Communication Design Playing a Role in Social Innovation

Design for social innovation aims at solving community problems by recombining available resources, creating new social relationships, and strengthening stakeholder networks. Social innovation presents itself as one of the most promising proposals for responding to systemic problems that manifest themselves both at a global and local level, and the use of design methodologies, tools, and skills enables social innovation to become more resilient and sustainable. Communication design is a particularly relevant area in this context, as it meets the needs for visibility, visual materialization, creation of future scenarios, dissemination, and replication. Through an in-depth case study of three social innovation initiatives, we collected evidence regarding different roles that design is called upon, although they are not exclusive to communication design. Some of the main roles relate to triggering the initiatives themselves as well as the social debate that sustains them, facilitating processes of ideation and co-creation, mediating actors and prototyping products, services or events.