At the international conference What Design Can Do, The New Institute, with André Schaminée of Twynstra Gudde and Tabo Goudswaard kicked off a public, practical research project on social design for wicked problems.

The term social design is used in different contexts for different (rhetorical) purposes. It features prominently, but in different meanings, in various heated debates and seems to suffer from conceptual erosion.
The research project should help designers and artists to come to terms with the qualities and methods of social design. Simultaneously, it should equip problem owners (or opportunity hosts) to collaborate with artists and social designers. The research project should also give constructive input to the public debate on social design. Social design here, is not taken as a separate design practice, but understood as a set of motivations, goals, means and methods that can be part of various design disciplines.

In the round table discussion held at WDCD, five experts took part that operate in different design domains. They all consider social design to be part of their practice: Emer Beamer, Kars Alfrink, Pieter-Jan Stappers, Alastair Fuad-Luke and Tabo Goudswaard.
The session helped to find terms to address the aspects we want to study and clarify during the project. The report of this round table session van be found here.

OPEN CALL
For the research project two open calls will be issued: One for primary stakeholders in wicked issues, and one for design teams that will work on them.
We will team them up, monitor the processes, reflect upon the projects with experts in a series of public sessions and publish online on this researchblog.