Keeping the System Going: Social Design and the Reproduction of Inequalities in Neoliberal Times

This journal article examines the potential for social design to address inequalities. We question whether professional design practices, as currently configured, are equipped to identify and address the inequalities that can result from such interventions. In the following sections, we take a closer look at social design to discuss two reasons for this lack. First, we review the institutional structures within which social design operates to demonstrate how its precarious status mitigates against the consolidation of a legitimate professional practice. Second, we show how its approach and methods are performed in ways that draw the focus of practice away from the problems it seeks to address. These two issues, we conclude, make it difficult for designers to respond to inequalities that are produced through and that sustain neoliberal ways of organizing resources. Despite these concerns, however, we identify opportunities that might enable social design practice to live up to its hopes.