Perspectives

Change design?

We’re introducing ‘Change Design’ as a unifying term to encompass the many disciplines, activities, and institutions driving socio-political change and innovation. We see Change Design as a situation-based and action-oriented field of practice for navigating and responding to complex socio-political problems. It is an emergent and inherently interdisciplinary practice which is comprised of civil servants, activists and social designers.

What’s the big deal?

We’ve observed first hand that meaningful and effective contributions to sophisticated Change Design require a transitional step between education and work as well as an ability for multidisciplinary collaboration, but in practice, this isn’t always available.

While there is a lot of existing knowledge and expertise across Change Designers — civil servants, activists and social designers — the cognitive glue to foster global, intergenerational, and cross-disciplinary ongoing learning in Change Design is missing at scale.

We see this a risk: a risk to the social change momentum, a risk to the role of Change Design in social fields, and most importantly a risk to the people and communities we have a responsibility to serve and collaborate with.

**“Design is ubiquitous; anywhere we look, we see design busy at work, from our hand-held devices to cities, and from education and health to food and agriculture.**
Social theorists have not taken design seriously at this level; conversely, designers have gone about their task without sufficient critical awareness of the fundamental fact that what they do indelibly shapes the kinds of subjects we become, the ecologies we inhabit, what we enable or destroy – in other words, as design critic Anne-Marie Willies puts it, that design designs: we design the world and the world designs us back.”

ARTURO ESCOBAR | *DESIGNS FOR THE PLURIVERSE*

Read more about the perspectives from The Residency co-founders / stewards:

This series in Apolitical captures reflections from members of The Residency on their multidisciplinary and cross-sector practice. Members share their experiences and thoughts on nascent, emergent and contested discourses in public problem-solving. A yearlong process of research, concepting, and co-designing the collective together with members, sparked this series. It precedes operationalization of the collective’s pilot and prototypes planned for 2020.

Perspectives

Change design?

What’s the big deal?

Introducing: The Residency

Absorbing Design in Social Systems

Creating Global Learning Systems Infrastructure

Let’s call it out: innovation has an authenticity problem

how to learn from failure without causing a scandal

how to break free from gridlocked conversations

The value of small circles in an era obsessed with scale