design activism

Over at the Harvard Business Review, Umair Haque has written about “titanic institutional failure” — how institutions not only fail to provide value but actively extract it from us, extractive institutions. (His article is “The Economic Roots of Your Life Crisis”). And it got me thinking about the idea of extractive design. Although we might [...]

I’ve been preparing a text on design activism and in particular, what can be learned from social movements. Part of the text is a timeline for “cause-oriented” design, which I include here in order to get input from readers about what is missing or debated. Please comment!  links and references  will come later (sorry, no [...]

There are a couple of items here, an event and a paper. I’m chairing the upcoming event next week, Weds. 25th May. The talk is part of the “Scarcity Exchanges“  program of the research project, Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment. This session speculates on design and consumerism, looking particularly at available material and [...]

wishing you the best beats in the new year More results One of my fellow design activism bloggers (at Social Design Notes) asked if I would share more details of the survey results. Good Idea. I’ve created a list of the sources that people suggested for learning more about design activism. The responses are anonymized [...]

Thanks to everyone who completed the survey. One lucky person has won the $50 gift certificate (to be named upon confirmation). In the survey I asked seven questions to help me shape my results on design activism into something that you can use. Well over 100 of you took time to reveal a bit about [...]

Architects are typically licensed professionals, which means that they subscribe to a code of ethics as part of the licensing process. (I examined and wrote about a range of codes of ethics of design associations for my book, The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability). Although a recent article in Dwell magazine about the merits of architectural [...]

In the previous post I introduced the idea of a form of hippocratic oath for designers, and shared some examples of how the medical hippocratic oath has been adapted for landscape, lighting, graphic, and UX (user experience) design. In this post I turn our attention to product designers. Several practitioners and design observers have pondered [...]

Before getting down to business, a quick reminder that I would like to get your input on design activism, through the short survey found here: http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/353304/your-interest-in-design-activism (you can enter to win a drawing for an Amazon gift voucher.) In this series of 3 posts, I explore the notion of a “Hippocratic oath” for designers. Recall [...]

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been working on a big project to help designers understand and use design as activism. It’s harvest time for this project and I’m getting ready to share the juicy results, but I need your help. Would you answer seven questions for me? Your input could help make [...]

Have you been reading some of the interesting stuff about design for social impact? For example, The School for Visual Arts has recently finished up its summer workshop, “!mpact: Design for Social Change” which introduces participants to “the growing field of design for social advocacy.” One of the particularly interesting projects there was an effort [...]