Welcome to our first post, well technically it’s our second but who’s actually counting. We’re pretty excited to have developed this blog so we can spill out all the socially responsible thoughts that are running around our heads and our hearts.

So you’ve landed on this site and you’re thinking, so socially responsible design huh, but what does this really mean? Well to be honest I think it is pretty hard to actually define it in a single sentence or even in a paragraph but I’ll give it a go. I guess the way we view SRD (let’s agree to shorten it so I don’t have to keep typing its full title) is that it refers to:

• Design that addresses a need rather than a want
• Design that improves everyday life – be it through areas such as health, economic hardship or even education
• Design that is sustainable – in terms of use, maintenance, longevity, lifecycle etc
• Design that is ecologically sensitive – meaning the overall footprint of the product in terms of material, process, transport, usage, end of life and the impact it has on our planet

I’m sure our definition of SRD will develop and evolve as this blog continues but these are our current thoughts. What do you think? Have we got it right? Would you define it differently? Pop us a line as we’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

So now that we’ve defined our views on SRD, the idea behind this blog is to create a dialogue about SRD and to promote the idea of SRD to a wider community. We aim to provide current news, thoughts, designs and hopefully even some controversies!