At the recent DMI conference in London, Geoff Mulgan, once Tony Blair's ex-strategy advisor and now a leading social entrepreneur, politely explained how 'social designers' had 'entered his space'... and failed. The reasons he gave were their naivete, their lack of knowledge about the public sector and their inability to effect change. While this caused some squirming in seats, it was a refreshing moment of critical, but constructive, feedback from a real power broker.
Social design is one of the new problem areas that designers have started to explore over the past decade, as the scope of design has expanded and the old disciplinary boundaries have blurred. Other new fields include service design, systems design, organizational design and design strategy. These interventions into new and more complex problem areas are sometimes called design thinking.
Whatever we call them, they present both opportunities and risks for design's trailblazers. The opportunities include a chance to expand the design industry into new, higher value disciplines. A risk, as Mulgan suggests, is that designers over-stretch themselves and damage their long-term prospects in these emergent domains.
(more...)