Design for social innovation

Design is emerging as a rich resource to social innovation, as evidenced in the vast use of design tools and approaches by a growing intermediary system (e.g. innovation labs, think tanks, and research centres/consortiums). Most of these toolkits provide a sort of roadmap and a collection of tools to be used in the different phases of the social innovation design process. The rise in popularity of design as a resource for innovation can be attributed to a push away from material objects to the application of the methods and processes of expert designers to solve just about any problem (Kimbell 2009). By diffusing ‘designerly ways of thinking and doing’ (Archer 1979; Cross 1982) through a modelized process and set of tools, design thinking has become a sort of innovation formula that promises creative solutions to a wide range of issues: heralded as the competitive advantage of companies (Martin 2009), the strategy of business management and the collaborative partner in solving social and environmental problems (Manzini 2015). This is evident in the wide uptake of design thinking by management consultancies (Deserti and Rizzo 2014) and its widespread use in the intermediary systems of social and public sector innovation (Deserti and Rizzo 2019).