Design for Societal Issues

—Transforming Design into a Societal Process—

Abstract

The target of design is expanding from manufactured products and services to society itself. Also the scope of the designer's role is spreading to a wider range of players throughout society. This means we must emphasize a new facet vital to the world of design – that of accepting and understanding differing viewpoints from the diverse range of members comprising society, and create a new system based on this new foundation. These phenomena show a change in the application of design, from an industrial and consumer orientation to a societal and democratic orientation. It also indicates a change in those responsible for design, from professional designers to people who generate and establish societal habits. This paper uses several arguments as a foundation to argue that our current societal processes generate various activities that can and should be used as environments for developing designs, rather than limiting work to the designer's studio. I call this concept “Societal Design.” Discussions in this paper are based on various aspects and phenomena realized during a workshop on welfare design in which the experimental co-design process was carried out by social activists and designers. The workshop was organized as an exploration of our research program on developing the Societal Design method and methodology.