The overlap between design and social innovation: Is there a sweet spot?
Being a greenhorn in the expansive territory of social innovation, I make it a point to be omnivorous, if not fully agnostic, when it comes to things I can learn, issues I can reflect on, impact I can help bring about, networks I can link up with, and opportunities I can partake of. Knowing very clearly and being intentional about it, I am well aware that I can put my talents and resolve to good use, and be enamored with the problem I want to address, more than the solution I want to realize.
With this in mind, a seed-stage concept for a social enterprise that I am initiating, together with the help of like-minded people who deeply resonate with this endeavor, I rolled up my sleeves, took a leap of faith, and embarked into a journey to see how to build on and improve this solution.
The central idea behind this incipient architectural start-up is inspired by many organizational models developed overseas like benefit corporations, architectural charities and social businesses, as well as a handful of local precedents, that seek to tackle hard-pressed community issues in the built environment such as chronic homelessness, rapid urbanization, vulnerable communities, dearth of open spaces, and exposure to extreme weather events and disaster risks, to name but a few. Prompted by the prevalence of exclusionary and antagonistic, anti-poor design, we have seen how there is an inequitable access to design and construction professionals, and a disgruntling indictment on the elitism of the design practice is voiced by many. Also, there is a swelling of indignation on how the practice of design, most especially the architectural profession, is somehow exacerbating social inequities and risks, mostly in the built urban environment.
But I beg to differ. Design, intrinsically, is empowering and liberating — it is but one of the instrumentalities to counter-balance the intractable problems abounding in our contemporary society. It need not be wielded by the hands of a few professionals and industries who keep the gates of design heavily locked up. Many a person are rising to the occasion and pitching in to respond to the unmet needs of their local communities through rendering charitable professional services. The civil sector is becoming more equipped as they harness the power of human-centered design to assist disenfranchised segments of the society. Educational institutions are slowly adopting humanitarian, empathic frames of mind meant to breed conscientious young students who have heart for the needy.
So, what’s next then? Now that there is a strong acknowledgment of the ‘salvific’ role of design in uplifting the conditions of disadvantaged sectors & communities, it is not a silver bullet in itself. How do we know that we are creating value out of existing design templates that fall short in addressing social inadequacies? How do we ascertain that our design solution is actually responsive to systems that are nested in other critical, interdependent systems? How do we know if we are touching onto structural problems that have dynamic influence to environmental, social and political spheres? How do we guarantee that we are not developing transactional and top-down design models that bring only limited, short-term benefits to a select few? So many questions ought to be begged.
Venturing into the field of social innovation and breaking down its fundamentals, I have gleaned that design can very well interface with social frameworks, developmental agenda and social entrepreneurship to create more impact and bring reciprocal benefits to the people and the planet. This is a key learning that has been reinforced further from our group’s participation in and selection to two timely opportunities, the Youth Social Innovation Lab 2020, a four-day online idea hackathon aimed at addressing issues on social protection, digital divide, and green economy during the course of the pandemic, organized by the United Nations Development Programme in partnership with CITI Foundation, and the Makesense Solution Sprint of Makesense Philippines, a one-month intensive program tailored to challenge young Filipino changemakers and innovators to develop and test out their early-stage social and environmental solutions.
Interspersed with structured tasks, workshops, assignments, networking and mentoring sessions, as well as project pitching, both the hackathon and the solution sprint are instrumental to stripping us off of our prior assumptions and biases as we got closer to a clearer and more concrete solution and operational model for our conceptual social enterprise. Further, we were equipped with an arsenal of skills, tools, and frameworks to analyze social issues, benchmark potential solutions, craft a social business model, map out the ecosystem and its interdependencies, empathize with the beneficiaries of the solution, and develop and test a service prototype as a way forward.
Our group, RADIC, composed of young professional architects-designers, have developed a response to devote our technical expertise and pool our resources to advance public interest design and social impact architecture, as well as anchor our efforts into attaining the urban SDG. On top of this, we have defined our social mission to champion sustainable urbanization and equitable, inclusive communities through the provision of technical design services and spatially innovative design solutions, and collaboration with complementary enterprises operating in the ecosystem.
The journey has just begun for us, but we need to hit the ground running. We know that there is much work to be done at once, and it is made doubly urgent by the scourge of the pandemic. As impoverished and vulnerable urban populations chip away at the toughness of a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, we know that there is a sweet spot between design and social innovation, and it will help us achieve our mission and foster social good.
