Design for social good by designing better relationships
Design for social good isn't just about better products or services. It is about the relationships they create between people, communities, institutions and systems, and the conditions those relationships make possible.
Design for social good is often understood as a special category of work. It is associated with public services, non-profits, humanitarian projects, climate initiatives or products created for underserved communities. Commercial design, meanwhile, is placed in another category—focused on growth, efficiency, engagement and revenue.
This separation is becoming harder to defend.
Every product, service, platform and system changes how people behave. It influences who participates, who gets excluded, how decisions are made, where trust is placed and how people relate to one another.
A product does not need to carry the label of social impact to produce social consequences.
This was the central idea explored during a members-only EPC conversation with Dr. Idrees Rasouli, Associate Professor of Design and Urban Innovation at ARU Cambridge.
His presentation introduced the Thinking City, a framework for looking at social good not merely as the outcome of a well-designed product, but as something that emerges through stronger relationships between people, communities, institutions, businesses, technologies and places.
The presentation was followed by a wide-ranging discussion with EPC members. The conversation moved beyond theory and addressed the difficult parts of the practice: power, conflicting values, business pressures, cultural differences, experimentation, behaviour change and the question of who gets to define what is good.
The discussion offered a larger proposition for designers:
The next phase of design may not be about creating better things. It may be about creating better conditions for people to live, learn, decide and act together.
