Design for community engagement and community engagement within the process of design are growing areas of research within contemporary design disciplines. The merging of design with social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology, has seen a shift in designerly perspectives. As a result, socially focused design disciplines are emerging and responding to the complex socioeconomic issues that predominate our twenty-first century lives.

In theory, these emerging social design practices promise solutions to current global issues, such as community resilience in response to economic uncertainty and the embedding of sustainable action in younger generations. In practice, they conduct research within simple contexts that do not represent the complexities of wide scale issues, such as established suburban schools and community gardens (Jégou and Manzini, 2009). They do so through the repetitive process of implementing transient tools and workshops, which undervalue the importance of sustaining impact beyond the designer’s engagement with the context. This research investigates the methods of three leading social design practices, Design for Social Innovation, Design for Sustainability, and Speculative Design, and identifies the limitations within their principles, formats and contextual applications. Key theorists within these practices are studied to address the gaps in current social design research: Ezio Manzini, John Thackara, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.

From the analysis of these designers’ projects and theories, the success of social design methods are discovered to rely upon engagement from participants within the contexts they are tested. In a school for example, the impact of social design methods might rely on engagement with and between teachers, children and parents, of which the designer facilitates. The limitations of social design methods are related to poor engagement from participants and thus this research asks how design methods might create more genuine and sustainable engagements within contexts that are socially complex.

By studying the unique context of Scotland’s community land movement through the lens of a social designer, this research identify it as the type of complex context that social designers should be approaching. Within this context, communities across rural Scotland already innovate methods to engage residents with the shared land decisions they must make. A practice-led methodology allows the practice of social design to navigate the context, responding to insights and observations that occur during fieldwork conducted with one landowning community case study: the Galson Estate on the Isle of Lewis. Allowing the practice of social design to take influence from the community case study and its methods of engagement, the inquiry asks the question: what can social design methods learn from their application within the context of community-owned land?

In response, a social design intervention is tested that adopts the Galson Estate’s predominant use of established community spaces, defined as ‘third spaces,’ to facilitate engagement. Mimicking the case study’s use of a community café to host informal consultation, the design intervention that is tested integrates social methods with the established community space of a pub, named The Public House. Conclusive from the testing is the discovery that the integration of established, community third spaces with social design methods can enhance engagement between participants and shared social issues.

1.2 Research Questions
As stated within the abstract, the primary research question that leads this inquiry is as follows: ‘what can social design methods discover about community engagement from their application within Scotland’s community land movement?’ To answer this, the inquiry is divided into three analytical steps that each ask sub-questions: Step one gains knowledge of the practice and its limitations by asking: how are social design methods already being used to stimulate and innovate community engagement within various contexts? This question is explored within the literature review and concluded in section 2.1.4.

Step two gains knowledge of the context and its limitations by asking: how are communities already engaging with the topic of land development and their shared ownership? This question is explored throughout the fieldwork and concluded in section 5.1.1.

Step three compares the methods of social design with the methods already being innovated by landowning communities in rural Scotland by asking: in what ways might social design methods learn from community-led methods of engagement, and how might the two enhance each other? This question is addressed through the testing of a social design intervention, analysed in section 6.2.

1.3 Aims and Objectives
The research aims to identify a set of learnings from social design’s interaction with the context of community landownership. From these learnings, it aims to identify elements within the context of community land engagement that can be adopted and innovated by social design methods, to enhance and sustain engagement. Insights that inform the creation of new social design methods, along with an account of any new methods formed, are then presented in a replicable way to be shared with fellow researchers who align with the practice of social design.

1.4 Thesis Structure
The structure of this thesis follows the chronological order of events that that took place during the research, which represents the design of the research inquiry.Within the first half of the literature review, section 2.1, the practice of social design is assessed and a definition is crafted from the analysis of key theorists Ezio Manzini (2015), John Thackara (2015), and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013). The socially orientated disciplines that emerge from these theorists include Design for Social Innovation, Design for Sustainability and Speculative Design respectively. Project examples from each discipline are analysed and categorised to balance the theoretical principles initially defined. From the analysis, social design methods are defined as those that exhibit predominantly social or cultural directives and a summary of their strengths and limitations is included.

The literature review continues with the exploration of Scotland’s community land movement as a context from which to explore innovate methods of engagement. Section 2.2 discusses the grassroots movement of community landownership as one that responds to inequality across the Scottish Highlands and Islands. The movement’s motivations are discussed in relation to examples of communities who have transition from private to public landownership and the support they receive from land reform policy and nongovernment organisations. The chapter concludes by identifying the complex context of community land in Scotland as one that relies upon and exhibits innovative forms of engagement, and is thus an appropriate situation from which to test the boundaries of social design.

Chapter three exhibits a change of tone as the methodological approach is presented in relation to a theoretical framework. Due to the subjectivism of practice-led research, the declaration of a theoretical stance when conducting the inquiry and interpreting data is what provides this thesis with validity. Within this chapter various theoretical perspectives are explored before giving rationale to the social constructivist, interpretivist approach that has been used. Through the theoretical framework, the practice-led methods of this research are then briefly introduced. These methods are discussed individually within the three chapters that follow.

Chapters four to seven provide the discussion phase of the thesis. Due to the role of communication and interaction as indicators of engagement, a past tense, first-person narrative is adopted to position myself within the engagements observed. As the social designer leading the practice within this practice-led inquiry, a first-person account is necessary to provide the connection between myself and the practice. In the fourth chapter, the process of selecting a landowning community case study (the
Galson Estate on the Isle of Lewis) is presented through the narration of a responsive scoping method. The scoping phase details my attendance of the Community Land Conference 2017: Sharing the Knowledge, where initial contact is made with the case study before a site visit is conducted upon its land. Limitations of the scoping method are then discussed in relation to the appropriateness of the Galson Estate as a case study. Insights and observations from the site visit are recounted within chapter five, which discloses a failed attempt to construct a method of data co-interpretation with participants. Analysis of the method’s failure results in a key insight: that social design methods must expect participants to interact only with formats that are integrated with familiar or daily activities. Learnings from the context of community landownership and the Galson Estate case study are then innovated using social design principles and tested through a social design intervention, named The Public House. The test’s variables and limitations are discussed within chapter six, which concludes with an evaluation of the method.

Finally, a summary of the findings, along with limitations and opportunities for future research are deliberated within chapter seven. The Public House design intervention demonstrates that the integration of established public community spaces within social
design methods enhances engagement between participants. However, limitations still bind the experiment. Of these limitations, predominant is the inaccessibility of the context chosen to support the inquiry, that of community landownership. The thesis concludes with suggestions for future research by proposing research designs that would address these limitations and embrace more contexts with similar complexities.