24-01-2012

A Symposium

Design; a Catalyst of Sustainable India.

27 -28 January, 2012

National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

There is increasing realization now worldwide, for the need to focus on sustainable development of both the society as well as the economy. Even in India the gap between the socio-cultural change and the economic change are increasing everyday. The present methods and models of both the business and the economic progress are inadequate and new models are being explored for new directions and leapfrog solutions. The emergence of the social economy makes even more explicit the great pressure to develop innovations related to social demands.

Social innovation is a process of change where new ideas emerge from a variety of actors directly involved in the problem to be solved: final users, grass roots technicians and entrepreneurs, local institutions and civil society organizations.

(www.desis-network.org)

Design can provide important contributions to social innovation, and vice versa. Social innovation can be a large and growing opportunity for a new generation of designers: professional designers and design researchers working to develop and sustain new networks, and feeding them with needed design knowledge. Design communities, design researchers and design schools need to recognize it as a new challenge and new area of activity. Institution, enterprises, nonprofit organization and most of all networks of collaborative people can be the potential collaborator/s with design fraternity to accept the change to bring the change in society.

Design for social innovation and sustainability is whatever design can do to trigger, support and orient social innovation and sustainability.

Design schools have now greater responsibility to educate the next generation design experts. Design schools can be today, active agents of sustainable change. They are the “laboratories of the new”, where new visions are generated, new tools are defined and tested and where new projects are started and supported dealing with the social and cultural diversity.

Design institutes thus form an important contributor to this new direction and the field. Various research based projects, professional design projects students classroom projects, workshops etc. are undertaken at these design institutes that explore new directions for social innovations and sustainability in the Indian context.

Also the design professionals in the country are actively engaged at the grassroots level and have explored and implemented new design directions that enhance and encourage social innovation and sustainability.

The two-day symposium aims to provide a platform for the design students, design educators and the practicing designers in this important field of Social Innovation and Sustainability to share, discuss and learn from the experiences and also create an active network of the likeminded designers.

The symposium invites design students, design educators and professional designers to present the process, the outcome and the learnings from their recently completed class room project, research project and /or professional project undertaken in the area of social innovation and sustainability. The project should demonstrate design intervention and the proposed new directions that may have emerged. The interested student designers, designers and design educators may send/ submit an abstract of the project (not more than 500 words) to desis-india@nid.edu for its review and selection latest by 15^th November 2011.

Symposium Coordinator: Mr Amresh Panigrahi

Symposium Chair: Mr Vijai Singh Katiyar and Mr Shashank Mehta

DESIS Statement

Design as Agent of Sustainable Changes

Social Innovation.

Over the last decade a multiplicity of social actors throughout the world (institutions, enterprises, non-profit organisations and, most of all, networks of collaborative people) have moved outside mainstream models of thinking and doing, generating a variety of promising initiatives (community- supported agriculture, co-housing, car pooling, community gardens, neighborhood care, time banks,...). They are working prototypes of sustainable ways of living and, at the same time, they are viable solutions to complex problems of the present (such as social cohesion, urban regeneration, healthy food accessibility, water and sustainable energy management). Together they form a promising wave of social innovation recognizable in all the regions of the world, from mature industrial countries, to emerging and developing ones. Today, these social innovations constitute a constellation of small initiatives mainly promoted by active local communities. Nevertheless, an attentive observation indicates that, if favorable conditions are created, these small, local social inventions and their working prototypes can be scaled-up and consolidate, replicate, integrate with larger programs and generate large sustainable changes. One of these favorable conditions is the existence of diffuse design capabilities.All the partners involved, in fact, must be able to consider problems and opportunities, imagine something that does not as yet exist and collaborate in finding the way to bring it into being.

Design.

Scaling-up social innovation is, therefore, a design-led process, where “the designer” is not a single specialized figure, but a variety of actors who collaborate in co-designing more mature, lasting, replicable solutions. Among them a particular role must be played by design experts: the social actors who have received formal training in design. Indeed it is these design experts who are able to use their specific knowledge to stimulate the design capabilities of the other partners by triggering the innovation processes with scenarios and proposals, supporting them with specific design tools, and recognize in the emerging social inventions the potentialities for new product-service systems. Some design-led initiatives already exist (for instance, in the areas of local food networks, collaborative housing, social services, mobility systems), but far more of them can and must be promoted. For the design community (professional designers, design researchers, design media and design schools) these interventions must be recognized as a new and challenging field of activity. In order to facilitate this recognition, and to promote new initiatives, a dedicated worldwide network on design for social innovation and sustainability has been established: the DESIS Network.

DESIS Network.

DESIS is a network of design schools and other partners (institutions, companies and non-profit organizations) interested in promoting and supporting design for social innovation and sustainability. Currently, it is operating in Europe, Brazil, China, South Africa, Colombia and the USA, and it is in its construction phase in several other countries and regions. It is endorsed by UNEP-United Nations Environment Program and collaborates with other international partners (SIX-Social Innovation Exchange, Cumulus and Lens). The general aim of DESIS is to promote design-led sustainable social changes. This overall goal is pursued in several streams of activities: giving social innovations greater visibility, making them more effective and replicable, integrating them in larger programs, clarifying their potentialities in terms of emerging demands (for services and products), original business ideas (in the framework of the emerging social economy) and sustainable planning (in the perspective of a sustainable urban and regional development).

Design Schools.

DESIS has its main pillar in the design schools. There are two underlying motivations for this: design schools are where the next generations of design experts are educated, and this, of course is very important for the future. However, design schools can also be, today, active agents of sustainable change. They can be “laboratories of the new”, where new visions are generated, new tools are defined and tested and where new projects are started and supported. Considered as a whole, they can operate as a large “distributed design agency” where a multiplicity of design teams promote social innovation being, at the same time, both mutually connected and sensitive to cultural and social diversity.

If a worldwide movement towards sustainability calls for the best possible use of all existing resources, design schools, with all their potential in terms of students' enthusiasm and teachers' experience, should be considered a very promising social resource. Recognizing this potentiality, DESIS intends to do everything possible to make it real by helping design schools to become catalysts of the whole design community and, in turn, supporting the whole design community in becoming a major agent of sustainable change.