Social design as normative inquiry

This paper gives a stipulative definition of social design. It argues that there is a distinctive field of design practice, and design practice research that can be labelled ‘social design’ but that this distinctiveness cannot be spelled out directly in terms of the relation between design and the social, which has been the dominant view up till now. Rather, social design is defined in terms of the kind of knowledge production that it is – as a form of situational normative inquiry. This means that it is conducted empirically by responding to problems identified in specific situations and according to the ends-in-view that can be collectively warranted, and thus responding to the norms of justification and standards of criticism of those affected. This stipulative definition not only has the advantage of delineating and orienting the fields of practices of social design, it also opens some interesting considerations with respect to knowledge claims made by social design research.