This podcast microcast, recorded on a hot Saturday evening, investigates the concept of "social innovation." The host hypothesizes that many social customs and organized practices, from Friday night socializing to community responses to emergencies, can be viewed as forms of social innovation. A central example is the transformation of fire response: historically a spontaneous act of community solidarity, it has been professionalized into a state-run service involving fire engines, police, and ambulances. This shift represents a change in social organization, raising the question of whether such a transformation constitutes social innovation or if the state itself can be considered a social enterprise.
The discussion traces the recent history of "social innovation" as a term, noting its peak popularity and how practitioners like those at TACSI (The Australian Centre for Social Innovation) sometimes rebrand their work as "service design" for broader understanding. The concept overlaps with social enterprises and NGOs, exemplified by initiatives like "Fitit for Work," which helps women re-enter the workforce. Framed within industrial design education, the host suggests examining graduate design shows for projects tackling social issues (e.g., death, anxiety, elderly care) as potential sites of social innovation, questioning who the innovators are and how these ideas are identified and named.
It was 38 today. Incredibly hot and quite an amazing amount of atmospheric pressure. And then there was a bit of rain in the evening to try and change the weather. That was a failure. It's a Saturday and it's 7pm. Saturday 7pm has a particular kind of meaning. If you were to put on the radio, then you hear party music. Saturday 7pm is supposed to be party time. Friday evenings are a thing. Friday evenings, what are they? It's customary on Friday evenings to go out to go out and be with other people. Be social. And there are a lot of different things you can do in your social. You can go out in the evening for a meal. You can have a barbecue. You can go out later at night. You can go clubbing. There's a bunch of things that are facilitated for people to get together and congregate. And do things. Now all of these things could be called all of these social innovation. At this point my hypothesis is yes. Saturday mornings, you meet for a brunch. And there are certain kinds of things you do. And you get together with people. Because hey, what are you doing inside Saturday morning? How are you getting together? And you go show. And then you get together. And it's a particular kind of getting together. It defines a particular kind of sociality. When you have a lot of these kinds of social constructs that populate your life, you might think to yourself, wow, I'm having a good life. Yes? So if you want a good life, you've got a partake in a lot of sociality. And for there to be the ability for you to partake in these kinds of socialities, like lunches and going out and so on and so forth on a weekend, doing things, then you need those kinds of customs or you need those kinds of practices. As designers, we don't tend to use words like custom or customary. This is sort of more social science kind of term. For us, they could be referred to as social innovation. Or so goes our hypothesis. So goes the way we're going to think. That's not a party. I'm at Princess Park. And it's a food delivery cyclist who's got a speaker strapped onto his bicycle. All right. Welcome to Learn a Centre Design Education podcast. I'm your host, Samitri Vada Rajan. This is a microcast, which means I have just four people in the audience. And I'm going to meet them in three days' time. And we're going to talk about what are all the different kinds of social innovations that we can research, that we can find out about. Is there such a thing as a social innovator, people who make it their practice or their work to come up with social innovations? And what are the kinds of places you can find these kinds of people? What is this salary who is hiring social innovators? Can you go anywhere and come up with these ideas and not call them social innovations? But call them something completely different. So the answer there to that question is potentially yes. But let's see. Saturday evening slow, I'm doing slow, and I'm going to record this podcast quite meditatively. And there is this customary in these podcasts. It will be short on explanation, but it will be amusing. And we'll ask questions and it will ask, so what do you think? It's that kind of podcast. Right, let's see. This is one of three such podcasts. It's a set of podcasts and the first one is social innovation. And the second one is technical innovation. And the third one is designer maker. Now in the audience of four people that I'm addressing this podcast to, there are three who are technical innovators. They've probably never applied that term to what they do. And the fourth one is the designer maker. In this particular case, I think, has applied the term to the practice that she does. So to start with, what we can ask is if you were to go to a university, somewhere on the planet, anywhere on the planet, go to South America, go to Africa, if we go to any part of Asia, you could go anywhere. And if you were to find in that place, in that city, our university, and that university has a program, in industrial design. That is our framing. So now we've suddenly narrowed down our focus, our lens, which means these are, we're going to now start wearing some sort of glasses so that we have a lens that frames everything in terms of industrial design. If you go to this university, you find there are students studying industrial design that are teachers telling them about industrial design. They as part of their studio work are doing industrial design practices. Then we can ask this question. It is customary in schools of industrial design for graduating students of industrial design. To have a graduating project that they work on, typically for one semester, or sometimes the graduating project is for a whole year. Now these graduating projects would be familiar to you. So if you were to land up at this university and walk into the design program, and there is an exhibition of the work of graduating students of an industrial design program, that's a frame. Now let us, for the sake of this particular hypothesis of framing or thought experiment, let us say that there is this.
graduate show potentially you pick up a graduate catalogue. That is this graduate show and you are looking at a hundred watts. Fascinating work beautifully executed. New kinds of mobility devices. This is a bicycle motor wheelchair. New kinds of medical equipment. New kinds of things for the home. Some 3D printed stuff. Lots of laser cut stuff. And then there is this project which is looking at death. And you go, hmm. And this is another project that is looking at anxiety. And then there is this third project that is looking at populations of elderly people. And you might catch the phrase service design. You might see that there is an app or there are some cards. So you would look at it and you go, sure, I am familiar with this kind of stuff. You might also encounter projects where you start to see the hand works skills of the design students. You see craft sort of projects or these projects might. That is a fire engine. There is a fire and you need people from the fire department to go and deal with the fire. This is a segwit. If you were to go back a thousand years or two thousand years or something and there was a fire. And people would rush there and they would throw water. So the community would get together and they would try and risk you for the house and people who are in the house. It would be spontaneous and it would be a social moment when the solidarity of that particular community. They would, they are there for others in the community. They are there to help people. You can see that manifest. You get wraps. What we swatches now is a transformation in Melbourne if there is a fire and if you are a citizen. And if it is in the city would you go and jump in and perform a rescue? How many times have you done that? So the notion of rescue in this particular case, we can start to imagine that. Now that role, that particular function has been taken over by experts. It has been taken over by the state. The state in this particular case is the Victorian government. The fire engines belong to the Victorian government. That's a question. Check it out. It is available to the city. Is it the mayor's office or pays for the fire engines and buys fancifier engines? So the fire and people's participation in helping sort of put out the fire and then in helping the people who are caught up if there are people who are injured because of the fire. People would sort of jump in and help and that's the way it used to be. It was custom. That custom has been displaced with a shift saying that no, this is the responsibility. People are not allowed because they can injure themselves or they're not trained. So this is an instance. You might still do that at the beach and so on. Jumping in to help somebody in distress. But here you have the fire engine, which means you send out an SOS message. And there is a service called the fire service and they'll land up. And when they land up, you'll often find that where there is a fire, there'd be police car or there'd be an ambulance. It's been designed that way. The system has been designed that way. In the event of a fire, there's a notion of best practice. And this is how it will be performed. In the event of an accident, there will be a fire engine and there'll be police car and there'll be an ambulance. So this is the emergency tricer. And so we could then say that this is a service design that has been enacted. But if we were to see the shift from community solidarity towards making the responsibility of the state and community is merely there to be a bystander or to take photographs and record it and things like that, then we're talking about a transformation of that society. Would we be able to talk about response to fire as a social generation or a social transformation? We could, but there are some difficulties because when what is done socially is taken over by an entity, like a corporate entity, the city is a corporation, the state is constructed like a corporation, then it becomes some sort of a social enterprise. Would we be able to call the government a social enterprise? Absolutely. And that is a framing where you say the state is a social enterprise. It serves a social purpose. It organizes a society in particular forms of sociality, defined by particular kinds of philosophy. That was just a fire engine then went by. And I'm sort of ad living on the fire engine saying, hey, there is a possibility to tie ourselves up in these beautiful exquisites, exquisite notes of computation saying, I want to bring up social innovation and social enterprise in the context of rescue as a concept. And yeah, I think we can say that sociality in the case of fire is thwarted. But sociality in the beach when you're rescuing the notion of rescue in a beach, it isn't necessarily thwarted unless you are not allowing the trained rescue people to do their rescue. So we've got something there that is a little bit okay. But what is interesting is that red fire truck. Now that's a pretty expensive proposition. And they're pretty gorgeous things at us. I mean, you look at it and you realize, wow, that's the technical innovations. So fire trucks have been, especially in the context of CFA, we've been going to a graduate design show in Australia over the past 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And it's quite likely you will sporadically encounter somebody who's innovating and changing fire trucks or putting packs on two SUVs which helps CFA volunteers get more efficient or putting more digital stuff in there. It is, it has been done, it continues to be done. And so there is a, the fire truck becomes the domain of technical innovation, the notion of rescue and the human organization that is required to deal with the fire is in the nature of, let's say, a non-technical innovation. Social innovation. Okay, big question there. We'll have to go to some other slightly traditionally, maybe this is a segue into that. Traditionally the notion of social innovation which, it was a big thing if you go back, I don't know, 40 years. build rate and the issue could change may cause.
social innovation, social enterprises, the current Prime Minister of Bangladesh and micro-credit. So, social innovation had maybe there was a period of peak social innovation. And now you don't call it social innovation because you call it lots of other things. Maybe about, let's about six years ago, was it, it's 70 or six years ago, I took group students to taxi in Adled. And taxi is TACSI, it's an acronym for the Australian Centre for Social Innovation. I funded by the government of South Australia, initially, comprehensively. And I did check on my LinkedIn and Chris Vanstone industrial asylum from UK. Part of, let's say, the 90s social innovation cohort, social innovation community in London or England. So, he's part of that, he's moved across to Adled, joined taxi. And yeah, I reached out to him maybe 2012, for something like that saying, hey, drop in and let's have a cup of tea in the office. And so, yeah, so people in Elizabeth Street in those days, and he came down, so he was a shout out to Chris. I used to offer a design studies tutorial in social innovation around about that time. I would be slightly earlier, so I think by that time I had sort of shifted the focus to service design. So, it was, so social innovation was a thing, and there were students who were going in sort of scouring social innovation case studies. So, Lucille Frazier was one of them. Lucille did community markets as part of her design studies course community markets in Melbourne. So, she was hanging out at the road street market, and she was looking at road street market as a social innovation. It's a market of social innovation. She said, yes, road street market is a social innovation. And I'm going to look at how it happens, how it's constructed. At about that time public transport was also, you know, shifting modes of mobility, socializing modes of mobility, was also a social innovation. I'll come to that in a bit. So, Lucille, then a few years after her second year, she was in honors, and she was in my sort of suppression group. And she looked at sort of what is now her task, her. But she looked at the birth of birth of work or freelance or finding work, community-organised finding work. So, there's a lot of students who are in those days, let's call that the heyday of social innovation, who would start to look at some art writings, another one, who was looking at how to organise graduates into a social innovation cluster. So, that they have access, they have a collective access to work. And if you are a big community and an activated community, you're possibly able to be easier to find, be able to share and work, put teams together. So, this particular kind of thinking, at that time, I think one of the presentations, Michael Trudgeon did say, "And there must be a bar." So, there is this notion of that kind of sociality, where if you make a cluster of community of designers who come together periodically branched by the evenings, petrocoaches, and there'll be a bar. And so, these communities of designers who enact a particular kind of sociality exist in urban centres, Melbourne has it, most cities have it, and could we call it a social innovation? Well, there was a group of students who were building a project saying, "Yes, this is going to be our form of social construct and it's going to be our social innovation." So, to come back to where he started, to Lucy did the Etasca type social innovation project for Honours, and then she also said, "Hey, can you connect me to Emily Pilitan?" So, if you go back 12, 14 years ago, before the book, "Design Revolution" was published, Emily Pilitan was an American designer who was pushing for a more humanitarian face of product design. This was a specific product, products that are more humanitarian in what they deliver. And I said, "Sure, I've never met Emily Pilitan, but I was picking up and reframing what must have been 2008 or 2009. Sometimes back then, LinkedIn emerged, and LinkedIn builds a community online, so you can. It's a like-face book, but it's not a Facebook type thing. So, you build digital or online communities, but this is a professional community. And I had at that time decided that I was going to build a ginormous LinkedIn community, not for professional lens, but much more like the social innovation project that Mark Whiteing had been talking about, of getting designers together and getting them to build, you know, hang together sporadically or know that they're part of a network, and they can have network effects in terms of getting work or stimulation and all those kinds of things. So, I'd started building a LinkedIn community, so if somebody were to write to me and I'd say, "Yeah, sure." I think in those days I was disciplined leader or industrial design or something like that. So, there was some role that I had, which was a good network magnet, possibly. But I was also, if I could, if somebody connected to me, I'd go looking and see if there are people in Phillips and manufacturing enterprises, in the electronics and also to different kinds of places. And I would reach out to them and I would keep building this network. Yeah, 6,500 strong now. I never used it for very much, but Lucy said connect image, Emily Pelleton. She was moving in a more humanitarian focus, terminology from then, those days. And then she sort of ended up a taxi in Adelaide. And so, in 2018, at the Honours cohort, and we flew down to Adelaide, we went and spent half a day at taxi. So, incredibly generous, they showed us the project, they showed us the methodology. But at that time, I sort of started catching a whiff of their rebranding. It was the Australian sense of social innovation. It was still taxi, but they were referring to the kinds of projects they do as service design. So, you'd started to see this shift. So, maybe it's not a shift, but it's a sort of usage of different terminologies, allow different people to access you. So, when they say, "Who are you?" I'm a social innovator. And they go, "Whoo, what's that?" So, I'm a service designer. Sure, will you design a website for me or will you do this for me? I've got a new startup idea. So, it depends what post code you're speaking in. It depends who you're talking to and so on. It so happens that social innovation is still strong, but if you do search for social innovation,
innovation, you might end up with the other free social enterprise and that's quite an interesting framing. So non-governmental organizations are things that exists when governments aren't, you know, there are certain sectors or certain things that the governments aren't doing. So there's a bunch of people, poor people, and they're living in slums and they do never electricity and you formulate what in the old days would have been called a charity. Now there's the call NGOs which are non-governmental organizations. And the non-governmental organization is a legal term used in many different parts of the world which is you're doing the work of the government but you're not part of the government and you're still an organization. In certain parts of the world this NGO started to be spoken of as social enterprises. So if you have, if you're running a rescue home for women fleeing domestic violence, you could be a social enterprise. In 2012 I had made a list of some 20 social enterprises in Melbourne and one of them which is still going is an organization. I had sent students there and did go on and studied and came back with reports. I've never actually been there to talk to them but this is an organization called Fitit for Work and I saw more into that organization and I've spoken about it in ways that are specific to that organization or more generally taken the framing of that organization and talked about particularly kind of problem. So what is Fitit for Work? So one of the things they are doing is that it's targeted at women. Women who have had a career have been working and then stopped working to go and have kids and then when the kids are grown up and can look up themselves they're reentering the workforce. But between the time that they left and the time that they're coming back there's been quite a bit of transformation. So Microsoft Excel and MS Word have become a little different. Dress codes have changed. So there's a bunch of things. So Fitit for Work is you have to apply to Fitit for Work and if you get selected you go through a program and the program ends when you are gainfully employed. So you talk about yourself and your application, they then interview and assess your application, they assess your application then they interview you and they might bring you on board and say we appreciate your need. We can see that we can actually make a difference to your life and here's what you're going to put it through. So you change, you get a coach, you get support to be somebody who can go into a competitive interview and have a decent resume and have a proper skills to get a job. It's a small thing but it's a really really well in those days I thought it was just a fantastic notion of social enterprise. In those days lentil is anything was quite big and lentil is anything was a restaurant started initially at calling words, Convert or is it still there? I had to check on that. But you essentially went to lentil is anything and you ate and you paid if you can or you paid what you think is appropriate. So you didn't get a bill and lentil is anything would employ people transitioning which is new migrants and people who needed particular kinds of employment or training and retail and stuff like that. A really fascinating story. Shanaka was the founder of lentil is anything and yeah he was a big celebrity in those days or a small celebrity. He's really his house unlocked and everybody knew it was all of them and so on. So one way of looking at these kinds of projects, social innovation projects is that they are heart projects. They're not part of the commodity world. They're not part of transactional world. Their social innovation is what makes the world a better place. It is a channel for us to realize our humanity. If you were to go to Alice Springs you would have the Center for A Crofiat Technology which is a skills training enterprise, social enterprise. So there are social and celebration army and what they do, op shops. These are all social enterprises. Social innovation sometimes becomes a social enterprise or it becomes an enterprise. So for example the orange sky laundry is quite a spectacular Australian story where these two young men say how you know it must be really hard and homeless people that they close their old rigidity. Why don't we just wash their clothes. So the orange sky laundry which just goes around the city washing and ironing the clothes of the homeless. It's a project that you can start to see is quite beautiful, quite startling and it's all hard and it's about dignity and so on. You have a whole series of social enterprises which are social innovations which don't become social enterprises. You have a whole series of social and enterprises which go back a very very long way. So we'll go back to the theoretical formulation of social innovation. So play is social innovation which means every kind of game that is potentially there on the planet is a social innovation because the affordances like playing cards. The cards are not necessarily going to win some great awards for technical innovation. They just are the facility playing Uno. But the fact that it creates a social beauty is quite spectacular. Necocafé, cat cafe, I've got one in my house. You've got a cat cafe and there are cats there. You've got a coffee and a bit over the price of the coffee but then you have cats to pet and rob and it's beautiful. So social innovators are ubiquitous. You probably know a ton of social innovators but you just haven't called them now. Some people are just alive for party. Some people take that skill that we are thinking that we are being converted into something and that thing then becomes a social innovation. So you had this notion of car pooling that's a social innovation. Then you have car share and that's a social innovation and then you take car share and then you make it into Uber. Now the lift is pooling, Uber is potentially pooling if you choose that option but otherwise it's, but Uber is not a social enterprise. It's just an enterprise but it uses social innovation. Uber doesn't rely on redesigning cars.
Yes, there is an app, but today an app is like LinkedIn. It would enable the particular client's sociality. So yeah, groups of people and forming that group with particular clients of rules that enable they're coming together, constitute a particular form of social innovation. And the benefits that come from that group happening, so if you look at creative communities there's a documentation about Ezi Amanzini and the research group in Polytechnico in Milan and you'll see that intergenerational living, so social innovation is men's shared is social innovation. Intergenerational living where you have housing for the elderly, but then you have, you design it in such a way that there are families with children. So the elderly are transacting or interacting with the young people and children, so you get all ages, so it's sort of better for, let's say, everybody and their health outcomes and it makes for safer communities. So you'll see those kinds of case studies, while those are the case studies and they're sort of particular kinds of case studies and particular kinds of places, co-housing is social innovation. Mourrunda Ka, I think, in Hidalbug, so there are some co-housing communities in Melbourne, there's some in Australia, there's heaps more in Scandinavian countries. So people get together and live in a sharehouse as a social innovation. So are we there? You know, in terms of what is a social innovation, the thing is that anybody can do social innovation and it just, you just fall into something and it becomes social innovation. So collecting 40 cards, that's, is that a social innovation? It's a social practice, it's a social practice and it's different from what existed before than it's innovative than it's a social innovation. Let's frame it and talk about it in that way and it becomes the thing. If we shift our focus from social innovation to social innovators, then a repository for us to find social innovators tends to be, let's say you've got a show of change makers. You're going online and if you say I want to find social innovators, you might discover that you've actually left creative practice, industrial design and design thinking or design kind of communities and you've gone into, I mean to be fairly, social change makers are not necessarily people with a business background. It's just that people from a business school in Stanford are collecting these case studies. You will find, so maybe the thing about social innovation is that it's innovation, it's a design, it's something which doesn't have, let's say, a material manifestation. For the time being, notions of service design, let's say it's like a penumbra kind of space. It's like the dusk where you can't see things very clearly and different people have different torches and different colors and they're all illuminating the same thing and giving a different name. So you could call it social innovation, you could call it service design and if you go back, 12, 14 years ago that I was talking about, when service design hadn't really taken up or something like that, you would, maybe a bit further back. You would have seen the contestation between these terms service design. There was social design was a candidate. It survived for a bit and then you can still sort of type social design and if you look back historically you'll find that there was, it was vying for credibility and mass acceptance but it's not around anymore and it's possible service design doesn't encompass everything that social innovation means because social reality is a requirement and social innovation. Social innovation can grow to become a social enterprise. Social innovation can grow to become a normal enterprise whether it is ride sharing, peer to peer. If you go to different countries you'll see Uber is not NDD and not the only way to travel. If you've got a bank or you can jump on to a motorcycle. All over Asia you'll see lots of different versions of, or different kinds of ride sharing and peer to peer and different forms of transactions. Facilitated quite largely through app based payments. I was three years ago I was in France and they have a thing called blah blah car and it can go and it's quite lovely. I'm sure you've got, if you have students from China they've got experiences of different kinds of notions of sociality and sharing. You can make mobility a thing and then you'll start to discover different people have different experiences. They can throw into the mix. Grab is what you will have in Asia, Indonesia and things like that. To blah blah car you go, you check in and then you say where you're going and then you get a bunch of options. Those options will tell you, oh, you're looking for three people and this middle seat in the back is available. It feels a bit like booking a seat on a flight and then they'll tell you where they'll pick you up saying, oh, it's like Donald's at that time in this particular place or the corner of this road or the back road. It's too much joy. Social innovation is something that people could use, a second nature to people. You don't have to be a designer to the social innovation. But when designers do these kinds of things, should we call it social innovation? My answer is to go back to the start of this podcast and I was saying that if you were to look at 100 projects and you find that some of them rely on organizing people to get outcomes, you know, improved health outcomes, improved sociality, improved mental health outcomes, improved economic outcomes and so on. If you were to say, look at the categories in these hundreds so you'll have some projects, you'll just automatically do social innovation projects. It's just that we now are wanting to say that when industrial designers do graduate projects, they might end up doing social innovation projects. They might end up doing technical innovation projects. New kind of mattress and you kind of backpack using 3D for one of art installations, making a shoe or sneakers or something like that. So, technical innovation, you fall into that. Are they humanitarian projects using technical innovation? Sure. Quite a lot of the work that gets tagged sustainability could be technical innovation. So, the sort of speculating about the future brings in to play forms of sociality. So social innovation is easiest approach when you don't have mercantile commodity. You're not buying a thing, you're not manifestly giving somebody money and getting a stick blender to make food. It's not a thing. So, it doesn't have a predominantly utilitarian functionalist discourse. Not a lot of the projects that deal in health and with peer to peer like my work in hospitals is about patient agency and peer to peer collaboration between patients.
the end of life. So that's peer to peer. And if it's peer to peer, then we in this particular tagging, we've only got three tags. One is called social innovation, the other tag is technical innovation, the third one is design innovation. We've got only these three tags, so we'd use one of them. If you find that constraining, then you might go, "Hey, this project has two tags. It is a little bit of social innovation or it's largely social innovation, but it has a technical innovation foundation because I'm going to acknowledge the existence of some kind of digital technology. That's digital innovation, plus social innovation. Sure, you could do whatever because in that sense it is a thought experiment. The baggage that social innovation brings and the baggage, the technical innovation bring, that if you open the door in the chatter of technical innovation, a chatter of social innovation, they're quite different. And that's the magic because the third one lurking here is the designer maker. And in the designer maker, paradigm or discourse or chatter, you're effectively giving primacy to the heart of the designer, the aesthetics of the designer, the embodiment of design loneliness that that particular designer brings. So these subtle variations are what activates our theory construction. Would I be able to find another place on the planner to where they say, if you say, "What is industrial design?" Industrial design is all about innovation and change. And there are three forms that takes. One is social change or social innovation, and the other one is technical change or technical innovation. The third one is designer maker where it is. The practice of the designer, the art practice of the designer. And then people listening to you will go, "Bam, light bulb, you are so lucid, you are so clear." Well that happened. It's fascinating, isn't it? Now the three, if you take industrial design, all forms of projects that are done in design school, tag, industrial design. And everything that is there in a garage or industrial design, you only have three tags to tag them with. And in one version of the game, you're only allowed to use one tag. In the second version of the game, you're allowed to use all three tags, but you have to say what is a proportion there of each. Does that help you? It gives you a little more leeway, a little more room. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you get it. Because you know it. It's just that we've got to give it a name. And yeah. It's this thing about social practice and sociality. It's quite interesting. We do it, but we don't call it out. I do it and I call it out because I have a PhD in social science. My PhD is not tagged completely social science, but based on the kind of audience that I'm talking to, I would say, I am 80% social science and 20% industrial design. And if the audience is all social scientists, then I'd go, I'm 80% industrial design who has gone out like a Mack Pi and brought social theories into industrial design. You know, what sort of armory do you want? If you go into a community of socialists and anthropologists and claim that you are one of them, then you need to be conversant with the vocabulary comprehensively. I can't do that. I'm rubbish at it. So I'll hide. But then in a community of industrial designers and if I'm feeling a bit weak, then I'll claim that I'm not all industrial scientists, you know, little bit. So there's ways and what's the third thing? I could say there's a bit of industrial design and there's social science and the third qualification I have is that I'm a mechanical engineer. So I have three tags that I can play with and I can shift them based on the kind of thing I'm saying, I'm talking about and so on. Yeah. I'm not sure you'll enjoy the sound of pincer spark in the background, but if I hadn't come to pincer spark and walked around with crunching gravel as the soundtrack, we wouldn't have encountered a fire engine. We wouldn't have been able to make the case that urban sociality that we are familiar with contains quite a lot of social integration, which then brings us to the elephant in the room, which is that the Lucy Frazier, the Emily Pilate and the Alexi Cellar case study pollinate energy, is that 80% of the planet is not wealthy, cool and urban and they do social innovation in completely, gorgeously startling ways and that's what the Shokha Changemaker gives you. It's a world of complete heart. Yeah. When I do the next podcast episode in preparation for, let's say, week four or something like that, I'll talk about technical information and innovation similarly as a force of good, force for good and I think transforming sociality, bringing more humanity into our social transactions into how we are a social being on the planet. Wow. Amazing, isn't it? And you are going to be the ones raising the temperature amongst your class. So, yeah, all the best.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The podcast explores the concept of "social innovation," questioning its definition and how it relates to customs, community practices, and state services.
It uses the example of fire response evolving from a spontaneous community act into a professionalized state service (fire engines, police, ambulance) to illustrate a shift in social organization.
The host reflects on the history and terminology of social innovation, noting its peak popularity and how it often gets rebranded (e.g., as service design) or overlaps with social enterprises and NGOs.
Examples include student projects, organizations like TACSI, and initiatives like "Fitit for Work," which helps women re-enter the workforce.
The discussion is framed within industrial design education, using graduate shows as a lens to examine projects addressing social issues like death, anxiety, and aging.
Summary:
This podcast microcast, recorded on a hot Saturday evening, investigates the concept of "social innovation." The host hypothesizes that many social customs and organized practices, from Friday night socializing to community responses to emergencies, can be viewed as forms of social innovation. A central example is the transformation of fire response: historically a spontaneous act of community solidarity, it has been professionalized into a state-run service involving fire engines, police, and ambulances. This shift represents a change in social organization, raising the question of whether such a transformation constitutes social innovation or if the state itself can be considered a social enterprise.
The discussion traces the recent history of "social innovation" as a term, noting its peak popularity and how practitioners like those at TACSI (The Australian Centre for Social Innovation) sometimes rebrand their work as "service design" for broader understanding. The concept overlaps with social enterprises and NGOs, exemplified by initiatives like "Fitit for Work," which helps women re-enter the workforce. Framed within industrial design education, the host suggests examining graduate design shows for projects tackling social issues (e.g., death, anxiety, elderly care) as potential sites of social innovation, questioning who the innovators are and how these ideas are identified and named.
FAQs
Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, or designs that address social needs and improve community well-being, often involving shifts in social practices or systems, such as transforming community-based fire response into organized state services.
The podcast explores how industrial design students' graduation projects, like those addressing death, anxiety, or elderly care, can embody social innovation by tackling societal issues through design thinking and service-oriented solutions.
Technical innovation focuses on improving products or technology, like enhancing fire trucks, while social innovation addresses human organization and societal practices, such as community rescue systems evolving into state-managed emergency services.
Yes, governments can be viewed as social enterprises because they serve social purposes, organize society, and provide services like fire rescue, effectively acting as entities designed to meet community needs.
Terms like 'social innovation' have shifted towards 'service design' or 'social enterprise' in some contexts, depending on audience and location, to improve accessibility and understanding among different groups.
Customs, such as community-based fire rescue, represent traditional social practices that can be transformed through social innovation into structured systems, like state-run emergency services, altering how societies function.
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