Articles
A selection of thoughts, opinion articles and academic production is showing on these pages. It is an opportunity to deepen into the world of Social Design and discover new perspectives. To produce knowledge, one must be supported by fundamental assumptions that guarantee a self-critical and self-reflective vision about the analysis. As pointed Morin (2004) it is required an ongoing investigation and interrogation about how the knowledge is produced.
A regenerative perspective to social change.
Environmental changes and challenges have been making several entities and areas to address innovative solutions in order to decrease human impact and heal our planet. However, some of these answers are made in linear and segmented form. The compartmentation of those approaches is deeply connected with the way we perceive the world and our relationship with life as a whole. The narratives constructed through the centuries separated humans and nature as two different forms of life and disconnected us from our real purpose of existence. To reframe this interaction between humans and nature, a systemic approach must be used, and this is the reason why regenerative perspectives are so important nowadays.
Apart from being a buzzword, regenerative cultures state that we should live as we were nature, not a separated thing that dominates nature, as we learn through our cultural and societal development. To make this happen, new narratives must be created to become new actions and behaviours. In this perspective, there is space to deconstruct power relations, embrace diversity and equality, to bring decolonized perspectives to the economy, as well as solidarity and human relationships. The transitioning moment needs a space for debate, designing and prototyping. Hence, social design can be the moto to this experimentation and translation for this new conception of interbeing.
Ecological theory studies and ancestral wisdom are key to rethinking and redesigning social dynamics regionally and globally. From ecological theories, it is learned that interbeing and regenerative systems are living organisms. On the one hand, we consider humanity to be more conscious and aware of climate change impact, yet the real fact is that society continues to perpetuate old attitudes towards life. People are continuing to act in a zero-sum culture, doing little steps for change that don’t affect their privileges and have the separateness concept of life. are so important nowadays.
This approach will require introducing connection, cohesion and consciousness principles to reconfigure human presence. Such transformation demands for creating models to flourish self-consciousness and solidarity among people. However, people’s behaviour is connected with standardized social norms and cultural beliefs, demanding a great compromise from the whole system to change. Some authors believe that this transformation will be possible if we change the economic system (author). To others, it is the social pressure for sustainability and resilience that will bring real changes. Hence, more than ever, comprehending and applying interbeing perspectives into social and cultural change is basilar for this transition moment.
To make this happen/In order for this to happen, one element plays a central role in this equation – solidarity – which we take for granted and assume as a glue that unites communities and makes people collaborate. This element can be essential when one wants to transform the social dynamics by making people more active to re-establish human-nature balance. To make people perceive that there is no human and nature but in fact one nature that we are taking part in, new approaches considering the solidarity dynamics will be needed.
//This content was created by Raquel Lima, a PhD Candidate in Design at the Fine Arts School at the University of Barcelona.
Regenerative Perspective for gender-based violence
The regenerative approach can help to deconstruct the centralized theme of violence by flourishing new perspectives into the gender-based violence spectrum. This centrality refers to solutions created by the government, excluding civil society actors from responsibility and participation. The social action is vague and focused on mechanisms and structures standardized by governmental institutions. However, there is an awakening for civic participation in social change, developed and improved by digital access and the urgency of societal transformations.
In regenerative models design “facilitates relationships between diverse agents in the system and enable conditions for the restoration and regeneration of healthy ecosystems function (Wahl, 2016, p.120)”. In this perspective and connection with the idea of interconnectedness from nature and humans, one can apply this approach to stimulate self-responsibility and social cohesion. Once society realizes that is the responsibility of everyone to face the structural violence system and the inequalities are a long tail present in many areas of our lives, people will be able to transform this reality by acting.
At the same time, to regenerate bio perspectives we must regenerate our societal values. It won’t have social cohesion while people behave by having power dynamics as role models. Renew or convert power dynamics base on self-responsibility and cohesion can also benefit nature. How can 1/3 of our population be excluded from ecological transformation? How can these women think in improve human-nature life if they are focusing on surviving from violence?
To go deeper, one can affirm that the relationship between humans and nature was always a violent relationship against the feminine. Since the beginning, humans see nature as something that must be domesticated. The forest demonization and the separation from human and non-human created an act of violence against everything and everyone that could understand nature – women and their closer relationship with the natural elements. In this evolutionary perception of relationships women were burned and also mother earth. With that all the sacred knowledge that some want to regenerate and restore.
//This content was created by Raquel Lima, a PhD Candidate in Design at the Fine Arts School at the University of Barcelona.
Collective intelligence with collective responsibility
Exists some layers of responsibility that people are not interested in, which allows us to delegate answers to others believing that we don’t have anything to deal with such problems. However, some social problems with complex structures in their composition, like slavery, racism, violence against women, and climate change, are issues impossible to separate us from responsibility.
We tend to separate the individual from the collective participation making this approach damage to create possible solutions in some problems. It is a long story that even Hanna Arent tried to solve when regarding the Holocaust social responsibility. The subjectivity and impact of our acts are not traceable enough to make us aware of the reverberation of a simple joke, for example. In fact, some actions can suggest that we are affecting others’ lives, and making people aware of it is a challenge that many social scientists and social designers face.
One good example of how to approach social responsibility is the project Slavery Footprint, which traces the relation of your consumption with human traffic in a sort of speculative design proposal. Of course, the numbers are not exactly those that appear to you, but it helps raise awareness of this relevant social and not eradicated problem. Additionally, the project also can propel social participation in inequalities people tend to convince ourselves we have nothing to do with it.
It is hard to prove how our actions contribute to perpetuating inequalities, however, it is an opportunity to develop our collective responsibility and intelligence. The collective intelligence comes with an awakening call of our social responsibility. People must understand that even if they don’t have harmful behaviour, or choose wisely the products they buy, the social-economical-cultural composition of our society inserts us as active actors in this system. This perspective is not to make you guilty or to feel bad, but to develop a conscience to act in favour of these social issues, and self-responsibility.
According to Edgar Morin (2011), a society can progress in its complexity, individuality, autonomy, and community, if it progresses in solidarity. We can only activate solidarity if we embrace collective responsibility and collective action to create some real changes. Although the development of social mechanisms of solidarity, we continue to see the State’s central role in controlling and answering our social problems. Unfortunately, those answers are not enough for the challenges we face nowadays. The State, as an existential tool, has an important role, however, it doesn’t contribute to social awareness and participation of effective solidarity. It is social participation that will configure the next step to our society.
In this scenario, solidarity should trespass the understanding of donation and charity to embrace more vivid solidarity, which Morin (2011) calls solidarity potential, that can be developed in each one of us and offer an active relation, from person to person, from groups to people, and from people to groups. Unfortunately, our sense of community has been dissolving by the development of the world – namely globalization and capitalism. To some specialists and researchers,
What we call evolution, to some specialists, has effects on the inequalities and challenges we are facing. As Daniel Wahl (2016) says, our social and cultural structure makes us distant from connecting with the whole, including our communities, neighbours, and nature.
Social innovation can strategically develop spaces to propel cross-sector partnerships, raise design literacy, and open source tools for autonomy. The responsibility grows with more conscious citizens and access to information and tools for autonomy. While Daniel Wahl talks about developing ecoliteracy and learning from living systems to face this transition moment that will need more collective participation, Arturo Escobar (2011) says that we must recenter politics into more holistic projects for making life. Both authors have in common some relevant areas of study: ancestral wisdom, post-dualism theories, and autopoiesis, to design relationally in our society.
To conclude, collective action for social transition will come with those more awake from their impact in life and more responsible for using their intelligence and capabilities in collective purpose. It is a social innovation role to develop mechanisms, models and spaces to flourish networks for good, nested systems and cycles of exchange between all participants.
References
Morin, E. (2011). A via para o Futuro da Humanidade. Edição Piaget.
Escobar, A. (2011). Sustainability: Design for the pluriverse. Development, 54(2), 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1057/dev.2011.28
Wahl, D. C. (2016). Designing Regenerative Cultures invites us to co-create thriving communities. Retrieved from http://www.gaiaeducation.org/index.php/en/why/news-and-articles/184-designing-regenerative-cultures