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Design, Social Change and Development: A Social Methodology

Authors:
Angus Donald Campbell at University of Auckland
Angus Donald Campbell
Naude Malan at University of Johannesburg
Naude Malan
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This paper critically describes a design methodology for achieving socially important goals through design. Such a methodology combines the best of human-centred and participatory design methodologies with critical social science and action research. This paper describes how design can be used in a multi-stakeholder context that attempts to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a changing food system. The paper describes a method that integrated urban farmers, industrial designers, development practitioners and government officials in the design process. It describes how designers and social scientists should immerse themselves in the lifeworld of their participants, how they should engage with them and what can be done to reflect critically on the process of designing with the other 90%.
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... La mayoría de los agricultores que participaron eran agricultores urbanos negros marginados; por lo tanto, tuve que ser hiperconsciente de los beneficios que podría obtener de un doctorado frente a los beneficios que los agricultores podrían obtener al participar en él (Smith, 2012). Aunque el objetivo a largo plazo es el cambio de políticas, después del apartheid, todos los agricultores señalaron que las conexiones que habían fomentado a través del proyecto condujeron a importantes ganancias positivas en su capital social (Malan, 2015;Malan & Campbell, 2014). Las profundas relaciones desarrolladas a través de este estudio continúan hasta hoy, a pesar de mi desconexión física de Afrika. ...
... Agricultor urbano aprovechando el sol de primavera en Soweto, Johannesburgo. Fotografía: A. D.Campbell, 2014. ...
Diálogos Sur-Sur en torno al diseño centrado en el buen vivir
Article
Full-text available
  • Jul 2022
Utilizando una metodología dialógica, en este artículo discutimos nuestras experiencias de investigación doctoral y nuestros posicionamientos en dos contextos diferentes del Sur Global, en los que trabajamos con comunidades históricamente marginadas. La primera voz, originada en México, exploró la descolonización del diseño y los conocimientos textiles mayas en colaboración con un colectivo dirigido por mujeres en los Altos de Chiapas. La segunda voz, originada en Sudáfrica, exploró colaborativamente la innovación tecnológica de los pequeños agricultores urbanos. El diálogo reflexiona sobre el “uno con el todo”, la colectividad, la condición de resource(ful) o lleno de recursos, lo pluriversal y el equilibrio como principios rectores del diseño centrado en el buen vivir, lo que nos permite reflexionar sobre nuestros estudios. Discutimos los aprendizajes y las transformaciones en nuestra investigación en diseño, que transitó desde los enfoques dominantes hacia las formas indígenas y endógenas de conocer, ser y hacer.
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... The challenge is not plainly to find appropriate ways of involving and engaging people in PD activities considering local socio-cultural environments but to identify approaches to renegotiate the Western principles of PD in these contexts (Hussain et al., 2012) that incorporate local understandings and patterns of participation in the design process (Bidwell and Hardy, 2009;Winschiers-Theophilus et al., 2010;Rodil et al., 2012). This matter is critical not merely to generate normatively desirable ends that tackle wicked real-life challenges of populations in need -such is the premise of design (Malan and Campbell, 2014) -but also and most importantly to define the practical elements that enable designers go beyond good intentions and facilitate responsible and ethical sustainable social innovation (Fry, 2005). ...
... Designers during workshops take the role of facilitators (Sanders and Stappers, 2008). Designers are defined facilitators in that they do not gain insights and come up with solutions, but instead, they help participants to find their solutions and ways to implement them (Malan and Campbell, 2014). This process is fuelled by creativity, which is an innate characteristic of human beings (Kelley and Kelley, 2013). ...
Participatory Design for sustainable social innovation in developing countries: Design experiments towards a model to deploy interventions with marginalised youth
Thesis
Full-text available
  • Jan 2020
An increasing number of practitioners are engaging in the consideration of Participatory Design (PD) as a strategic modus operandi to attain socially progressive ends among marginalised communities in developing countries. However, the structures, methods and objectives of this type of work constitute an ongoing debate. A scattered body of resources in this area tend to focus on either theory (such as journal papers) or practice (such as design toolkits). To fill this gap, this research develops a model of practice that links these two dimensions through a collection of elements drawn upon contemporary approaches to design and development. The model considers three layers of ethos, methods and outputs to guide the design and undertaking of social-entrepreneurially oriented PD interventions with a focus on problem identification. Two case studies are undertaken with communities of marginalised youth in South Africa to evaluate the model and its inherent flexibility respectively. The evaluation found that the model enabled the researcher to build capacity and empower participants to gain leadership and ownership over the intervention, ultimately developing their sense of activism and aspiration for change. On this basis, a final version of the model is put forward to help prepare and guide design practitioners to deploy PD interventions with marginalised youth in developing countries for responsible and sustainable social innovation. In addition, the research reflects on the various roles that design practitioners take on while deploying the intervention and on the use of a cross-paradigm to undertake the type of design research approached in this thesis.
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... IZ eventually became part of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Network. These international collaborators introduced multi-stakeholder and later the social innovation methods that were later adapted and expanded by IZ (Malan and Campbell 2014). In 2016 IZ launched the Farmers' School and Innovation Lab as a grand event that integrates all the diverse aspects of the project with significant farmer and stakeholder participation. ...
... IZ's Participatory Technology Development service learning was a collaboration between Development Studies fourth-year coursework students and Industrial Design's fourth-year final mini-dissertation project (Malan and Campbell 2014). Students were exposed to issues of participatory technology development, human-centred design and social innovation (IDEO 2010;Chambers 2012). ...
Typological Diversity of Agriculture in a Densely Urbanised Region of São Paulo, Brazil
Chapter
  • Jan 2020
The municipality of São Paulo has a rich typological diversity of urban agriculture (UA). This chapter aims to show this diversity of UA and the interactions between actors engaged in these multiple expressions of UA. The UA types vary along a continuum from professional farms located in the suburban areas to community gardens located in the city centre, including a model of urban activism focused on the “right to the city”. We use the “continuum” framework to overcome the dichotomous thinking that has dominated to date and to recognize the gradual and nuanced nature of characteristics concerning actors and space. In order to point out the diversity of UA and the gradual and dynamic changes, we conceptualize the continuum by focusing on actors and space.
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... IZ eventually became part of the Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability (DESIS) Network. These international collaborators introduced multi-stakeholder and later the social innovation methods that were later adapted and expanded by IZ (Malan and Campbell 2014). In 2016 IZ launched the Farmers' School and Innovation Lab as a grand event that integrates all the diverse aspects of the project with significant farmer and stakeholder participation. ...
... IZ's Participatory Technology Development service learning was a collaboration between Development Studies fourth-year coursework students and Industrial Design's fourth-year final mini-dissertation project (Malan and Campbell 2014). Students were exposed to issues of participatory technology development, human-centred design and social innovation (IDEO 2010;Chambers 2012). ...
Food Security and Land-Use Conflicts Within Regional Planning: The Recent Experience of the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Chapter
  • Nov 2019
Belo Horizonte, Brazil, has received attention for its pioneering food security programmes, which has inspired many jurisdictions around the world. However, food security programmes in metropolitan contexts necessarily involve cross-boundaries articulations over a wider territory, such as the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte, which includes rural and urban areas of 34 municipalities and a population of over five million people. We discuss key challenges and outcomes related to the incorporation of food security proposals in the recent territorial restructuring plan, leading to two fundamental rights: the “right to the city” and the “right to adequate food”, the latter enshrined in the Brazilian constitution since 2010. The authors also consider the contributions from this case to better connections between sustainable City Region Food Systems and territorial planning.
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... iZindaba Zokudla made use of the facilities of the University of Johannesburg, Soweto Campus to bring a wide range of stakeholders together to create opportunities for more sustainable urban agriculture and entrepreneurship in the Johannesburg food system (iZindaba Zokudla, 2022). The inception of iZindaba Zokudla and bringing local expert urban farmers together to learn from and connect, creating various forms of social capital (Malan, 2015;Malan & Campbell, 2014), was inherently aligned with the socio-environmental relational conception of Ubuntu. ...
Advancing Afrikan Sustainable Design
Chapter
Full-text available
  • Sep 2023
In a monoculture-dominated world, this chapter explores what an endogenously inspired conception of Afrikan sustainable design might be. The authors initially contextualise the incompatibility of growth-based human development versus the limited resources of a finite planet. This is followed by a brief exploration of postwar development and its recent refinement into the Sustainable Development Goals. These concepts are compared to the similar parallel emergence of the discipline of industrial design and its refinement towards more sustainable approaches to design. This leads to an exploration of what an Afrikan conception of sustainability might be, with a particular focus on the indigenous Afrikan philosophy of Ubuntu-the inseparable relationship between people and the natural environment. With a decolonial lens, product design examples from the Afrikan context are used as exemplars of how indigenous approaches to knowledge creation, situated within an Ubuntu framing, could translate into more appropriate Afrikan design practice and education.
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... The Izindaba Zokudla (which means "conversations about food" in isiZulu) project was founded in 2013 by two lecturing staff members of the University of Johannesburg (Dr Naudé Malan and Mr Angus Campbell), as part of research and student projects (Malan, 2015a:969;Malan & Campbell, 2014). The Izindaba Zokudla project was thus from the outset conceived as combining research, education, teaching and community engagement. ...
socially responsive university: Teaching, research, community engagement and a community blog-site class project
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  • Oct 2022
The lens of decolonisation invites the opportunity to reflect on the current mainstream viewsregarding the purpose of the public university. A decolonized approach suggests that the keytasks of a university (teaching, research and community engagement) should be sociallyresponsive. This conceptual article draws on a class project to suggest a way in which the threetasks can be combined to respond so a particular social need. Against the foil of a class project -situated in a larger Izindaba Zokudla (conversations about food) community engagement projectof the University of Johannesburg – this article argues: 1) instead of conventional teachingmethods, teaching should be based on an empowerment education model; 2) instead of atop-down externally initiated model, community engagement should use a participatory multistakeholderapproach; and 3) instead of conventional research approaches, research should betransformative. The article concludes, firstly that it is possible to integrate the teaching, researchand community engagement tasks of a public university productively, and secondly, it shouldtake as point of departure empowerment education, participatory community engagement, andtransformative research.
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... Most of the farmers who participated were marginalized Black urban farmers; I, therefore, had to be hyper-aware of the benefits I might gain from a doctorate versus the benefits the farmers might accrue from participating in it (Smith, 2012). Although the long-term goal is policy change, in the aftermath of apartheid, all the farmers noted that the connections that they had fostered through the project led to significant positive gains in their social capital (Malan, 2015;Malan & Campbell, 2014). ...
South-South Dialogues around Buen Vivir-Centric Design
Article
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  • Sep 2022
Using a dialogic methodology, in this article we discuss our doctoral research experiences and positionalities in two different contexts from the Global South, working with historically marginalized communities. The first voice, originating in Mexico, explored decolonizing design and Mayan textile knowledges in collaboration with a women-led collective in the highlands of Chiapas. The second voice, which originated in South Africa, collaboratively explored technological innovation by small-scale urban farmers. The dialogue reflects on uno con el todo, colectividad, resource(ful), pluriversal, and equilibrium as Buen Vivir- Centric design guiding principles to reflect on our studies. We discuss the learnings and transformations in our design research from dominant approaches towards Indigenous and endogenous ways of knowing, being, and making.
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... iZindaba Zokudla 1 is a multi-stakeholder engagement project that aims to create opportunities for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system. iZindaba Zokudla emerged from a research project in participatory technology design (Malan and Campbell, 2014;Campbell and Malan, 2018;Malan, 2020a). The NGOs REOS Partners and TransForum (REOS Partners, and TransForum, 2011) and the South African Food Lab introduced the author to food systems thinking and TransForum's multi-stakeholder engagement methodology accommodating public, business, and civil society interests (Regeer et al., 2011;Van Latesteijn and Andeweg, 2011). ...
Steering the Nexus: iZindaba Zokudla and Governing for Sustainability
Article
Full-text available
  • Sep 2021
“iZindaba Zokudla” means we talk about the food that we eat. iZindaba Zokudla is a public innovation lab that uses stakeholder-engagement methods to create “opportunities for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system.” iZindaba Zokudla is presented as an extra-institutional means to govern the water, land, energy, and waste nexus. This reflective essay critically describes iZindaba Zokudla and applies this to the design of institutional steering mechanisms to govern the food, water, land, and energy nexus towards sustainability. Governance is an intersubjective and interactive process between the subjects of governance and governance itself. Sustainability, as an interactive process, implies the creation of autocatalytic and symbiotic communities in society that integrates diverse actors and stakeholders, inclusive of scientific and lay actors, and ecosystems. iZindaba Zokudla is a means to govern and create such communities, and this article describes and reflects on how iZindaba Zokudla has created and managed such symbiotic communities or autocatalytic networks in the food system. The article generalises how the activities conducted in iZindaba Zokudla can be used to govern the water, land, energy, and waste nexus for sustainability. The article shows how iZindaba Zokudla has realised a progressive governance through the facilitation of its Farmers' Lab and website; how it has created opportunities for participation; and how it enables critical reflection in society.
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... Angus Campbell and I implemented the participatory technology development service-learning courses in 2014 (Campbell & Malan, 2018;Malan, 2020a;Malan & Campbell, 2014), and I held four additional workshops with educators on school gardens. The School Garden Dialogues aimed to persuade schools to combine agriculture and entrepreneurship. ...
Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development Advance online publication 1 iZindaba Zokudla: A conversation about food systems change in South Africa
Article
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  • Oct 2020
iZindaba Zokudla (IZ) is a multistakeholder engagement project that aims to create opportuni­ties for urban agriculture in a sustainable food system in Johannesburg. IZ implements the Farmers’ Lab, a social lab used as a transitional mechanism in a larger transition to sustainability. To move the South African urban food system to an ecologically sound, economically productive, and socially equitable system, significant stakehold­er integration is needed, and the iZindaba Zokudla Farmers’ Lab provides that. This reflective essay presents a history of the project (2013 until now) detailing the project’s creation of an ecosystem based on social labs that facilitate innovation in the food system. Emergent entrepreneurs and others use the social labs and their activities, as well as stakeholder engagement in their enterprise devel­opment, and these Labs have created opportunities for applied and other research in the university. This has brought innovation and change to agro­ecological practice in Johannesburg. This reflective essay article situates IZ within the broader evolu­tionary change in South Africa and considers how conversations about food lead to the creation of sustainable food systems.
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Service Learning and Stakeholder Action: Technology and Education for Urban Agriculture in Johannesburg, South Africa
Chapter
  • Jan 2020
This chapter reports on an ambitious action research and service-learning programme that aims to address urban food insecurity through food systems change in Soweto in Johannesburg, South Africa. The iZindaba Zokudla project developed appropriate technology, graphic design and business management service-learning courses for food systems change in South Africa. The chapter reflects on the ability of urban farmers and entrepreneurs to take action after a service-learning intervention in Soweto, Johannesburg. The chapter focusses on how service learning, its methods, personal change and reflexivity in students, and partnership development influenced the ability of entrepreneurs to take action. It concludes with remarks on how to implement such service-learning programmes so that stakeholders can contribute to the arduous task of food systems change.
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Questioning Technology
Book
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  • Apr 1999
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Technology, Wellbeing, and Freedom: The Legacy of Utopian Design
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  • Dec 2013
This paper is about the application of user-influencing design for improving wellbeing, focusing on the ethical issue of finding the right balance between determination and freedom. Two contemporary approaches for user-influencing design, "Persuasive Technology" and "Nudge," are discussed against the background of social engagement in the history of design. What can be learned from the past? The most explicit but also contested examples of improving people's lives by means of design can be found in movements of "utopian design." We discuss the utopian aspirations in Arts and Crafts, New Objectivity, Gute Form, and Postmodernism. The major lesson to be learned is that it is necessary to find a way out of the repeated ethical dilemma between coercing human behavior on the one hand and fostering human freedom on the other. Following Michel Foucault, we will conceptualize freedom not as the absence of influences on people, but as a practice of shaping one's life in interaction with these influences. User-influencing design methods can help to prolong the tradition of socially engaged design, with tempered, non-utopian goals, but at the same time with improved understanding and more effective tools concerning how technology mediates our existence.
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Urban farmers and urban agriculture in Johannesburg: Responding to the food resilience strategy
Article
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  • Jul 2015
The city of Johannesburg is implementing an urban agriculture policy, as part of a “food resilience” strategy. This article draws on participatory and social science methods of research in articulating farmers’ perspectives on issues critical to this policy and to urban agriculture in the city. The fieldwork forms part of a social science and action research project, Izindaba Zokudla, that aims to build the capacity of a farmers’ organisation in Johannesburg, and to develop programmes for implementation. Farmers, through a series of facilitated participatory workshops, have developed a strategy for organisational development that identified Land and Water (soil), External Stakeholders, Training, Tools and Technology, Marketing, Organisational Development, Permaculture and Security as themes relevant for the development of the organisation and urban agriculture. The ways farmers articulate these priorities afford us a perspective on urban agricultural development in Johannesburg that is crucial for the implementation of policy. The article discusses these themes in the context of the newly formulated policy and explains their significance vis-à-vis the broader assessment of urban agriculture and smallholder agriculture in the literature. The article concludes with comprehensive recommendations for the implementation of urban agriculture programmes in Johannesburg.
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Design of Resilient Products for Small-scale Farming in South Africa
Conference Paper
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  • Apr 2012
In a current climate of environmental, social and economic inequality it is imperative that designers contribute towards sustainable development. South Africa has a dual economy as a result of ingrained economic division which poses a challenge for designers when designing for the developing sector because they predominantly form part of the developed sector of society. The most pervasive method adopted for design interventions of a developmental nature, especially when designers are from a different context to the intended users, is User-Centred Design. This paper proposes the addition of an intentional designer influence or ‘nudge’ throughout the design process as well as in the final products use in order to address global and national agendas, and ensure more resilience in the product intervention. A case study of the design and development of single-household farming kit is used to explore the application of this approach. In the case study a vital aspect for the resilience of the kit is the system upon which it relies: the South African food chain/s. A decentralized model is encouraged through the use of the designers influence on the end users and this ultimately results in a more resilient product.
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Industrial Design Education and South African Imperatives
Article
Full-text available
  • Jan 2008
The first tertiary programme in industrial design in South Africa was offered at the School of Art, Johannesburg (SAJ) at the start of 1963 (Wood 1963:88). The SAJ then became the Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) in 1979 (Brink 2006:119) and finally the University of Johannesburg (UJ) in 2005 when it was merged with the Rand Afrikaans University (RAU). This was the only programme in industrial design in South Africa for 25 years, until the establishment of a second one at the Cape Technikon1 in 1988 (Verveckken 2007) and a third in 2008 at Tswane University of Technology (TUT). Since the curriculum for any technikon programme was controlled by the convener technikon, which in the case of industrial design was the TWR, the two technikon programmes have maintained many similarities particularly in terms of the curriculum (Verveckken 2007) and the TUT programme has been started by an industrial designer educated at the TWR. Both UJ and CPUT have been required to cater for the growing demand for designers in industry and have only as recently as five years ago been increasingly pressurised to expand areas of design study from vocational training into research at post-graduate level. In keeping with all tertiary offerings in the country, the unique political and economic challenges facing South Africa have demanded a reconsideration of what is taught and how it is taught.
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One-dimensional man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society
Book
  • Jan 1964
Combining aspects of Marxist theory, the Frankfurt School, French social theory, and American social science, Marcuse outlines a theory of advanced industrial society in which changes in production, consumption, and culture combine to create a technological society in which thought and labor is restructured in such a way that perpetuates domination and dehumanization. Marcuse argues that this leads to an oversimiplified culture that he refers to as a "one-dimensional society." Reason is used as a method of control in this society. Marcuse outlines simultaneous tensions in society: 1) advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change and 2) forces exist which can break this containment and explode the society.
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Growing Out of Poverty: Does Urban Agriculture Contribute to Household Food Security in Southern African Cities?
Article
  • Jun 2014
The literature on urban agriculture (UA) as a food security and poverty alleviation strategy is bifurcating into two distinct positions. The first is that UA is a viable and effective pro-poor development strategy, and the second is that UA has demonstrated limited positive outcomes on either food security or poverty. These two positions are tested against data generated by the African Urban Food Security Network’s (AFSUN) baseline food security survey undertaken in 11 Southern African cities. At the aggregate level, the analysis shows that (1) urban context is an important predictor of rates of household engagement in UA—the economic, political, and historical circumstances and conditions of a city are key factors that either promote or hinder UA activity and scale; (2) UA is not an effective household food security strategy for poor urban households—the analysis found few significant relationships between UA participation and food security; and (3) household levels of earnings and land holdings may mediate UA impacts on food security—wealthier households derive greater net food security benefits from UA than poor households do. These findings call into question the potential benefits of UA as a broad urban development strategy and lend support to the position that UA has limited poverty alleviation benefits under current modes of practice and regulation.
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