Social Design: Transforming Corporate Social Responsibility

The crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened growing public awareness of the urgent need for systemic change and prompted businesses to take a new look at their social conduct and their responsible performance as agents of change. 

The confinement to which we were subjected for more than two years forced many companies to modify their organizational structures by creating working groups, or "cells," with defined objectives that interconnect to obtain specific results. This circumstance promotes the development of flexible work systems that favor the integration of innovative social solutions, such as social design.

One way in which businesses are encouraged to involve themselves in society is through social innovation (SI), which entails a shared responsibility for environmental and ethical sustainability in aspects associated with inequality and the strategies needed to deal with it. Innovation can be a key factor not only in raising businesses’ productivity and competitiveness, but in reducing inequality and poverty in the world as well. SI proposes new forms of institutional engagement, a reconsideration of the roles of public enterprise, civil society organizations, and enterprises, engineering new ways for businesses and society to interact, by creating and transforming knowledge.

We must not forget that SI seeks to generate value for society by introducing a new product, service or process that meets a social need more efficiently, causing a positive, lasting, scalable change in the social environment. It seeks to involve the community as a whole, and it stands in dramatic contrast to the old vision of a homogeneous society and one-size-fits-all strategies where societies are expected to adapt to the needs of businesses. In this context, social design (SD) constitutes a creative practice dedicated to understanding social problems and supporting positive social change, creating opportunities that shift relations between people and people, and people and institutions and enterprises through new forms of interaction.

SD has at its core the human being. It seeks empowerment from the local level so that, by modifying communication processes, solutions can be devised for a specific social context. It proposes new values, and with companies’ involvement, encourages experimentation in flexible, non-linear and non-traditional practices, where the dynamics are more bidirectional, and more stakeholders can benefit.

The traditional view of designers is as talented (but somewhat narrow and usually outside) experts who apply their personal vision to the creation of products, communications and services. The value of traditional design is measured by its direct contribution to the bottom line.

Companies that produce sustainable products understand that you need to consider the entire system of which that product is a part.

SD takes that one step further: design a system that supports the people and infrastructure that make the products, help them be more creative, more innovative and "scale up" the principles and processes of design to work on human dynamics with a deep understanding of context. The principle is to create the conditions for success by engaging stakeholders, building strong relationships, and sharing access to knowledge. When SD is applied to business, it can shift cultures, instill creativity throughout an organization, and ignite the new thinking and transformational opportunities we need now.

Following these precepts, SD introduces methods that rely on experimentation, grounded in evidence drawn from the specific social contexts in which they develop, and which use comparative evaluation to identify best practices. 

The new reality requires us to SD strategies in which business practices are integrated into various social dynamics based on three principles: identity, conversation, and community. This in order to understand the individual and their social context. The reason for this is because conversation serves as the glue between identity and community. Conversation is how we express our identities to a community and how we receive feedback from society, and in the process, strengthening business.

Social designers find their inspiration from seeing unexpected connections between things – noticing the unusual relationships that change the nature of the whole. They map these connections, making them cogent and visible; dynamics that were unseen before become part of the conversation, part of what can be designed.

For businesses, this is especially significant, because they can refocus their engagement outside of and within the organization to adapt to the new realities of this post-pandemic world. Very often companies are likely to encounter resistance to change within their ranks, and an attitude that environmental issues or community impact should take a back seat to profitability or financial results — but giving way to these attitudes can mean tensions and friction with this new social reality.

Finally, we should bear in mind that successful social innovation reduces vulnerability and enhances resilience through a transformative impact on societies. It is a process in which various organizations create new initiatives to generate lasting, meaningful change by acting out of a sense of ethical, responsible commitment. These trends are involving an increasing number of business organizations regardless of their size or global presence, modifying corporate social responsibility as a whole.