Consultant social design, austerity and citizenry

Social design has emerged as a broad set of designerly approaches to societal challenges. With falling public sector budgets and failing economies, social design, as carried through pro- fessional, consultant practices rather than in its voluntarist or activist modes, is understood to work as a smart, fast way of seeing us through these. Outsourcing, Outcome-Based Budgeting and the stirring up of traditional governance systems and responsibilities each contribute to a more varied and less permanent design landscape to work in, however. These are met by a set of design methods to researching, generating and realising new ways to configure and deliver services. This paper takes a critical view that asks whether consultant social design really is ‘social’ or whether, instead, it conspires, in its methods and in the contexts it is active in, towards the opposite.