In 2018, the Hans Sauer Foundation founded the "Social Design Lab" with the help of an IKEA Foundation grant, in cooperation with morethanshelters . This enabled the foundation to bring over its scientific trends, practices, and experiences from its own work to a new context and new conceptual framework.

 

The Social Design Lab uses the social design approach to solve social challenges. This means that methods and practices from design, the social sciences, and other disciplines and departments are consistently used to solve societal challenges. In the understanding and practice of the lab, this means, among other things, that solutions are engineered in a participatory, iterative, open-ended, and bottom-up manner. Research, practitioners, and the people affected are brought together to gradually and collectively work on new models and solutions “from bottom-up”.

 

These solutions are then practically tested for their impacts and effects. In this way, social change and innovation processes that people actively shaped are not only initiated, but - so the hope is - also widely and sustainably supported. For this purpose, a separate process model and portfolio of methods was developed along with an interdisciplinary lab team, in which design, the humanities, and social sciences are represented.

 

Why is the social design lab called “Lab”? In contrast to a scientific research laboratory, the lab is anything but an enclosed space, and yet it is a field for experimentation -without being specifically located. The lab can and should take place anywhere, and as close as possible to the social context in which the project is taking place. The lab work follows principles that are essential for social design processes: the lab principles.

 

Participation: The activating, empowering and co-creative inclusion of all actors, especially those affected by the respective social grievances in every project phase, is a central principle of the work of the social design lab.

 

Transdisciplinarity: Working across professional and social boundaries, integrating diverse knowledge, and a wide variety of skills is another central principle of the social design lab.

 

Design and innovation: The social design lab focuses on design in the sense of a creative, adaptable, and better future-oriented development of solutions. It projects the notion of Innovation, understood as the dissemination of these new solutions in society.