[Update on 19th Nov 2025]
In my research, I have adapted several literature as the foundation theories for my projects. These resources explore design, future studies, and collaboration as the core principles behind my work.
Since my previously annotated bibliography might not have fully reflected and integrated into my research questions, I will now base my bibliography on my current blog post.
Manzini, E. (2015) Design, when everybody designs: an introduction to design for social innovation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
I used to believe that design was solely about planning and producing closed-ended products and services, heavily narrowed on expected outcomes. Being caught in a capital-driven process eventually made me feel disillusioned about identifying myself as a designer. This pushed me into a constant shift in my professional path—from strategist to designer—as I searched for a meaning of being a designer within the so-called creative industry. And my concern, is somehow nodded by Ezio Manzini when I found the term of design for social innovation.
Design for social innovation is trying to reimagine the function of design into a potential process of triggering and supporting social change. At some cases, design for social innovation is foreseen as a process that can develop original or existing social invention into more structured prototypes and/or social enterprises. So instead of always asking what’s needs to be new or renew, social innovation help to fill in the fracture, bridging the gap between design and social humanities.What I find inspiring is how this positions designers as enablers for social invention, using their expertise and technology to identify and amplify grassroots ideas, making social invention elevated into more accessible, impactful, sustainable, and scalable innovation.
[Update on 19th Nov 2025]
In my recent research progress, after discussing my project with urban designers, I discovered that they believe collaboration with communication designers can help bridge the gap between the community and urban designers. This collaboration, as described by Manzini’s diagram, is known as a design coalition. Communication designers possess the ability to grasp the imagination and make sense of the radicality of their ideas using a grounded communication theory. They then develop these ideas into visual data, which can later be transformed into social data.
Design for social innovation is often related to other discipline in order co-design take part in social innovation.
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Co-design has been echoed and integrated into many practices of design and production. Manzini highlights co-design is an approach that positions design as a powerful tool to address complex social challenges. It involves a wide range of stakeholders and reimagines design as a form of service and critical inquiry for development.
[Update on 19th Nov 2025]
Based on my professional career, designers from specific discipline are doing the end-to-end process in their design project. Oftentimes, it created biases and make less discussion. In my co-design session in Cipadu, when the experts, residents and government immersed into the discussion, it emerged many undiscussed issue in the development. Thus, it validates how strong and supportive circle can spark social innovation.
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Social innovation requires a strong system and supportive circle. In this book, he stated that social innovation can sparked from “social heroes”, and requires a supportive organization or institution that can make the innovation last over time, grow and multiply. It took a village to change the future.
And not only start with passionate people, but also means by giving people voice and room to imagine the change they want to see. By relating to individual problems and communities validation, it will build new possibilities, not only a single solutions.
The last important component is to identifying problem in both its local and its general dimension. This means to envision the local problem with the general or global problem that might create an impactful, sustainable, and scalable innovation that can be amplified to future challenges.
[19 November 2025]
The philosophy of gotong royong or mutual assistance is very deeply visible in the theory of social innovation. Especially when the co-design session is being held for the third times. However, the social innovation might not be suitable to solve wicked problems that are complex like Cipadu because its orientation is to find the sustaining design that solve specific problems. Hence, social innovation is best for the ground philosophy but needs more theory that is more suitable for understanding complexity.
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DelSesto, M. (2022) Design and the social imagination. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
DelSasto appear to extending the concept of sociological imagination as first introduced by C. Wright Mills in 1950s, with the term of social imagination. To begin with, Mills’ sociological imagination is a potential quality of mind and a mode of thought, or a human capacity. In this definition, Mills also linked the causes of individuals problem (biography) with what is the background or the history that happened universally.
Sociological imagination aims to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar by linking personal experiences to broader societal contexts. While initially felt on an individual level, this experience resonated with many others globally. What began as a personal struggle ultimately reflected a widespread issue, which illustrating the concept of sociological imagination.
However, DelSesto expands the idea of human capacity and ways of thinking through the concept of social imagination, which goes beyond the sociological imagination that tends to focus solely on present realities, as what social sciences or sociology always been. Instead, social imagination encourages a future-oriented, collective way of thinking about what could be possible by analyzing “wicked problems”.
[19 November 2025]
Initially, I thought my disillusionment on my neighbourhood was only my personal feeling. But when gathering the residents all together and sharing our aspiration and imaginations towards the future, we were all able to connect the dots within our each other struggles. This exploration is really relevant towards social imagination that apparently can untied all the complexity together and seeing it as something collective.
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Wicked problems are complex issues without clear root causes and involve constantly changing variables, for example is problem in poverty. According to Rittel and Webber’s definition, such problems require bold thinking and innovative research, not only to understand their nature but also to imagine what solutions might look like. This is exactly how social imagination is needed, to engage the people on what the world they want to live and see. And somehow, the wicked problem is fully dependent and tangled into specific issue or area only, it makes some intervention in specific area can not be replicable.
[19 November 2025]
In case of Cipadu, the communities face ongoing socioecological struggles after being convicted from South Jakarta, such as recurring floods, poor and corrupt governance, which made people often experience social resignation. DelSesto also mentioned this social averse behaviour happened because the complexity is uncanny therefore people are giving up to pulling which thread that matter first.
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Design and the social imagination also trying to link the distinctive sector between design and social sciences. Design professions have typically been associated with intervention, communication and action, while social science has long been associated with thought and reflection. Often times, design and social thought are too frequently considered distinct in terms of how theories can be applied in practice.
[19 November 2025]
Design and the Social Imagination merges the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences to provide ideas, and strategies for shaping the future. This is why every intervention I’ve made has focused on modeling interventions that iterate based on previous feedback from users. Apparently, there are still many participatory practices that are leading to answers that are less democratic.
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Therefore, DelSesto introducing social imagination as the extension of realities using possibilities and creativity. He also referred to Zygmunt Bauman’s human praxis about fundamental basis of human societies, where human can be both subjects and objects of unfolding social realities. So practically, human have their own agency to transform existing conditions into something imagined if only they are provided and facilitated in the community.
The human mind might full of creative potential to invent and make, is also highly conditioned and habit forming around routines of the status quo. It can be personally, professionally, and politically more comfortable to accept the world as it is rather than reinventing or innovate the world as they imagined. This is why laboring to re-make the very conditions under which new social realities might come into being is a daring and courageous act.
[Updated on 19th Nov 2025]
Press, J. and Celi, M. (2024) Designing Sustainable Futures: How to Imagine, Create, and Lead the Transition to a Better World. 1st ed. New York: Routledge. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003451693.
World bank stated that climate change is driven in large part by economic and social inequalities across the world, as retold by this book. This statement is very strong in terms of how society seeing the future and especially sustainability nowadays. From this uncertainty, this book invite us to explores some of the emerging practices to reimagine and transition to a better world. Some of the practices that are being used are speculative futures, worldbuilding/design fiction and collaboration.
Through this book, it inspired me to dig deeper towards design for transition and also analyzing the social data that I gained from the third intervention using speculative narratives.
Designing sustainable futures also involves exploring experiential futures as one of its practices. This means encouraging people to experiment with foresight in a radical manner to explore the possibilities of their futures. Press et al. also classifying possible futures using speculative narrative to give people insight on how they want to achieve their future. This is important because, facilitaros often do a workshop, that made people get excited, but nothing changed “Monday morning.”
This cycle of discussion without action is dangerous. It breeds cynicism among participants, undermining the very momentum needed to tackle urgent problems. When people see that envisioning a better future is treated as a performative exercise rather than the first step in a real process, they disengage. The book argues that to make real progress, we must commit to closing the gap between the workshop and the workplace, transforming visionary conversations into tangible strategies and actions.
From this book, which I found after I contemplated on what to do to next, so I will not only exploiting the people’s hope in this co-design session. Designing sustainable futures also validated that we need to make participation democratic and continous using the existing technology to make it relevant. And because of that, the idea of making speculative narratives is emerged. Not only for analyzing the problems, but also archiving people’s ideas that can be interpreted and implemented by the urban developers, and relevant to the residents.
This book effectively implement new mindset using design to create preferable futures. The book champions “Futures Literacy” as a critical capability for everyone, not just futurists or strategists. As described by UNESCO’s Riel Miller, Futures Literacy is not about predicting the future. Its purpose is to empower us to use our imagination about the future to see the present more clearly and act with greater agency.
Pink, S., Akama, Y. and Sumartojo, S. (2019) Uncertainty and possibility: new approaches to future making in design anthropology. Reprinted. London New York, NY Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic.
Pink et al. propose a new method for engaging with the future that shifts the focus from anticipation and control to actively using uncertainty as a catalyst for change.
Their methodology, rooted in action research, is designed to analyze emergence; the constant arising of new phenomena, during the research process. This research argue that since we inhabit ever-changing systems where new elements are continuously emerging, it’s likely to be impossible to be certain about what future will bring, or assume we can fully control them.
There is a strong parallel between this concept and my research on Cipadu’s “wicked problems.”
This analysis leads my research to explore the potential of adopting Pink et al.’s central idea: deliberately utilizing uncertainty not as an obstacle, but as a tool to generate new possibilities in the Cipadu context.
Like the uncertainty context as described by Pink et al., Cipadu’s issues are interconnected and tangled, meaning that the emergence of one problem often triggers or affects several others in a cascading effect.
The intervention confirmed the complexity of the situation, as the negative issues mentioned by the people outweighed the positive aspects. But this does not mean the outcome is failed, instead the positive aspect can be a silver lining that can be a spark of hope in seeing the future, which is through gotong royong.
In the book, it is mentioned how “designing collaboratively with people is to immerse in emergence and chance while attuning with slippery, un-namable tones and expressions that can only be sensed through our feeling and bodily encounter to other people’. This is very strong idea because I would never be able to empathized and immersed towards the problems of the residents if I was not able to be in the Cipadu. Regardless being immersed can also be emotionally involved and drained, the important aspects that found in the offline session can’t be found during the online co-design session.
Human of twentieth century are so obsessed seeing risk as something that needs to be heavily anticipated and controlled, which Giddens explained it as “risk society”. Which made anticipation turned into anxiety and later will turn into risk averse behaviour. This is also understandable because the complexity from modern society has bring, make people cautious on wanting to know “what next”. This is creating failure in the human system.
Anthropological and historical views, however, reveal a richer understanding of uncertainty as a potentially fertile condition. The authors advocate for an intentional shift to engage with the reality of constantly emerging systems, seeing uncertainty not as an obstacle requiring mitigation but as a dynamic resource for developing new forms of understanding, imagining, and intervening in the future.
This view is very radical but also a new way to train human cognition to altered uncertainty into possibility, which we often see it as “being positive”. People always told me that not everyone can also be positive in their situation, and it is very much understandable. Especially in this age and time of the century. However, positivity can be a control and also the way of surviving. Cipadu has been massively exploited internally and externally, yet they are still believing in each other because togetherness makes them together. This such a powerful tool and belief for making people binding and build possibility.
[Updated on 19th Nov 2025] Additional Bibliographt
Bregman, R. (2021) Humankind: a hopeful history. Translated by E. Manton and E. Moore. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
It is true that human is driven by selfishness and self-interest, it is a very basic human nature and act of survival according to Bregman, as he begins the book. In contrary, he also believe people that it is realistic and revolutionary, so to speak, that people are altruistics or good.
Using several case studies, he showed several examples on how crisis and uncertain conditions make people hand in hand to help each other, strengthened the community with solidarity. Thus, human long for a safety from fear and have a ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power, that ceaseth only in death’. Which later resulted in ‘a condition of war of all against all.’ But Hobbes also give argument towards this–anarchy can be tamed and peace established, if only we all agree to pursue liberty.
Fear disempowered civilization to have democracy to choose the way they live. On the other, Rousseau: it was the structures of civilisation that made humans self-interested.
Another interesting finding that I found in this book is an observation from Morris Janowitz and Edward Shils. They were observing the reason behind the resilience and why did the Germans continue to fight so hard during the war. Were they brainwashed or possessed by any ideology that blinds them in the combat? However, the result of the observation was the otherwise. It was Kameradschaft/Friendship. All those hundreds of bakers and butchers, teachers and tailors; all those German men who had resisted the Allied advance tooth and nail had taken up arms for one another. And apparently it goes the same with American soldiers who fought in Vietnam, their camaraderie that drives them to fought to each other.
Some truth are so painful to accept, how can every soldiers in the world were actually driven by the empathy and humanity towards each other? Although there is no excuse in doing war and crimes, but people do have sense of defending to one another in friendship. Making solidarity a strong kinship to progressing or achieving a certain goals.
Apparently it is also rooted from how human is actually rooted deeply in empathy, although it might not naturally presence in human. Bregman quoted from Professor Paul Bloom, empathy operates like a spotlight, highlighting a specific person or group of people in one’s life, while simultaneously causing the rest of the world to “fade away”. Thus, it is hard for people to empathize every single persons in the world. He argues, that human does not only need empathy but also compassion to give about the change.