Interview with Debra Solomon

What does social design mean to you?
Social design is about working with what is sometimes referred to as wetware, that is to say people, and working with the sticky, vague, and mutable stuff that goes with them. Social design is a way of working with people, their behaviour and the existing social context as materials.

Could you give some direction to how you would define social design?
An important characteristic of social design is a collaborative working process. Social design happens horizontally, ideally. Often the design product is in fact a process, the context is participatory.

What are you doing or showing at Utrecht Manifest?
In the CM studio, I am organising at least one, possibly two dinners. These dinners are an opportunity to bring together people who represent vital (Utrecht) food-related voices/narratives but who by coincidence or social construct are not in communication with each other yet. Specifically, I mean people who don’t talk, but whose agenda would mutually benefit through discussion, by preparing a meal together, and by sitting down together to eat it. The topic of these dinners is ‘Food as a Social Issue’. Because food touches on innumerable aspects of our lives, because Dutch involvement in global food markets and distribution systems forms an important part of the national economy, and has an impact equally on our local and regional economies, there are many questions that require clarification regarding the overlap between social design and that very large subject called food. One way to clear things up is to engage strategic people in this discussion in an informal working situation, in this case a dinner.

As an artist/designer, I am involved in food culture and have a vested interested in creating and nurturing a critical discussion. Therefore the guest lists consist primarily of people with whom I want to talk because I have an agenda. According to me, no discussion, no research, and no campaign on food should ignore social factors as inputs and outputs. It is with this agenda that I curate the dinners that will ideally form a platform for tactical discussion among the guests themselves.

For the past four years I have been producing, writing about, and curating what are effectively food culture interventions. Food, as I deal with it in my work, is a social and cultural construct inextricable from a social context. Designing and producing food and food systems is an act of social design.

Could you explain how these activities relate to social design?
By offering a platform, an in to a conversation that hasn’t yet taken place (and that I feel is necessary) I am designing a way, or just a possibility for a specific group of people to converge, with the potential to change how and what we eat and what foods are available to us, big quality of life issues. In some cases this conversation may be that last detail that was missing before a local action group with the ambition to provide a neighbourhood with locally produced food is formed. Just offering a time, date and location could prove to be the tipping point for an organisation to start taking action. Providing impetus in this way is social design. A small intervention in the form of a dinner conversation might be successful in really getting things going.

In another case, I would like to improve the public conversation about food by first engaging in a private one with a small number of vocal spokespeople, to really clear the air on the subject of the social factors involved in food production. I have invited people whose viewpoints confuse and confound me, so that we might through conversation and gentle salad making create the opportunity to understand each other, even if we never end up agreeing on the sustainability of small-scale agriculture or the flavour of vinaigrette. The dinners are a specific example, a specific subject with specific strategic guests.