger projects more effective. Manzini draws the first comprehensive picture of design for social innovation: the most dynamic field of action for both expert and nonexpert designers in the coming decades.

This collection stems from the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) congress in 2021, promoting the research of design in its many fields of application. Today's design finds itself at a critical moment where the conventional ‘modes’ of doing, thinking and application are increasingly challenged by the troubled ideology of globalisation, climate change, migration patterns and the rapid restructuring of locally driven manufacturing sectors. The volume presents a selection of papers on state-of-the-art design research work. As rapid technological development has been pushing and breaking new ground in society, the broad field of design is facing many unprecedented changes. In combination with the environmental, cultural, technological, and, crucially, pandemic transitions, design at large is called to fundamentally alter its modes of practice. Beyond the conventional models of conducting research, or developing solutions to ‘wicked’ problems, the recoupling of design with different modes should be seen as an expression to embrace other capacities of thinking, criticisms and productions. This selection of proceedings papers delivers the latest insights into design from a multitude of perspectives, as reflected in the eight thematic modes of the congress ; i.e., [social] , [making] , [business] , [critical], [historical/projective], [impact], [pandemic], and [alternative] with design modes. The book benefits design researchers from both academia and industry who are interested in the latest design research results, as well as in innovative design research methods. In presenting an interesting corpus of design case studies as well as studies of design impact, this comprehensive collection is of relevance to design theorists and students, as well as scholars in related fields seeking to understand how design plays a critical role in their respective domains.

Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact. The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.

This volume discusses how design broadly understood as design of business, policy, product, system, etc. can produce socially responsible innovations with livelihoods consequences. Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) is a robust framework for analysing and measuring social impact for excluded populations and groups. This is illustrated with case studies from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal by discussing how initiatives concerned with design in the broad sense have the potential to create sustainable livelihoods. This volume will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in Sustainable Development and Design.