"Matthew DelSesto provides a compelling blueprint for a design practice that enables us to address the social, political and environmental challenges of today. By combining the creative, action-oriented sensibility of design with the reflective, analytical capacities of the social sciences, DelSesto offers models, ideas and strategies for shaping the future. Drawing on the work of C. Wright Mills, Patrick Geddes, Jane Addams and W. E. B. Du Bois, and exploring professional practices and discourses in a wide range of design fields, this book shows us how design and the social sciences can interact in a more productive way"--

Preface
Part One: Awakening the Social Imagination
1. Another Relationship to Knowledge
2. The Enduring Gap between Reflection and Action
Part Two: The Key Thinkers: Their Lives, Contexts, and Projects
3. Patrick Geddes: Thinking Ecologically
4. Jane Addams: Theories in, of and for Practice
5. W. E. B. Du Bois: From Consciousness to Cooperation
Part Three: The Choreography of Beautiful Action
6. If You Can Think, You Can Act
7. Contingent Becoming
Afterword: Social Thinking, Imagining, and Designing