DEFINING SOCIAL DESIGN
Social design doesn't let you describe it in a few sentences, and the concept has different meanings for different people in different parts of the world. To us it means taking the social mechanisms in public space, human relations, organizations or whatever seriously when working with content. The social aspect of a given context seems to always be of incredible importance - but is often ignored in creative work. Now, the word social can mean at least two different things. It can relate to society, and thus often implies philanthropy of some kind - or it can be a technical term for interaction between beings. The latter meaning is the most interesting to us, because it can function as a tool in the design process. When trying to define the relevance of this kind of sociality in connection with creative work for Wikipedia, we wrote as follows:
"The term social design is used to describe design of the social world. This definition implicates a perception of a man-made reality, which consequently can only be changed by man, and is changed by man all the time. In this view social design is inescapable, it is there whether people are aware of it or not. The social reality is created as a result of the sum of all our individual actions."
Social design thus represents an ambition to cross paths with other professions such as sociology, anthropology and psychology but brings with it an underlying ethos of intuitive and experiences based thinking. This method, not mentioning its technicalities in detail, has been the basis for SKÆVE BØRN's work so far.
