Designing for viable futures: Community engagement as social innovation

Creative industries such as industrial design, architecture, interaction design, and fashion embed design disciplines, methods and processes with the intention and focus on designing with and for people. While there is a myriad of methods to help designers work with people of all backgrounds and demographics, engagement is a critical aspect of such a human centric focus. From this perspective, engagement means the critical involvement or participation of people with the content (i.e. object, problem, question) being developed or explored. Depending on the design discipline or the approach, the content and context may vary. Key theories that underpin a design discipline’s approach to community engagement processes come from participatory design, place theory, and design for social innovation. In participatory design and in place theory, engagement is a process driven by the direct involvement of people, the end users or the people that will be affected by the design intervention; a ‘process’ where people provide their input by engaging with the problem being discussed, or by providing input through their lived experience with the problem they are interacting with. Extant literature on community engagement in a design process offers descriptions of methods and approaches, discussions of the challenges of such collaborative and participatory approaches and of maintaining sustainable and ethical practices (Ehn, Nilsson, & Topgaard, 2014; Hillgren, Seravalli, & Emilson, 2011). An aspect requiring further exploration is the identification of the social and cultural factors shaping and influencing the ways people engage in community-based projects. In this chapter we explore these issues through two design projects and other examples of community engagement involving design projects for social innovation, where the process was intended to facilitate the creation of viable futures through design. It is within this scope that we define ‘community engagement’ as a participatory process that is led with a bottom up approach and that is distinguished by the sharing of knowledge as an indispensable component for community participation in social innovation projects. This process is stimulated by the co-production of knowledge among all participants, and where the forms of community engagement and of community participation is determined and shaped by its context. From this perspective the notion of community engagement is a dynamic one, and is redefined in every project according to the multiple factors that contribute to the context of the project. These different elements depend on the content being explored, the questions being asked, the people involved and the location of the community. Altogether, these aspects constitute the social and cultural fabric of the participatory process in which people engage with. This chapter presents an exploration of the notion of engagement from the perspective of design disciplines; specifically focusing on the topic of community engagement where social innovation driven projects are constrained by social and cultural factors. Through the examples presented in this chapter, we explore and further describe the four aspects observed in these design-led projects that are comprised in our definition of community engagement. The three questions guiding our exploration are: What does engagement look like in design-led projects? What does it mean to the participants? and How is community engagement re-defined through these processes