Social Design

I checked out the sites on the Selected Bibliography and discovered from www.design21sdn.com that Social Design is design for the greater good. The members of Design 21 are from across the world and they collaborate to make positive changes in what they design and create for society. The areas they focus on improving are education, aid, poverty, community, environment, communication, arts & culture, peace and well-being(health). It seems like a really influential site and I think that it is a great idea that they hold design competitions to inspire healthy competition for worth while causes. This site seemed to be on the cutting edge of social design in its goals and its drive to improve society for the future.
Another one of the recommeded websites I checked out was www.designcanchange.org. It focuses specifically on the problem of climate change and it has a great slideshow outlining the problem, causes, effects, culprits and how designers can go about being involved. It makes the point of design being such an integral part of our lives and that leaves the designers to start being part of the movement for social change. I like how this site speaks to different groups of designers including students and gives a little advice about how to get involved and make decisions along the line of sustainability.

When I just typed "social design" into google I came up with a large such result and discovered that there are numerous individuals and organizations supporting and becoming involved with social design. I came across Social Design-social & technical consulting which is a designer named Chris Halaska and Jocelyn Hollander, a sociologist, who work together to provide their services for various aspects of social design projects. I included this comment just to mention a few designers involved in the social design cause. Another site I discovered was http://www.backspace.com/notes/ Social Design Notes. It is a site dedicated to collecting notes on the built environment, graphic design, product design, architecture, the decisions we make, and the impact they have. It's just an example of more people attempting to make searching of social design easier by creating one place in which to find various examples of social design.
I will post more later on my search findings.