Social planning and decision making processes

This paper aims to highlight the role and the relationships between design and social planning in the decision making processes. The design activity is generally carried out with the conviction of being able to create, dominate and orientate reality to organize the future. Social planning is aimed at the formulation of rational strategies for the distribution of the most adequate resources to the fulfillment of target-values. In the light of modern programming-designing logics, what appears to be really important in any case is not to block the communicative processes of formative interaction and social relationality, because they are at the basis of a truly participatory design (which is development planning). A social development depends not so much on finding the optimal combinations of resources and production factors, but also on activating communication processes, with the purpose of producing contextual intersubjective knowledge. In this context and in design terms we rediscover also the role of the sociologist as a possible referent of an analytical planning of development, creator of a system of social relations as well as in his competence as a reflexively critical and scientifically valid and reliable interpreter of social realities.