Artists and designers working in Africa, Asia and Latin-America often take a holistic approach towards their creative practice as illustrated in the stories that can be read on this site. Many of them relate to urgent social issues in their local or global environment. Within the Social Design programme we finance projects in Africa, Asia and Latin-America in which artists or designers develop new perspectives on concrete social issues, for example related to the design of public space, the increasing ‘formalisation’ of human relations, food shortage or climate.
The financing of social design projects is new in the international culture program and will be developed throughout 2011-2012. We will finance some specific pilot projects and will send out a call for applications. Projects that focus on informing about or creating awareness on social issues will not be taken into account.
For more information see the report of an informal consultation we organized with ruangrupa in Jakarta, read the article of David Kaiza on the projects of Stroom in The Hague or click here for an overview of social design projects we have financed in the Netherlands.