While design as a discipline is expanding from creating artefacts to interactions, innovations, participations and other services, there were many design movements over the years (Crucial Design/ Universal Design/ Inclusive Design/ Participatory Design) cumulating in public performances, exhibitions and publications for global debates. These practices will help to bridge gaps in design research and social practice. 

 

As Lucy Kimbell, head of social design at the Young Foundation, defined "There are now several initiatives in the UK and internationally in which design-based approaches are being used to support innovation and improvement in public services and tackling social problems… This does not mean that designers should be running everything. It's more that different kinds of professionals are trying out design-based approaches and methods on projects: early prototyping for project teams and the publics they serve, paying more attention to people's experiences of engaging with services in situ, and explicitly getting diverse people involved in doing designing... Social design is gaining importance as some services are now expected to be delivered by communities themselves…“ (Bailey J (2012) Role of social design in public services, The Guardian, 19 April )

 

How do designers become social?  Dr Yanki Lee, Director of HKDI DESIS Lab and Dr Denny Ho (何國良博士), a renowned local sociologist, co-authored a research paper to raise this question and have recently presented at the IASDR 2013 conference in Tokyo’s Shibaura Institute of Technology. They suggested three components should be highlighted when training novice design practitioners in order to turn them into a social-change agency:

 

1. Defining public through design

2. Democratising design practice

3. Changing roles of designers 
    

For the HKDI DESIS Lab, we will carry out these components through a series of “design possible studies” (設計可能性研究) enabling designers to ‘spark’ a public into being, formulate a special relationship with potential users of their object of design, constitute their political ethics of design and practise the designerly ways of doing.