Personally I tend to agree with Prof. Ezio Manzini’s approach: your definition on ‘social design’ and the one of Prof. Victor Margolin are both acceptable because they both are based on a reality: we are relational beings by nature.

I still remember what Prof. Margolin wrote in his article “The product milieu and social action”: design creates opportunities for new relations between isolated practices, and we engage with design in four ways, all of which are active rather than passive: we design product ‘for’ others; we design products for ourselves; we use products designed ‘by’ others; and we use products they design for ourselves. What he said implies that design activity always, intentionally or unintentionally, has repercussion (slight or strong) in our lifestyle and in the environment. Stefano Marzano said something similar: “The future does not just happen by itself.… By virtue of the enormous number of products they put onto the market, large companies play a major role in determining the quality of our lives. Such corporations should therefore shoulder their responsibility and become conscious of their power.”