Abstract
Social design has emerged as a broad set of designerly approaches to societal challenges. With falling public sector budgets and failing economies, social design, as carried through professional, consultant practices rather than in its voluntarist or activist modes, is understood to work as a smart, fast way of seeing us through these. Outsourcing, Outcome-Based Budgeting and the stirring up of traditional governance systems and responsibilities each contribute to a more varied and less permanent design landscape to work in, however. These are met by a set of design methods to researching, generating and realising new ways to configure and deliver services. This paper takes a critical view that asks whether consultant social design really is ‘social’ or whether, instead, it conspires, in its methods and in the contexts it is active in, towards the opposite.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Guy Julier http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0416-5764
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Guy Julier
Guy Julier is the University of Brighton/Victoria and Albert Museum Professor of Design Culture.