Routes to social impact : a systemic design perspective on enriching social innovation projects to navigate complexity

Abstract

Contemporary societal challenges such as inequality, climate change, healthcare pressures, and institutional fragility are increasingly understood as complex, interconnected, and evolving problems. Social innovation projects have emerged as an important response to these challenges, bringing together diverse actors to develop intervention networks including practices, services, relationships, and organizational models. Yet despite their ambitions, many of these projects struggle to achieve lasting impact. Interventions often remain limited to short-term outputs, implementation breaks down after project completion, and project teams lack adequate ways to monitor and sustain change within evolving social systems. Therefore, this dissertation explores how social innovation projects can be enriched with a systemic perspective to navigate complexity and support long-term social impact. Positioned at the intersection of design, social innovation, and monitoring and evaluation, the research addresses four key gaps: the temporary role of designers within projects, the limited practical application of systemic and complexity-informed approaches, fragmented and situated understandings of impact, and the underexplored consideration of ethical and equitable actor involvement. Adopting a qualitative mixed-methods approach, the research combines grounded theory studies, an interdisciplinary scoping review, design-inclusive research, and a theory-informed framework analysis. The findings show that while practitioners increasingly recognize complexity and aspire to create systemic change, their work is often constrained by linear project structures, short-term evaluation requirements, and persistent difficulties related to implementation and long-term ownership. In response, the dissertation reframes social innovation as a collective process of navigating complexity rather than delivering predefined solutions. It conceptualizes impact as an evolving process of shared sense-making, highlights the importance of continuous learning and reflection, and introduces handover as an ongoing systemic responsibility rather than a final project phase. Furthermore, by integrating care ethics with systemic design, the research advances a more relational, context-sensitive, and ethically grounded approach to social innovation. The central contribution of the dissertation is the development of a systemic enrichment instrument that supports project teams in envisioning, monitoring, and sustaining impact through collective reflection, capacity building, and adaptive learning. Developed and refined through multiple iterative cycles with students, researchers, and design consultants, the instrument aspires to offer a practical and actionable way to engage with complexity. Together, the findings contribute to bridging the gap between theory and practice by proposing a systemic, ethical, and practice-oriented approach to designing for envisioned social impact in complex contexts.