Designing for free!?

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Christian Drehkopf

comment: Flipping through the web i passed http://www.socialdesignsite.com – a site about designing for the the lower parts of the pyramid. The owners of that site believe that they cannot change the world but either reinforce or change the way things are around us with every little things they do. To establish and change the social world we all live in every day. What they call social design. Interesting idea because design is able to solve problems even if there is not the big business behind that. The opposite of Business-Design?

What they say about themselves:

PURPOSES OF THE SOCIAL DESIGN SITE

SocialDesignSite.com is a non-profit organisation that aims to foster a discourse on social design through our international online platform and the organization of and participation in projects, exhibitions, conferences, lectures, etc.

1. The first purpose of SocialDesignSite is to create awareness on social design: We as individuals have social interactions everyday. We are not alone on a deserted island. We cannot not be social. Therefore we should be aware of the fact that we have the opportunity to choose our actions in everyday life. We have the choice between following the same habits, customs and lanes we did in the past or to change them. Every new day we could do things differently than we have done it before. For us this is social design, how do people organise their social life, how do we design our world?

2. As the topic social design is very elusive we are giving examples. SocialDesignSite is an exhibition for exemplary social design projects from a variety of fields. To give the broad topic some kind of a structure the projects are navigable by a list of pre-set keywords .

3. Our aim is also to interconnectthe projects and their owners as well as general public. The objective is to establish a unique interactive platform on social design between all the actors interested on the topic. For that we might come to organize real live events, lectures, exhibitions, conferences, or even online initiatives.

4. SocialDesignSite explores itself with all the project owners and interested people participating. We do not tell what social design is we just want to foster a discourse on social design in our forum .