This article was presented at the conference “Design as Common Good – Framing Design through Pluralism and Social Value”, which took place online from 25 to 26 May 2021. The conference was organized by the Swiss Design Network and all presentations were later published as conference proceedings. The full article can be downloaded here.
Designing Beyond the Common Good – an Evolutionary Process between Speculation and Reality (Abstract)
Dustin Jessen & Simon Meienberg, 2021
To what extent can designers direct their professional practices towards serving the common good? Design constitutes itself anew with every project. Each project is both conditioned and made possible through a unique constellation of actors, timeframes, objectives, skills, etc. which arise from both social values and political agendas. We discuss the different approaches of two selected design projects by the authors, and the respective strategies and methods. While the designers’ ambition in both projects was certainly to change an existing situation into a preferred one – the first by the means of interactive user engagement, the second through the idea of semi-finished product semantics – we emphasize on the challenges and ambiguities arising from the evolutionary process of design, aiming at the common good. Eventually we conclude that design processes can serve as a tool to debate rather than create the common good.