Supporting Social Innovation: Application of InDeate Tool for Sustainable Service Design—Case Study of Community Workshops

Designing systems for sustainability involves satisfying diverse requirements spanning not just of the object of design but also of the designer, the context in which design happens and the design process. Taking an engineering design approach emphasizes the object of design as well as the process, albeit neglecting the designer and the context in which design happens. Taking a Gandhian approach to design necessarily emphasizes the designer and the context in which design happens, while the object of design could take a backstage. In this regard, this article applies the InDeate tool, developed to balance design approaches, for innovating a ‘service design’ for the community workshops of National Innovation Foundation (NIF). NIF is involved in supporting grassroots innovators and leverage their innovation for social and hence national benefit. On observing two comparable student groups conceptualizing for ‘service design’ with and without using the InDeate tool, as the variety of conceptual propositions is higher with the group using the tool, it is proposed that the tool could be a candidate for supporting design for social innovation.