design activism

Happy new year to all. Sorry I’ve been away from the blog a little longer than usual in the transition to the new year. During this period I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of legitimate causes for activists to pursue. This is a question that concerns designers, but others as well.

From my reading, a number of designers seem to position design activism, or design for social change, on the “humanitarian aid” end of the spectrum of potential causes. And there’s no argument against these as central and legitimate causes. One need only gesture to Haiti’s earthquake and similar natural disasters, with weather-related disasters likely to increase. Housing for underserved populations, humanitarian technologies such as Project H’s life straw for clean drinking water, are other good examples.

But lately I’ve been thinking about the other end of the spectrum. What about those “causes” that essentially concern the problems of overconsumption? The problem of making sustainable consumption palatable, or at least viable, to “wealthy” westerners (here I mean average inhabitants of North American and European countries)? Ultimately these patterns not only cause us to overshoot natural limits, but also pave a cultural path that many want to follow. These are also the patterns that I live in and struggle to navigate. I recently happened upon an article in the Bangladeshi Financial Express pointing out that although “overconsumption” is thought of as a problem of western countries, increasingly the wealthy in all the world’s cities are getting on the consumption treadmill.

beyond “reduce” to “reverse”?

Recently I attended a meeting of a nascent De-growth Network here in London, with speakers from many major European “de-growth” groups. One speaker in particular, Leida Rijnhout, ANPED (Belgium) , pointed out that sustainability is traditionally conceived as “three pillars”— economic, ecological, and social— that need to be kept “in balance.” But she contends this is a real fallacy, since the economic “pillar” is already way out of balance with respect to the other two.

I’ve written before about the challenges for designers of working toward sustainable consumption, and I continue to be concerned about the question of how we make the necessary and most probably drastic changes in lifestyle that are required. The recent financial crisis hasn’t served as the obvious turning point for dealing with the problems of economic growth — what will?

As yet there seem to be few consolidated efforts to delve in to design’s potential roles in sustainable consumption, either in products or architecture. The main efforts that I’m aware of  — certainly there must be more — are concerned with the broad categories of sustainable cities, service design, and social innovation, for example the Desis network (see for example Desis USA at Parsons) on design for social innovation and sustainability. In the UK we’ve recently had the Urban Buzz project. And the Young Foundation also does social innovation work in the UK.

But it’s not clear to me that these initiatives are explicitly acknowledging the need for de-growth. Maybe it’s taboo to say so. In a recent article on “common wealth” economist Richard Norgaard says, “rather than talking about market failure we’re talking about how to work within the market and make it better. If you are on the wrong path, optimizing doesn’t help a lot.” Also, in some of these initiatives it doesn’t always feel as though design or architecture has clearly articulated a role for itself. Perhaps this represents the tension between “design thinking” as applied across all sorts of endeavours, versus old fashioned design-as-formgiving. Or perhaps it just presents too much of a fundamental, even existential, conflict with what design is perceived to do—make more and better stuff.

more and better stuff

What’s your view? what are the substantive efforts underway to position design activism in the overconsumption, de-growth area? Is it a legitimate “cause” and if so how do we frame it? At this point I don’t have answers (will I ever?) I only have questions…

Chemicals have a been a theme for me over the past few weeks. First I had a reader inquiry challenging the idea that there could be any health risks from plastics in food and drink packaging. Then, I had a run-in with my son’s school over a new, portable classroom that wasn’t properly aired before his class started using it, making the indoor air of very questionable quality.

Plastics–are they OK?

A reader of my Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability wrote to challenge the idea that plasticizers and other chemical additives in plastic could cause a health hazard. She argued that with today’s strict regulations there is no risk of harm from plastic food packaging.

In the book I talk about about a range of issues concerning plastics and more generally, chemicals. For example, I discuss downcycling and suggest that plastic drink bottles remade into textiles contain chemicals that aren’t intended for contact with skin. I also note that there are nearly 100,000 chemicals in use, few of which have been tested, and given the way our eco-sphere works, these all end up back in the environment in one place (such as our bodies) or another.

In responding to this query I noted that recent research (reported in the Guardian Newspaper) adds to the evidence that substances contained in many common plastics, including rubber used to make clogs, are absorbed through skin contact. (The Guardian Newspaper also produced a special report called “Chemical World” a few years back that is still relevant).

However, the main problem with the chemicals is that not enough of them have been properly tested for health effects, and the result is that we only regulate chemicals that we know about. A classic example is BPA, a chemical additive found in bottled water containers, baby bottles and the like. Last year mounting evidence about adverse health effects from BPA caused it to be withdrawn from the market.

The long term solution to this problem is hatching in the Green Chemistry movement, which is aiming to put the burden of proof of safe chemicals on the manufacturers. Currently a chemical is innocent until proven guilty, however, there are simply too many chemicals and, based on the evidence we do have, no reason to assume their innocence. Proposed green chemistry policies also recognize that health problems might arise for interactive, multiple exposures.

Schools and chemicals

In confronting the school I also had some evidence to hand. Children are more susceptible to environmental contaminants because they breath more, relatively, than adults and they behave in ways that put them in closer contact with their surroundings (crawling on the floor, putting fingers in mouths etc.). Poor indoor air quality can result from a combination of factors, such as poor ventilation, chemical emissions from new construction and finishing materials, mold (particularly in carpets) and so forth.

Increasingly research is showing a positive link between good indoor air quality and better student health, behavior, attendance, and academic performance. More broadly, sustainable design in schools is showing similar benefits (particularly air quality in association with daylighting). For example, recently completed, sustainably designed high schools in Oregon (by Boora Architects) are showing these benefits.

In addition, there are several organizations concerned with school design, and not only indoor air quality. The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) has a good report on indoor air quality on its website, along with other resources. Together with the state of California, CHPS tested a number of materials for off-gassing of chemicals, and the findings are also available on the CHPS website in the Low Emitting Materials Table. In the UK there is a similar oganization, the CIBSE schools design group.

Another group concerned about schools, environmental contaminants, and health is the Children’s Environmental Health Network. Their report “ABCs of Healthy Schools” details many areas of concern for new school building as well as finding and eliminating problems in existing settings. The American Architectural Foundation also hosts the “Great Schools by Design” program that publishes a number of reports on their findings.

An Activist Challenge

With chemicals the main challenge is what we don’t know. There are some things we do know, such as some of the air quality or platicizer issues mentioned above, and where possible we can aim to make those problems and solutions more widely visible, and to disrupt routine practices that make use of bad chemicals. The struggle in this regard is that many of these bad chemicals are still legal, and many of the practices, such as putting children in an improperly ventilated new classroom, is also within regulations. My son’s school is “looking into” the issue, but it comes back to the point that as long as it meets regulation, there is little justification for remediation.

Here it makes sense to join up with groups, such as those mentioned above, that are already working on these issues. I’m reminded of a quotation from architect Teddy Cruz who, working on an affordable housing project with a nonprofit housing group, noted that part of the design process was explicitly political–to find a way to change regulation, “the project became a political instrument to change code” and the construction became a political framework.* But this kind of work is not contained within a single project. Cruz comments that although he has built a number of buildings, it takes time to build a political position.

For the many problems we don’t know about, we may need to consider more old fashioned collective action. For example, if you are a member of a professional design association (even if you’re not), urge your association to support green chemistry legislation so that individual consumers and designers are not stuck trying to find research to determine the safety of any given chemical.

* (see Journal of Architectural Education 2007, 60(4), “Introduction” and page 8 )

Earlier this week I attended a lecture by urban sociologist Richard Sennett titled “the social craftsman.” He talked about the possibility that we will have a “jobless” economic recovery (if you can call it that). And he argued that contrary to popular belief, highly skilled labor is not scarce, that most people are capable of doing what we call “highly skilled” labor.

I’ve been thinking about employment, skills, and unemployment for a while now. The labor movement was one of the “old” social movements (along with civil rights and womens’ suffrage). The labor movement achieved success in many ways, but then became institutionalized and arguably, lost its way while being battered by a number of global forces affecting labor. Despite an increasingly dire employment landscape, labor union membership is in decline and labor unions seem to be scoffed at as much as, if not more than, respected.

New issues concerning labor, and more particularly “skills,” that have caught my attention are several:

- a number of recent reports on what types of skills are required to develop and maintain sustainable communities (see for example: research council initiative on “skills and knowledge for sustainable communities”, the BRASS paper “Understanding the Role of Skills, Learning and Knowledge for Sustainable Communities” see working papers, The U.K. Government’s Egan Review: Skills for Sustainable Communities, and Arup’s Mind the Skills Gap, and two more in an addendum at bottom).

- recent investigations into how skills related to sustainability can be integrated into professions, including architecture, see for example the network on professional practice for sustainable development and Building Sustainable Communities: developing the skills we need by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

- questions regarding what types of skills are needed for social entrepreneurship (article in the Stanford Social Innovation review, “not just anyone can make breakthrough change”) and how cities can encourage social innovation (Breakthrough Cities report).

At the same time, as I review a number of cases of design activism, I see many examples where being involved in a design process helps people (non designers) acquire and apply new skills. But I also come across critiques of how contemporary design, by simplifying everything down to the touch of a button, or requiring disposal/demolition rather than allowing repair/rennovation, actually takes away many of the skills people used to possess (see for example this paper by Ezio Manzini).

So on the one hand designed artefacts may be taking skills away from people, but on the other hand participatory or co-design processes might be able to help people acquire new skills. In the rest of this discussion I leave behind the issue of artefacts that designers create, except to note that there is an obvious gap between designers acquiring skills relevant to sustainability and opportunities to apply them. For example, many students that study sustainable design can’t find jobs through which to apply these skills, something I’ve written about before here (on how to find a job in sustainable design) and here (on the future of sustainable design education).

Seen through the lens of activism, can design processes address unemployment and employable skills? My sense is that in most instances of participatory design, the goals for participation center on an artefact, such as a landscape (park), building, or object. Little structured thought is given to what skills may result from participation. Yet in presenting the design results, the design teams often comment on the personal development of the participants as an added side benefit, alongside the central goal of creating an artefact such as a beautiful park or effective school.

What if designers joined up with labor activists, neighborhood regeneration groups and others to look more specifically at how design processes have a role in re-skilling the labor force? Although this may be more common in the developing world context, where I know of a few examples (see the BaSiC initiative’s work in Mexico), I’m less familiar with this kind of approach in North America or Europe. I’ve heard more about designers mentoring young, inner city designers (for example the Reciprocity Foundation’s proof of concept program), or creating design-focused high schools and the like.

Although I don’t have a perfect example of something like this (I’d love to hear about more) there is one example that exemplifies some of this thinking. It’s a project that architect Will Alsop did with British nonprofit Rideout (Creative Arts for Rehabilitation) to redesign the concept of “prison.” McGray, writing in Metropolis (August 2006) commented, “As he spent more time with the men, Alsop began to feel that prison was molding them to prison life, not the life they would one day lead beyond the prison walls.” And this led him to consider the social cost to bad prison design. A better prison design, which Alsop developed with the inmates, included a less sprawling building that left room for gardens that prisoners could tend and learn to maintain, and other sites for training including a small restaurant, barbershop, radio station, and construction workshop. Prisoners also proposed a small hotel for family visitors.

In this prison example the inmates arguably gained experience in design thinking and gained a sense of possibility through envisioning the types of training and skills they would like to have. I’m sure many of us are familiar with community design projects during which participants learn to garden, build, or gain experience making models and drawings. But have we thought explicitly about what skills participants gain, skills the projects might later deliver (such as some that were proposed for the prison redesign) and how that portfolio of skills might be applied in the community? In addition to trade skills, such as construction or landscaping, are there also skills related to organization, leadership, public speaking, teamwork, negotiation? what about other forms of media or computer skills associated with collaborative projects? How would people present evidence of these skills?

As much as designers may be worried about their own employment these days, there does seem to be a productive, perhaps even activist, role for them in worrying about other people’s employment and skills as well.

addendum 16 November 09

Two more reports on skills and the built environment now out:
The Future’s Green: Jobs and the UK Low-carbon Transition from the Institute of Public Policy Research
Grey to Green: How we shift funding and skills to green our cities which focuses particularly on landscape architecture, by CABE

I am a few days late on the climate action blog post (action day was the 16th October). I want to divide this post into two parts. First if you’re just becoming aware or trying to inform yourself about climate issues. Second if you’re already active on climate issues.

 In the first case, and on a professional level, a good place to start is gaining basic climate literacy (perhaps as part of gaining eco-literacy, so much the better). One could do worse than to watch Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Other sources on the basics include the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, or the Climate Literacy Network. On a personal level you can also calculate your ecological or carbon footprint (at bioregional, wattzon, or the Carbon Trust) and start figuring out ways to reduce it. This challenge is a good way to bring the issue “to life” in your design practice.

In the second case, you’re already active on climate change. Perhaps you are looking at energy efficient design, dematerialization, or reconfiguring transport. In my recent readings of some new books on climate change, such as Giddens’ The Politics of Climate Change and Mark Diesendorf’s Climate Action: A Campaign Manual for Greenhouse Solutions, I’m struck by the fact that the design of the built environment and manufactured objects is rarely mentioned explicitly.

Of course in policy proposals that deal with efficiency and transition, design is everywhere implied. Consider some of the following proposed policy directions for achieving climate stability:

- set regulations and standards for energy efficiency
- allocate personal carbon budgets
- foster a socially just transition to a steady state economy

But typically these policy initiatives are high level abstractions that don’t discuss what it means in design terms. Some design groups  join in on the policy level, for example Architecture 2030 and the American Institute of Architects have adopted policies for carbon neutral new and renovated buildings by 2030. The policy has subsequently been taken up by both the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the national Association of Governors. This policy starts to make a more explicit connection to design, but 2030 is a long way off. What about today?

How can designers make more explicit and purposeful connections with these broader policy-driven aspects of the climate stabilization movement? There might be several ways.

1. designers are in a position to help people imagine appealing, or at least workable, “if…then” scenarios. For example, if we each have a carbon budget of X then here are some attractive, or simply feasible, lifestyle choices and tools. I’ve seen a number of interesting design concepts for making energy “visible” in the home with glowing electrical cords, energy monitors, or this Danish project that lets you create an energy “cap” for your home and share energy rations among your appliances. But none of the concepts I’ve seen so far are explicitly linked to the idea of a personal carbon budget.

2. design can materially demonstrate the future in the present. For example, there are currently a number of building projects struggling to get to “carbon neutral” status. Interesting examples are Yale’s new Kroon Hall (School of Forestry and Enviro Studies) and the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. These and other projects suggest a range of opportunities and challenges that show there is still room for radical thinking to get right down to carbon neutral, to cut the building’s energy load. My guess is that some of the change will involve social and not just technical approaches. What are we willing to live with, and without? In addition, product designers should think about their role in various carbon neutral building scenarios — what if it means smaller buildings? new social arrangements? different appliance systems?

Carbon neutral…The Aldo Leopold Legacy Center. Photo: Mark Heffron/The Kubala Washatko Architects

3. design is increasingly being recognized as a tool around which to build social infrastructure. A large task in the policy goal of “fostering transition” involves developing resilient and just social fabric, that is, reconnecting people and places outside of commercially driven contexts. Transition Towns (Totnes being the first one) have been good at this and bear further study. Another interesting group here in the UK, Glass House, has a good model for participatory design processes that fundamentally change communities, arguably preparing them to take on bigger “transition” tasks.

The important thing is to think about how to link explicitly to broader climate stability movements, rather than running along “in parallel” or worse, running in a different direction. Connecting with organizations in these movements may involve some convincing that design has an important role right now beyond the educational graphics that most social change groups might first think about. I note that there are many fantastic graphic design projects dealing with climate change and we need more of these as well. But designers working outside of graphics have the challenge of helping Climate activists to see ways to link abstract policy initiatives to actual spaces and lifestyles.

What are your thoughts on making this link?

A couple of other resources:
S. Peake and J. Smith, Climate Change: From Science to Citizenship. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Stephen Hale, The new politics of climate change: why we are failing and how we will succeed. downloadable here.

Health Care … a timely topic. This post features some of the health related projects I’ve come across in my research on design activism. Designers surely can’t affect the health insurance situation—or can they, service designers?—but the projects below show some of the other categories where designers are trying to improve health outcomes and experiences of health care.

Massachusetts General Hospital’s rooftop healing garden

Things
Designers have been working on a range of things, or products, to improve health “performance.” One example is a range of new pill bottles that are easier to read, that talk, or that will call and remind you when to take their pills (Metropolis article here). Similar interventions are occurring in child-friendly medical devices, such as the IV tricycle that lets children drive their IV around with them. The tricycle was a project of student Jetske Verdonk at the Design Academy Eindohoven.

Tricycle IV by Jetske Verdonk at the Design Academy Eindohoven

Interior architecture
A number of practitioners are taking aim at the interior construction and finishes in hospitals and health clinics. Not only are designers realizing that ecological design is good for human health, but they’re also starting to look at health more holistically.

One example is an Italian clinic that started with the human being at the center, rather than starting with a web of regulations for hygiene, efficiency and technology. Designer Giannantonio Vannetti took a holistic approach that encompassed daylight, color, art, and gardens. (Metropolis report here.) For example blue has a calming quality and yellow has a quality that soothes pain. A mounting body of research shows that patients recover more quickly when exposed (even if only through a view) to nature.

Research in the UK has also highlighted the general mediocrity in hospital design. The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Royal College of Nursing published a report on radical improvements in hospital design addressing similar holistic issues.

Landscape
I noted above that nature, either being in it or seeing it, helps patients recover better, and some hospitals are starting to pick up on this finding. Two particular manifestations occur in labyrinths and healing gardens. The first labyrinth was installed in a California hospital in 1997. The labyrinth project has documented many more since then. The group also has an article on labyrinths in hospital/healing settings.

Labyrinth by Labyrinth Enterprises installed at West Clinic in Memphis TN

Massachusetts General Hospital offers an example of a rooftop healing garden which provides therapeutic benefits as well as energy savings. The garden was designed by Cambridge Seven Associates and Halvorson Design Partnership, who focused on the user experience. The soil layer of the garden acts as effective insulation.

Reform versus transformation
The above examples are all in the vein (pardon the pun) of health care reform. That is they each suggest reforming the equipment, the interiors and the landscapes of our health care environment.

But there are also designers thinking about transformation of the way we address health. One example of a transformative approach comes from a public health doctor. Dr. Richard Jackson argues that our car-dependent suburban life is so unhealthy that it may be killing us. His book, Urban Sprawl and Public Health (with Frumkin and Frank) details these arguments. For example, instead of using drugs to treat depression, high blood pressure, or obesity, doctors should be politically and socially fighting for communities that do not rely on us sitting in cars for hours each day. Similar arguments and research stem from groups such as Active Living by Design, a program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Adding to the transformative way we look at health, recent work at University College London makes explicit the links between health and climate change. The UCL team focused on key areas: patterns of disease and mortality, food security, water and sanitation, shelter and human settlements, extreme events, and population migration.

A final example of transformative ways of thinking about health care emerges from work of the Design Council in the UK. Their research looked at the notion of “co-creating” health through expert patient forums and other systems approaches, often supported by networked communities. I keep a copy of this report on my website here. Further work stemming from Design Council program Design of the Times (DOTT) also addressed design interventions in health care (sexually transmitted diseases, dementia and “cyborg” implications for health).

— — —

Are these the best ways for designers to engage in health care? How could they play a bigger and more effective role in the debate, given that the role of design is necessary, but not sufficient, to solve the problems…

P.S. Change.org’s blog on social entrepreneurship also published a post on health today, looking at the social determinants of health (eg working conditions, physical environments, income etc.) and highlighting a board game that aims to teach players about these social determinants. Another transformative approach?

This review is from an online newsletter on lifecycle design issues (covering LCA design tools and related teaching tools such as powerpoint slides) over at The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability.

Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable by Nathan Shedroff (Rosenfeld Media 2009)

There is much to like in Nathan Shedroff’s new book, Design is the Problem, which is a survey of sustainable design approaches that can be applied across the lifecycle of products. Shedroff also provides contextual and background information about sustainable design in a business context. The book succeeds at covering a wide range of concepts relevant to a designer or business person who wants to learn about sustainable design. In reviewing the book I noticed three main things about it:

– It’s a really useful survey of methods and approaches.
– The style of the book may affect how you can use it.
– Regarding activism, there’s an interesting tension running under the surface.

In this review I look at these three aspects more closely.

Good Survey

In looking at both approaches to sustainability generally (for example, what it is, how it’s measured) and at methods (such as design for efficiency, buying local, or design for disassembly) Shedroff usefully goes further than the norm. For example, he goes beyond environmental concerns to look at social and economic indicators for sustainability. From an activist standpoint, Shedroff includes a remarkably interesting list of criteria used in social investment screening, noting that all of the issues “become the focus of protest at some point.” Here is yet another angle on the value of activism to design!

Shedroff also goes beyond the “three Rs” (reduce, reuse and recycle) to consider “Restore” in which he discusses systems. He closes with a section on “Process” which also starts to weave together and support some of the previous, more check-listy sections, by looking at innovation, development, and corporate reporting of results. Another good aspect of the book is Shedroff’s frank, conversational tone, reminding readers that there are no easy answers to difficult challenges. His range of examples also covers many different kinds of products, such as tools, garments, electronics, vehicles, food, luggage and so forth.

Where he succeeds best is in encouraging readers to step back and see systems, bigger questions and contexts, while tying these ideas to relevant user/customer experiences.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

The Style of the book

The book’s tone and content clearly make it the writing equivalent to “business casual” attire. Perhaps the author and publisher thought this stance would be compromised by detailed notes and references, but for whatever reason, sources for many of the book’s assertions are weak and potentially compromise the book’s usefulness. As an author myself I know how difficult it is to balance “notation” with the flow of reading, to decide which assertions require notation, and to manage and accurately credit sources. In the end it is always difficult to get the balance right and ultimately it depends on the readers.

A few examples illustrate this issue. Consider the section on usability, where the author presents a diagram on the levels of meaning and follows it with a list of the 15 core meaning attributes. No source for these is given. In discussing product take-back programs, Shedroff asserts, “the packaging redesign (and material savings) that was necessary under these conditions [in Germany] was duplicated in places even without the same taxes and laws.” But there is no source to indicate what “places” these might be. In the disassembly section there is a list of techniques but no sources for any of them or for the general topic of disassembly. A list of general resources at the end of the book, though useful, doesn’t correspond to chapters (such as “disassembly”) in a way that would help the reader further explore the topic.

For readers seeking general inspiration, the lack of notes and sources is not an issue. But the problem is that the book will serve most readers as a “reference.” If I’m a practicing designer and I want to investigate the packaging or disassembly further, I have to start from scratch. Yet surely Shedroff had sources that he used to develop these sections of the book. Why not share them? If there aren’t many sources (which I suspect is sometimes the case) then it’s also helpful for the reader to know. Similarly if I’m teaching or if I’m a student, I’d like to have more evidence with which to follow up the various claims and methods described in the book. As Shedroff himself acknowledges, there is still lot of debate around sustainability and that makes evidence more important.

The index is also weak for a book that is meant to serve as a reference. For example, although watches are mentioned, “watch” is not in the index. Similarly snap-fit and snap-on issues are mentioned, but “snap” is not in the index. The searchable, PDF version of the book solves the problem and is included with the purchase of the paperback…but you have to be at your computer to use it.

On the good side the book has short “chapters” presented in a clear, well-organized table of contents that make the methods and approaches themselves easy to find.

screen captures from the PDF version of the book, Design is the Problem

Interesting tension

From an activist perspective, Shedroff’s book is perhaps most interesting for how it tries to navigate the tension between what businesses can do and what actually needs to be done. Businesses can be activists in the way they use design. But there is a gap where the capacity (and willingness?) of businesses to advocate or act on sustainability ends and the interests and mechanisms (democracy, social movements, etc.) of wider society are necessary.

This tension manifests itself in the book, particularly in the contrast between the beginning and ending, which are by turns alarmist and revolutionary, and the central core of the book. At the beginning we find community resiliency compared with terrorism and rhetorical questions about reducing the world’s population in any socially acceptable way. Yet the core of the book carries the message: “we must change—but not too much.” Shedroff comments that, “getting too far [ahead] of your customers or the market can be more disastrous than being too far behind.”

Case studies such as Cliff Bar and Apple Computer highlight how the companies undertake sustainability work, but covertly, to avoid “castigation from environmental groups.” In a BP case study Shedroff presents the lesson as “be ready to offer more information,” a recommendation quite far from the transparency that most public agencies and activists would prefer (consider the green chemistry movement).

The book also resists investigating lifestyle changes even when they are quite obvious—do without a certain material, don’t eat a certain food. In these cases Shedroff tries to stick with the science of the comparison rather than stepping back to the societal level. For example in a discussion of buying locally, he presents the case of lamb and the counterintuitive result that “lamb grown in New Zealand and shipped to England had a lower environmental footprint than lamb raised in England.” What about not eating lamb?

In laying out the scope of problems and the systems view, Shedroff seems to argue for transformation. He wants to see business, and designers within business, as central change agents, but the “stop short” nature of the book, which counsels reform, shows how limited businesses ultimately are. Emerging “social” elements (such as lifestyle changes, social enterprise, social innovation, and social movements) will probably ultimately drive transformation and outpace what business alone can do.

Positive Recommendation

I like Shedroff’s book as a very useful collection of information in one place. I wish he had been bolder with respect to the business context and more thorough in his notation. But perhaps we can see the book as trying to meet people where they are and take them forward. That’s a good step.

I’ve heard a lot recently about how those of us working on social change issues, from climate change to health care, should avoid trying to scare people into change. We shouldn’t be fear mongers.

Object Orange, a Detroit group highlights abandoned, often
crime ridden houses by painting them orange

But a couple of recent episodes of “direct action” social protest have gotten me thinking about the fact that I rarely hear anyone, least of all designers, talk about how scary, even dangerous, it can be to engage in protest and confrontation, even in their mildest forms. And I’m inclined to think that the fear, risk, and danger of social protest deter designers perhaps even more than others.

First consider these recent episodes:

1. the conviction of 22 UK climate activists who obstructed a coal train.
George Monbiot, writing in the UK’s Guardian newspaper notes that scientists and journalist can “bang on about the climate crash until everyone has died of boredom” but direct action like the coal train obstruction makes the issue real in an entirely different way. He also reports that research suggests that, “the greater the personal cost of the action you take, the more likely other people are to respect and follow your cause.”

2. pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran.
Sociologist Jeffrey Goodwin, considering the recent protests after the Iranian elections, asked why, for example, people in the US didn’t take to the streets protesting the flawed 2000 election between Bush and Gore. He notes that a flawed election has to “generate such outrage, such rancor, such disgust, that people are willing to bear the costs of protest, up to and including, in many cases, facing truncheons and bullets.” (emphasis added)

Protest and direct action are powerful, but also risky and potentially dangerous. By contrast, personal change–drive less, eat organic food–is relatively safe and “easy.” As Derrick Jensen argues, writing in Orion magazine, personal change doesn’t equal political change:

“Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Is design activism ever protest?

River Glow by architects David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang, indicates
water quality with green or red floating lights.

Where does design activism sit on the spectrum from “safe” personal change to risky social protest? Most “design activism” is not too confrontational and designers typically put their artifacts on the line rather than themselves. For example, two New York architects created “River Glow”, a floating and highly visible monitor that glows green when water quality is OK and glows red when water quality is too low. A designer created tree “houses” for protesters occupying a forest. In the project Object Orange, shown above, designers and artists painted condemned houses bright orange to shame the local government into demolition as a step toward improving blighted neighborhoods. “Critical” artifacts (also called “discursive design” in this article), such as a vase made out of a gun or a voting ballot on a french fries carton, are often the subject of exhibitions rather than street protest.

Occupy a forest in style–tree tents by Dutch designer Dré Wapenaar

These examples show that designers engage in protest, but it strikes me that their work may often be both less strategic and less sustained than it could be.

Confrontation…why not?

Returning to Jenson’s Orion article, with examples of powerful industries and systems such as industiral agriculture, petrochemicals, energy and transportation, he notes that, “the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.”

He acknowledges that confrontation is scary for any number of reasons. Below are some of the reasons I think designers might be deterred by the risks and dangers in protest:

• designers live under the pressure of appearing cool–how they look, the places they see and in which they are seen, the artifacts they produce. Protest does not typically support a “cool” persona. It is in varying degrees messy, unpredictable and dangerous. Can any amount of “rebranding” change that?
• designers are trained to serve clients and users in a business context, a context in which “protest” is not comfortable. When design gets involved in protest it often starts to be called “public art.”
• designers routinely take creative risks, and it may be that a person has an overall risk threshold beyond which they can’t emotionally go. Perhaps designers bump up against this threshold more than others.
• most designers are from the privileged classes, so they have something to loose.
• the way design measures success is heavily invested in existing power structures — starchitects work for the wealthy, after all.

For any activist there seems to be a problem of finding the balance between maintaining social acceptance on some level and provoking change. I begin to wonder if it’s the case that activist groups need to know more about design and how to deploy it, or if it’s the case that designers need to become better activists. Perhaps both.

What do you think? Let me know of interesting cases where designed artifacts or designers have been involved in social protest.

Occasionally I get notes from readers who are working on interesting projects. From time to time I’d like to present short “round ups” of the news I’m getting. Here’s the first:

Wired Unplugged

Are printed magazines dead? Should they be, from an environmental standpoint? Antonio Scarponi, in Zurich, sent me this set of instructions for how to make something new out of your old copy of Wired magazine. You can make a DVD sleeve, an envelope, a wallet, and so forth.

The project was part of WIRED’s launch in the UK and Italy and one may ask, is it really activism? Although it may not be radical or new (I recall seeing folded wallets made out of the currencies of fallen dictators), and the audience for WIRED is hardly downtrodden, the project does engage people in issues of materials and reuse. As I wrote in my sustainable consumption article, instructions rather than things, and doing rather than having, are probably central to a “low product” economy.

Bronx River Crossing

Alexander Levi, of Schachter & Levi, SLO Architecture in New York, sent me information about Bronx River Crossing an outreach project that he is working on with his colleague, Amanda Schachter, along the Bronx River.

The two architects are currently Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellows, and the project involves working with Bronx high school students and teachers, as well as others in the community, to collaboratively design and build a large, floating model of the Lower Bronx River Watershed which was then floated across the river. The aim of the project is to “physically activate and recast” the Watershed as “the ecological and social spine of the borough.”

The model towed along the river

The floating model is made of
“3,000 used MetroCards, 30 broken umbrellas, 2,000 plastic bottles, 300 sycamore burrs, and 50 PVC window frames hauled off a demolition site”

close-up of the model

The project parallels Levi and Schachter’s design of the Bronx River Community Charter School that will be located near the Bronx River. The school plans to make the river a main line of the curriculum emphasizing ecology and community activism.

This project brings to mind the bioregional quiz, “Where You At?” developed by Charles et. al. (1981) and which I include in my book. The quiz as well as the project suggest we should all know things such as where our drinking water originates, where our waste goes, the identities of our native plants and animals and their seasons, and a number of other aspects of our regional ecologies. It suggests, in essence, that ecological literacy is fundamental to design as well as to cities. Bronx River Crossing engages people dynamically in these issues.

THE WRANGELKIEZ COLLECTION. A social design project

Kathi Stertzig alerted me to a project in Berlin addressing design’s role in collaborative, open innovation. The project, which ran in June, was part of the International Design Festival Berlin, and sought to bring a group of international designers to a community to study, interact and collaborate. The designers proposed ways to leverage existing skills, facilities, and relations to improve communication and relations within the community.

The neighbourhood around the Wrangelstrasse in Kreuzberg has been through difficult social and economic times but has seen more creative professionals coming to the area recently and wanting to contribute on the terms of the pre-existing community.

I’m looking forward to finding out what the designers proposed and how the community responded. This model of “co-design” seems to be on the rise, and often as a political as much as creative action, but it would be useful to see more results.

Dialogue through Design

Kara Pecknold, of Vancouver Canada emailed me about her project in Rwanda on Visual Coversations. She said, “The reality is, in Africa particularly, one more product isn’t going to do what people might imagine it could.” Her work involved helping a cooperative of weavers with their graphic identity and a website, although the weavers had no access to computers or internet. Realizing that a shared language and assumed technologies were not present, Pecknold worked with visual design approaches that created a shared process. Pecknold used portions of IDEO’s “Human Centered Design Toolkit” (about which she’s quoted in FAST company here) and created this 7 minute video that provides an overview of the project.

The “field desk” in action

Pecknold’s project engages with the increasing awareness that “developed” countries have gotten plenty of things wrong whereas developing countries may in fact have approaches or models that might benefit developed countries. As I noted in a previous post along these lines, both industrialized and developing countries need new development paths and those paths could come from anywhere. As Pecknold suggests, the question of what “languages” we use to share these paths is critical.

More?
Have any comments on these projects? your own interesting project? get in touch or leave a comment.

Making potential climate change flooding visible and enabling us to discuss
adaptation. The Watermarks Project of Bristol, all images courtesy of
Chris Bodle and the Watermarks Project

As a U.S. citizen I’m trying to decide my own position on climate legislation “The American Clean Energy and Security Act,” aka the Waxman-Markey bill (pros/cons via Worldchanging), now going through congress. Should my letters to congressional representatives be for or against? At the same time, last Thursday I attended “Sustainable Lives? The challenges of low-carbon living in a changing economic climate” a conference in London by the RESOLVE research group. I’m interested in their “lifestyles” strand looking at sustainable consumption.

The RESOLVE conference didn’t explicitly consider design, but it did offer up some design-relevant thoughts regarding the issue of climate change. The overriding theme at the conference was “contradiction,” a theme introduced by Tony Giddens (that’s renowned British sociologist Lord Sir Anthony Giddens to most of us).

On the one hand, he argued that we need a return to utopianism, and that messages of climatic catastrophe will not inspire people to change. We need to concentrate on positive future visions. On the other hand, he suggested that some degree of climate catastrophe will most likely occur–it’s too late to prevent effects from climate change– and that we need to seriously rethink adaptation strategies.

For Giddens these two contradictory strands are united in the need for a general “return to planning,” a key mechanism for developing a politics of the long term. He suggested that planning fell out of favor in the 1960s and 70s, but that it was time to resuscitate it. He also urged us to position climate change outside the environmental movement and outside party politics, noting that few countries have the essential cross party consensus to act on climate change (see Giddens’ new book, The Politics of Climate Change).

Philosopher Kate Soper captured the contradictory utopianism-in-catastrophe idea in a different way, suggesting that we need to recognize people’s concern about sustainable lifestyles being of low quality. We must articulate the nature of what will be lost in the transition to low-carbon lifestyles and describe the high quality of what will replace it. For both commentators, the problem is the abstract, long term and invisible nature of climate change and the lack of strong, obvious benefits for taking action to prevent/lessen it.

Design activists are already intervening along this planning and visioning path, looking at both adaptation and alternative positive visions.

Adaptation
One example comes from landscape architect Chris Bodle of the Watermarks Project in Bristol, which aimed to facilitate real discussion of adaptation. The team marked predicted flood lines onto buildings around the city, helping people to “imagine the depth and extent of this potential future flooding - allowing us to measure the possible future water levels against ourselves in familiar environments.” The project relied on U.K. government-estimated flood predictions and looked at future dates such as 2017 and 2047.

Other examples of design exploring adaptation to high water levels include Dutch designs for amphibian houses and an architect-designed flood levee that expands or contracts depending on water levels– the alluvial sponge comb.

Quality of context
Ezio Manzini and Francois Jegou have done a fair amount of work on the topic of improving our lifestyle quality while at the same time reducing materialism (see their “sustainable everyday” project and the book of the same name). I also recently wrote about the “low product” scenario and the implication for design of “non purchase” solutions, civic places and co-design processes, that begin to suggest a satisfying new low consumption “social language.”

Kate Soper pointed to public art and gave as an example Anish Kapoor’s Chicago Cloud Gate as a public installation that captures people’s imaginations and offers an activity that counters shopping or otherwise material consumption.

A few last contradictory thoughts

As these examples show, and several speakers at the RESOLVE meeting also highlighted in different ways, the climate challenge requires new conceptualizations of what is “normal” and ways of moving people to this new “normal.”

Tim Jackson closed the conference with the observation that the moment of transformation–perhaps the moment between the “old normal” and the “new normal”– is a moment of pure contradiction, essentially a moment of breakdown. This is the moment of creative destruction, from which change arises. It may be useful for designers to consider this moment of breakdown as they negotiate climate politics and climate-oriented change.

As for Waxman Markey — my letters will be for, encouraging passage of the bill with improvements and added strength.

Architect Michael Herrman’s Nomadic Prayer Space,
one of the projects he uses to explore “the architecture
of displacement” in his new book, Hypercontextuality
(Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, 2008)

This month I’ve published a feature article on Core77 (the industrial design online magazine), on the topic of sustainable consumption. The article has lots of images and starts like this…

“Will “no product” become the new brand? John Hockenberry provocatively suggests that given the global economic crisis, “no product” is now plausible. But how plausible given our society organized around economic growth? I’m talking here about consumerism as both the primary purpose of growth, and its principal driver—the high product context.

Reliance on continuous growth makes the economy unstable (it must grow or it collapses) as well as unsustainable (it strives for infinite growth on finite planetary resources). Tim Jackson provides a very accessible overview of this situation in his great new report, “Prosperity without Growth?,” in which he also proposes an alternative—a steady state economy. Enter the “low product” context. Enter the Nomadic Prayer Space, knitfitti and the floating swimming pool. Before getting to the examples and the implications for design of a steady state economy, let’s explore “growth” a bit more.”

read the full article on Core77. I know you readers here aren’t big into commenting, but if you have an opinion please leave a comment there.

New post here next week.