The Intergalactic Design Guide: Harnessing Social Design

Guest: Cheryl Heller

Business strategist and designer Cheryl Heller shares her system for putting social design into action to solve seemingly intractable problems facing business, governments, foundations and social organizations. “Social design is about changing people’s perceptions about what they believe is possible and can work together to create,” says Heller, who chairs the first MFA Program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. “It instills a belief in human creativity and builds the capacity for communities to imagine new realities.” It runs counter to the conventional wisdom that our future is best left in the hands of experts who believe they have all the answers in advance. In complex social systems, navigating in uncertainty and chaos, plans don’t work, only networked innovation and experimentation does.