There is no doubt that we live in interesting times. Facing unprecedented challenges and previously unimaginable opportunities. The big question is whether we can design effective ways to navigate and innovate our future and tackle issues of sustainability, health, technology, and venerability of people, places and our planet. Design approach knowledge, tools and methods that can help us purposefully create responses to the challenges that we face. After all, design is about creating a better world. Design is about more than just creativity and generating good ideas. The challenges we face require practical and sustainable solutions, not just a myriad of new ideas. Design innovation in social well-being is more practical and applicable way of designing a better society.

Rather than design focusing solely on heating up the economy so it grows, driving consumption and stimulating sales. Design should be focused on society’s most important challenges and complex social issues, such as reducing poverty, inequality, malnutrition, female empowerment, prevention of chronic illness, better sanitation, pollution, water shortage and much more critical and social issues. Designers need to connect and collaborate innovative design practices from around the world. Explore the know-how behind designing new products that can ensure everyone has opportunities to build positive futures; Innovative ways in which people-centered services can deliver real impact. What underlies the path of social innovation is not a social problem to be solved, but the social change it brings about, which includes the creation of new ideas that propose new alternatives and new social practices for social groups

What underlies the path of social innovation is not a social problem to be solved, but the social change it brings about.

Designers for social innovation

We, as designers do not have a monopoly over social innovation, But we do have an important skill-set to apply to social innovation — namely, an empathic approach to their solutions. Unlike engineer’s working extensively from technology or science, we start from people.We tend to understand the needs in a better and more empatizing way and inturn come up with solutions which never existed. We have to look at participatory process such as large-scale people movements using social media and examine communication designs that help spread and scale social innovation. With such a large collaboration of designers, we will not only learn to put into practical approaches and methods of design of each other but also explore participatory redesigned traditions through which we can co-design solutions with the people who are directly affected by particular social issues. Many organizations have started moving towards having their own role in this social innovation design. Its just matter of time that each one of us becomes a part of this in creating a better future.

Unlike engineer’s working extensively from technology or science, designers start from people and empathize with them.

Conclusion

Design methods can be used to develop hybrid organizations such as social enterprises and collective impact approaches to addressing complex social issues. Using design thinking encourages designers to explore new alternatives and creating options that had not existed before. Focusing on the needs of the people to create a better solution and helping the society by bringing the design into a society and support these processes by providing our problem-solving and sensemaking skills where each problem is solved by a unique solution which was never thought of before and making our societies a better place.