Abstract
Increasingly, the urban landscape is being influenced by people creating or remaking spaces, revealing new uses and opportunities to designers trained to shape the city. As a result, they are also shaping how designers practice, what they design and who they design for. With the professional design community increasingly tackling projects within these environments, a growing challenge has been to define this work: its theory of change, its activities, and its outcomes. This paper explores possibilities of definition through articulating a working framework of a deliberate process. It examines three projects that have recently emerged in this area of design practice. In particular, the paper focuses on four common strategy areas (process, milieu, boundaries, practice) consistently deployed in all three projects.
Notes
1. This paper will not delve into these projects but for more information, see Koolhaas et al. (Citation2000); Van der Haak (Citation2005); and Mostafavi & Doherty (Citation2010).
2. Disclosure: The author served as Design Director at Public Architecture during the primary development of this project.
3. Not all social impact design projects engage the informal sector, but it is a helpful filter in this discussion for framing a type of context.