Communicating Disparity: How Social Design Can Create Public Engagement with Issues of Inequality

"[A] social design focus should concentrate on context-specific innovations that open safe spaces for dialogue and create new ways of delivering motivating and clear messages to the general public by challenging normalised ideas. Ultimately, this article creates a platform upon which this type of social design thinking and output can develop."

This article, from the Journal of Development & Communication Studies, discusses public engagement in light of social inequality. "For many disadvantaged individuals and communities social disparity is often naturalised and tolerated, while for the wider public interest it is commonly presented in the form of bewildering statistics and policy-focused technocracy. The result is frequently inertia."

The author proposes a social design approach to stimulate people to "seek new ways to compel change in their own contexts." Through disrupting "normalised" behavioural patterns, social design can facilitate development of communicative tools and create spaces to "de-mystify and ‘de-naturalise’ social inequality" and "new spaces for dialogue and communication through creative thinking." A platform for safe communication spaces and techniques to engage people can "put contextualised individuals and the public at the centre of the dialogue, bestowing an authority on them to describe and explain the situations of disparity that are lived through in everyday life."

The author discusses the embedding of inequality, which becomes internalised, as described by Paolo Friere: "The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalised."

The author argues that the "source of authority" of data-driven social and economic analyses "obfuscates the true impact of inequality and disengages the vast majority of the community." Because the media plays an important role in shaping people’s preferences and policy outcomes, the author finds that it becomes a tool for the wealthy to manipulate opinion and policy. He then shifts his argument to the engagement of the public in "[m]aking society a matter for the general public" through social media as a way of "prompting social action to combat inequality." However, the digital gap that reinforces inequalities is recognised as involving "gaps between groups in awareness, adoption, skills, devices, use and outcomes for communication technology."

"Social design seeks solutions and improvements to enhance people’s lives and create a sustainable society by applying design principles to social issues..." by including end users and social participants. "It aims for transformational, structural and systemic change through disruptive design thinking...", including a focus on "the design of products that benefit people (for example, the design of water purifiers for people living without potable water); or services (for example, designing more inclusive financial services); or processes (for example, designing participatory decision-making processes inside organisations)....Social design innovation needs to be accessible and viable so that generated ideas can be implemented by (and with) non-designers for the greatest impact. This can be achieved through a culture and process of storytelling and exploration or, in different situations, through observation, experience and research." This research phase of "hearing" is followed by facilitated participation or co-design: "Such a bottom-up perspective requires that the interaction be context-specific (or place-based) to ensure that the design outputs have people, communities and location at the core of the empathetic collaboration..."

Highlighting different techniques, mediums, and participants, some examples of bringing inequality to the forefront of the public include dialogue and storytelling. "[S]torytelling needs to be in the toolkit of the design thinker - in the sense not of a tidy beginning, middle, and end but of an on-going, open-ended narrative that engages people and encourages them to carry it forward and write their own conclusions." Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talks are an example of a platform that includes "free access to knowledge from inspirational thinkers. It is a non-profit company that holds two annual conferences and includes the TED Talks website, the Open Translation Project and TED Conversations, the TED Fellows and TEDx programmes, and the annual TED Prize." For example, a TED talk participant, Professor Hans Rosling, developed the Gapminder website and associated tools to show tangible statistical representations that could represent and communicate information to promote sustainable global development.

Documentaries on inequality are also tools to engage public interest in, for example, the notion of a living wage. "Achievements such as these show significant progress in disrupting some of mechanisms that drive disparity and show strong citizen-led and backed participation....This article argues that there needs to be additional contextual communicative approaches that empower the disadvantaged to understand their situation of inequality and its causes so that they can create opportunities to respond themselves."

Further examples of social design in communication include:

• the Es Tiempo campaign, which included women in designing health access spaces that were based upon resolving their experiences of anxieties and concerns that created a disparity in health seeking behaviours.
• the Glasgow Refugee Asylum and Migration Network (GRAMNet), which provides regular workshops on relevant topics (such as rights, translation, and health) and movie screenings and, in addition, included the work of Australian artist Daniel Connell, who explores the role of the visual arts in enhancing a sense of belonging by placing large, hand-drawn portraits of recent migrants in public places in cities.

The author suggests that these more inclusive social design techniques are "responding to the challenge by finding new spaces and techniques for successful storytelling and altering perspectives."