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How Designers Can Act Inside the Design Objects

A Preliminary Study on How Community Building Constituted Social Innovation as a Design Approach

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Cross-Cultural Design. Interaction Design Across Cultures (HCII 2022)

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Abstract

When designers actively engage in social innovation, the object of Design turns to the complex socio-technical system in which the designer is also embedded. How does this new perspective on the relation between the design subject and the design object lead to changes in specific design actions? Using constructivism grounded theory, we analyze 20 cases of social innovation involving community building in mainland China and find that community building is an approach rather than an ultimate goal to continuous action toward a vision. Actors enter the community by reflecting on society-self and community-self relations, generating more common understanding through dialogue, proposing prototypes based on everyday life, transcending the constraints of existing meaning spaces, and creating new meaning spaces oriented toward the vision in the community.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We recognized that these “meanings” formed a territory of, an area of knowledge, activity, or experience, we call them “meaning of space” or “meaning space”.

  2. 2.

    A program that allows retired women who come to live with their children in the metropolis to serve meals to commuters in their neighborhoods in their free time.

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Acknowledgement

Supported by the NICE Commune and the Sketch Action, this study conducted detailed interviews and six online salon sessions with practitioners in mainland China. The team members who prepared and organized the events were very helpful in collecting and analyzing the data for the study. We would like to thank Zhou Lu, Bingling Huang, Yichen Meng, Bohui Cai, Haoyu Du, Jiachen Dai, Tinglei Cao, and others for their contributions to this study. We also thank all interviewees for their assistance with the study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Danwen Ji & Tinglei Cao

  2. Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste - Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Hangping Yang

Authors
  1. Danwen Ji
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  2. Tinglei Cao
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Correspondence to Danwen Ji .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Pei-Luen Patrick Rau

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Ji, D., Cao, T., Yang, H. (2022). How Designers Can Act Inside the Design Objects. In: Rau, PL.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. Interaction Design Across Cultures. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06038-0_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06038-0_15

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