In recent decades, many design practices have shifted focus from primarily producing material things to addressing complex social challenges through innovation.
Bachelor of Design Honours – Social Innovation Project
In designing to address social challenges, solutions are intended to generate value for society rather than only for a limited set of customers or private individuals. The focus usually starts on understanding the problem and its social, environmental and economic factors – and then looks to work collaboratively with stakeholders to design and test solution ideas.
Industry demand
Employers have become increasingly interested in this ability of designers to create positive change beyond the production of visual and physical objects. This is reflected in the rapid expansion of new job titles for designers and the diversity of organisations seeking to hire them.
It's becoming common for research and strategy consultants, government organisations, not-for-profit organisations and the private sector to seek out designers for their great strategic thinking, ability to create novel ideas, and their skills in representing and testing ideas in different forms. These skills are represented by job titles such as strategic designer, social designer, service designer, human-centred designer, user researcher and user experience (UX) designer.
A new pathway in Design Honours
In 2022, the UTS School of Design introduced a new pathway in the Bachelor of Design Honours for students to learn about design for social innovation in the development of their major project. They take this as a subject called the Social Innovation Project. UTS School of Design partnered with The UTS Social Impact Lab and the Cooling the Commons research collaboration — so that Social Innovation Project students could explore how to address increasing levels of heat stress for people living in low-income housing in Glebe.
Throughout the year, the students worked together to map the problem space, facilitate a workshop with stakeholders and run participatory design research interviews with social housing residents. They were mentored in how to collaborate with each other and the project stakeholders, developing essential professional practice skills for design in social innovation domains.
Individual projects for common good
Students work together to collaboratively explore aspects of the problem. But they also choose an individual focus area and research question to guide their major Honours project. The 2022 cohort held a prototyping session to test their design solutions with social housing residents, social housing managers and researchers, with design ideas including:
- An evaporative cooling device made from recycled materials in the local area
- A community map and educational resources which trial new ways to represent cool spaces in the local area, and
- A physical device that helps social housing managers and residents decide how to prioritise home maintenance issues.
Students then consider and implement stakeholder feedback to refine their final design solutions, as well as writing about their research explorations in a research paper. The students are due to showcase their work with the UTS Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion in November 2022.
To find out more about UTS Bachelor of Design Honours – whether you currently study with UTS or not – you can:
- Visit the Bachelor of Design Honours course information page
- Email the Design Honours Director for more information
- Book a video chat with the director to get your specific course questions answered.
Read about the Cooling the Commons cross-disciplinary research program
