Rooted in the places, cultures, histories, and wisdom of the diverse Asia-Pacific region, this book gathers heterogeneous practices of designing social innovation that address various social, political, and environmental challenges.
In contrast to dominant notions of design from the Global North that evolved through industrialisation and modernist thinking, the examples in this book speak to designing that is embodied, relational, temporal, ontological, and entangled deeply with ecologies. This edited volume shares rich and detailed stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Samoa, Thailand, Vanuatu and a continent now called Australia, that offer honest and critical reflections from practitioners and scholars on designing social innovation. Contributors explore issues of ethics, politics, and positionality in their work. This book highlights the importance of respecting multiple knowledge streams, worldviews, and practices situated in a place. This then supports a plurality of designing social innovation. In all, this book offers ways to sharpen focus on entangled pluralities as a central condition for designing. It is a contribution of hope and inspiration that are becoming more urgently needed in the volatile uncertainties of this world.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in social innovation, service design, social design, participatory design, design anthropology, and Asian studies.
This chapter links to DESIAP women’s leadership mentoring program
Kristopher Santos’ chapter, Examining design orientations through Indigenous Filipino strengths’ perspective was awarded the Design History Writing Prize 2024 with the Guest Judge, Professor Anne Massey that remarked: “I found it to be sensitively written from a unique perspective. The writing was clear and evocative, scholarly and engaging. It was situated within a broad, contextual framework which was critically investigated. It makes a sterling contribution to the discourses around decolonisation and was well referenced. The combination of personal experience with rigorous academic debate is a difficult one to pull off, and the piece of writing certainly succeeded in doing so”