Teaching the Next Generation of Transdisciplinary Thinkers and Practitioners of Design-Based Public and Social Innovation

Abstract

Amidst a wide range of complex social issues and public governance challenges, both in the United States and internationally, there is an increasing interest in the public sector around the idea of social innovation, particularly design-based social innovation. There has been a proliferation of sites and spaces (“public innovation places”) in which designers have joined a multiplicity of actors all working to innovate new approaches to the provision of public goods. To train future designers adequately to operate within this new environment, it is imperative to rethink the ways in which we as design educators think through and approach issues of social and political complexity, and how we frame those in the context of studio projects. For the past five years, the Parsons DESIS Lab has been working through this question focusing on design for social innovation, dealing with community organizations, not-for-profits and the public sector to build new capacities, skillsets, and roles for design practitioners in order to position them as contributing agents of change. In this article we discuss the pedagogical opportunities, limits, and difficulties around the training of future transdisciplinary designers and thinkers seeking to address a range of complex social and political issues and willing to operate within the interstitials spaces between government, civil society, and the market, where new social innovations may arise. To do so, we will focus on a Fall 2013 studio course taught at Parsons Transdisciplinary Design MFA Program entitled “The NYC Office of Public Imagination”. The challenge was for students to design a hypothetical governmental agency, find a place for it inside the existing structure and parameters of city government, and imagine what that agency would do using design as a catalyst for social innovation.