Social design principles and practices: exploring how designers work in this realm.

We propose the concept of indiscipline as an alternative way of looking at and understanding the culture of design. In particular, this project focusses on the democratic and participatory aspects of design, i.e. a concept of design whose object is the social transformation and whose practice involves the collaboration between users and designers. Based on the understanding that all collaboration, especially the one in which more just and sustainable futures are concerned, is as conflictive as it is harmonious, this thesis focuses on indiscipline both as an expression of denial/negation and simultaneously action with clinamen, emancipatory and of the actual transformation situation – design – in progress.

Based on four episodes that happened during a process of investigation by practice, we raise the hypothesis-question that transformation of design in the context of social environment (in the neighbourhood, in the public square, or in the classroom) is in how to transform, and not on the result of that transformation (an artefact). As we have shown, in the cases under study, dissent is also a form of design, and it is understood that the border between diffuse and specialist design is performative. That is, the distinction between knowledge or design capabilities (designer and non-designer) is not natural, but unstable and dialogical, therefore permeable to transformations and mutual learning among the participants themselves (co-design as trans-design ecologies). From here, we see how the discipline of design expands beyond its conventional limits, insofar as artefacts cease to be ends to be achieved or materialised, but principles of openness that point out possible ways to create and anticipate transformations, whether intended or non-intentional.

On the premise that all design tends to be co-design, this thesis aims to be a contribution to better understand the experience of collaboration between diffuse design and specialist design. Pioneering contemporary design discussions, practices and research into the path of more just and sustainable worlds in these collaborative ecologies where design is the situation. Taking the situated perspective of a path that begins in communication design, this thesis demonstrates that it is possible, both in pedagogic and professional contexts, to activate practices of democratic and participative ethos as a means to understand the social, ethical and political dimensions of thought and design action and thereby transform.