DE7051 - Social Design Studio

Learning through doing, you will be introduced to, and coached in, the use of different design approaches to enact, as part of a team, participatory social design. Your place-based project will operate in a space between grassroots action, institutional services and structures and public policy. You will spend time engaging with people and their places and bringing people into your working space to host co-creative activities. You will learn by helping different individuals from across this project space to collaborate. Practical workshops will help prepare you to undertake participatory social design practice. The academic team of tutors will provide supervision for your project and this feedback will help you and your team address difficulties you encounter and steer the direction of your project.



In each studio, project practice is complimented with critical discourses introduced through active seminars. The Social Design Studio critical discourses relate to ‘who says what good is’, ‘is social design an act of public charity’, ‘are national and local resilience in harmony’, ‘can you design social change’, and ‘sustaining civics’?



Regular feedback provided by peers, academic tutors and collaborators alongside your studio practice will help you track your progress and make improvements. Written feedback will be provided in response to your assignment submission at the end of the module. The assignment and this feedback will help you consolidate your learning to date and carry it forward into the next part of the programme.

Social design and participatory practice will involve meeting new people and helping people who may not know each other to collaborate. Not everyone is comfortable talking or working with people they don’t know. The academic team will help develop your confidence in engaging in these social settings and will help you prepare and experience these settings in a staged manner. Social design engages with topics that people care about. We can expect some conflict and disagreements to surface. You will be academically prepared to anticipate and deal with disagreements as valid conflicting perspectives as a part of the designing process. The academic team will provide safe spaces for the cohort to talk about their experiences of co-design workshops to encourage positive learning and supportive development.



You will be introduced to locations and communities to anchor your social design project. You will be given autonomy to shape your project with the guidance and supervision of the academic team. Social Design is an area of research strength at the university, and you will be introduced to researchers and their work to inspire you and so you can benefit from their experiences of undertaking project like the one you are undertaking.



A detailed briefing at the start of the module and a module guide will help you understand how the module will run and what the expectations are. You will see your tutors throughout each week of the module where there will be opportunities to ask questions and gain support. Digital platforms allow you to engage in discussions and share relevant resources with the studio members (your peers, tutors and collaborators). These platforms also provide the means to contact your tutors directly.

All modules at Northumbria include a range of reading materials that students are expected to engage with. The reading list for this module can be found at: http://readinglists.northumbria.ac.uk
(Reading List service online guide for academic staff this containing contact details for the Reading List team – http://library.northumbria.ac.uk/readinglists)

Knowledge & Understanding:

Present a situated understanding of a social design context and its communities.

Draw from key literature to articulate your social design philosophy.



Intellectual / Professional skills & abilities:

Develop, in response to ongoing learning and discovery, a social design practice.



Personal Values Attributes (Global / Cultural awareness, Ethics, Curiosity) (PVA):

Be curious in your understandings of social design and sensitive in your collaboration with others.

Clarify your personal values and how these relate to your social design philosophy.

Formative assessment will be provided through weekly contact with peers and tutors, and through in-depth project review and debriefing sessions.



Summative assessment will review an individual 2000-word illustrated account of your project contributions and your own personal social design philosophy.



Written summative feedback will be provided to highlight the strengths of your assignment submission and its areas of improvement. This feedback will make clear how you performed against the assessment criteria. All MLOs will be assessed through your project report.

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How social is design? Can design purposefully shift social structures to address the inequalities that people experience? Can you unscramble the complications that arise while working with people attempting to materialise new kinds of futures?



In contrast with dominant forms of contemporary Western design that operate within, and reinforce, social and institutional structures, this studio will introduce disruptive forms of design that take aim at re-configuring social and institutional structures and logics. It will help you develop respectful, participatory design practices and allow you to contribute more sensitively to re-structuring the social for good.



Working with academic experts, a real-world, team-based project supporting external stakeholders to co-design preferred futures will provide an opportunity for you to explore the facilitatory power of design to navigate and mediate contested, challenging, and tense societal situations.



This studio is designed to enable student to act as co-researchers contributing new knowledge and understanding about social design as facilitatory practice. Your project-based contribution will be assessed through the development of a personal social design philosophy which will be presented in the form of a short report alongside the completed project presentation.