Abstract
Successful eco-social design improves relations, sometimes without the production of products or services, which are the primary modes of understanding success in economic markets. The work of eco-social designers creates values and benefits, which can be difficult to measure in purely monetary terms. Positive transformations supported through eco-social design often unfold in the long term - just as the effects of education, care work, social work and cultural work take time to reveal themselves.
While the currently well established roles of designers are predominantly market-driven, mainly helping to innovate and market goods and services, in recent years more designers in Europe want to engage in practices beyond the roles driven by the logics of the neo-liberal economic model, think for instance of the proliferation of successful design master courses which focus on social and environmental sustainability. Earning a livelihood with these alternative notions of design work can therefore be a challenge, because for these kind of design practices there is a lack of established positions and roles, which could provide a prefigured career path and predictable income stream. Eco-social designers often rely on multiple economic activities at the same time: they combine their eco-social design practice with a wide range of other activities, which generate monetary income, for example, by working as teachers in schools, researchers in universities, traditional graphic designers, exhibition installers and much else. When everything runs smoothly, this creates synergies and cross-fertilizations between different activities; when not, it takes away time, concentration and energy from developing one’s eco-social design practice. This situation of multi-jobbing very often leads to an overload, which is not healthy in the long run. While being unhealthy for the eco-social designers themselves, this situation also weakens eco-social design as a field and the benefits it could provide on a bigger scale. Moreover, it deters many designers from engaging with the world in more socially, environmentally and politically progressive ways, and directs them to the activities and roles defined by the neo-liberal market economy, where the inherent goal of the players is to maintain not to change the eco-social system we are in.
So, what is needed to support eco-social design in a sustainable way?