The idea is that you can shift a brand’s value to the community, so that collaboration has the advantage over competition. The team (including Alex Bogusky and Rob Schuham of Fearless Media) want to help organize consumers so that they “demand more” in terms of social and environmental benefit, and in terms of what business organizations give back to a community.

The common brand with its CM “common mark” developed by Fearless Media

In response to their argument that the duties of “citizen” and “consumer” are colliding, they attempt to introduce democratic politics to consumer branding. In an era when the size of multinational corporations overshadows the size of governments, and individual consumerism powers the global economy, they argue that voting isn’t enough anymore. No argument here!

They describe their brand as three main elements. The first is a powerful brand backed by a coherent community (they call it the new capitalism community). Bogusky mentioned the likes of the Virgin brand, and asked, what if, by following some guidelines, you had access to the virgin brand. In this case the guidelines, or rules, would be developed by the community which designs and owns the brand. Thus “Common” is organized as a cooperative, rather than a nonprofit.

Three elements of the Common network, from the launch video

The second element of the plan is a way to facilitate the creation of organizations that will take up the Common brand. This element is where Project M comes in. Project M found that you could release designers into the wild for as little as 2 weeks, and they not only addressed community needs, but often ended up forming businesses inadvertently. This is the model of community-designed and -owned business development that Common would like to follow, encouraged along by an “out-cubator” process. It is in this “out in the wild” out-cubator sense they see a big role for designers and other creatives.

The third element is Bogusky and Schuham’s Fearless Revolution Media, which has the role of spreading the word, particularly aggregating the community’s results and amplifying their work.

By way of explaining how this might look Bogusky used the Virgin analogy. What if you were opening a new pizza place, and you had access to the virgin brand so that you could open as “Virgin Pizzas”? Under the Common brand, this new pizza place owner would have access to a similarly powerful brand. My question is, what if this pizza place is on the low end of the price scale and a high end pizza place opens down the street. Are they also going to want to be “Virgin Pizzas”?

They might, if both these pizza places are owned by the Common cooperative–the new capitalism community. It would be a sort of cooperative franchise model (I guess?). If, by contrast, these are separate businesses, each with different owners but both interested in the Common brand, then Common begins to look more like a rating or labelling system.

Common might be a more holistic label perhaps, but sits alongside more targeted labels such as “organic,” “fair trade,” or “energy star.” It becomes another mechanism through which businesses compete. The Common co-operative becomes the group that decides what standard must be met to use the Common label, akin to how the US Green Building Council (a broad-based nonprofit group) decides (and continually revises) what standard must be met to achieve LEED platinum, gold, or sliver ratings for buildings.

I think Common is on the right track to explicitly address ownership, and I hope that they are proposing a sort of cooperative franchise model. Many more questions arise in that case, but we won’t explore them here.

I was reminded of a discussion I had a few years ago with someone who proposed “branding” the concept of sustainability. Why couldn’t sustainability work as a brand and be “sold” in a similar way? Keeping in mind that the basis of a brand is exclusivity, ownership and control, among other things, the answer is: because you can never “compete” over qualities that make up sustainability, such as clean air or happy families, that have no price, that can’t be “owned,” and whose benefits accrue to everyone, no matter who does the good deed of maintaining and protecting these qualities. Although marketeers might argue that these qualities of sustainability should simply have a price put on them, I don’t agree with that approach.

clean air: can’t be owned, benefits accrue to everyone, no matter who protects or maintains it.

Common seems to be arguing two main points. first, rather than exclusive ownership, we tackle the problem of not being able to keep sustainability’s qualities “exclusive” by mirroring openness in the brand (any individual can join) and turning the emphasis to the collective, rather than the individual. This is a bridge–between individual and community–that is arguable missing in much of modern life.

Second Common suggests addressing the problems of maintaining elusive qualities such as clean air and happy families not through price competition, which as discussed won’t work, but rather through democratic processes, such as discussion and debate, among members of the community, about what is important and how we prioritize.

The danger could be that as qualities such as clean air, healthy food, and restored ecosystems are championed by Common, its prices go up and it becomes, like most other green or ethical businesses, the purview of the well-off, those who can afford it. Arguably this is where broader political action engaging with governments, alongside consumer action, has a role.

Still, Common represents a very interesting experiment, with an ostensible role for design and creative initiatives as a starting point. How will cooperative, values-based ownership affect the commissioning and process of design? I would certainly join the cooperative. What about you?

an image by Claire Manibog from her proposed SROI tool for design, read and see more at her blog

Meanwhile there’s an interview on Core77 with Mariana Amatullo of the Design Matters program at Art Center College , which is introducing a new concentration in art and design for social impact, whereas before they operated mainly by project. Core77 also carries a column by Cameron Tonkinwise at Parsons The New School for Design, about the political intricacy of design for social innovation. He’s spurred to address this question by his work with Desis (a project I’ve written about before here) and a Parsons’ Desis project called, “Amplifying Creative Communities.”

an image from the Amplifying Creative Communities project from their website, which contains information about their exhibition, interactive map, etc.

Tonkinwise makes the argument that designers might think they are avoiding politics by simply taking a “do good” ethical position, by creating positive social impact that works. But he makes a compelling argument that this type of apolitical ethical stance becomes a political one because without aiming to change broader systems, it accepts the status quo for everyone outside the scope of the project to hand. For example, he reasons that by using design to create social services (such as senior care) to replace shrinking government resources, then you are, by default, supporting “smaller government,” which may or may not have merits, but does constitute a political position. By not connecting to issues at the scale above the project, this kind of design work might enable the kind of status quo it aims to remedy with its project. He says, “In other words, being ethical, in order to avoid politics, is a political position.”

In this sense, designers working on social impact sometimes, and somewhat naturally, tend to focus on the project scale and see the users and clients as the targets, rather than thinking about their work in broader terms–for example, in terms of social movements for change. The field of design has adapted “change” and “social impact” agendas to fit within design’s traditional goals and orientations such as “human needs” or “usability.” This contrasts with conventional activist frameworks around rights, struggles, grievances and claims.

Activists are overtly political, and, as the term “activism” suggests, take public actions to call for broader change, typically targeting wide audiences and specific decisions makers. Effective activism occurs in ongoing campaigns that are strategically targeted and respond to countermoves by those maintaining the status quo (or worsening it).

So as Tonkinwise suggests, all design for social impact is political, and we might argue that whether consciously or not, it is activism. It calls for social change, but typically it is activism of a relatively weak or unstrategic kind. Tonkinwise suggests that design-based social innovation (read here design for social impact) should be connected to systems of lobbying for wider change, beyond just the project. In a sense he argues for the necessity of social impact designers becoming much more strategic activists, and I agree. I would add that designers would benefit from a closer study of how activism works, what tactics it uses and where its power comes from. We need a better understanding of design as activism.

This blog, DesignActivism.net, is part of a larger study where I’ve looked at this question of how design works as activism, as well as how conventional activists might understand design as a tool of activism. I’ve been sharing some of my insights with you through these posts, but soon I’ll be looking for some input from you on how you’d like me to share my “big picture” on how design works as activism. Look for this in the next post.

One newspaper story I came across this week was about a young woman, fashion designer Tala Raassi, who as a teenager in Iran, had been punished with 40 lashes for wearing indecent clothing according to Islamic law. Upon emigration, her motivation to design swimwear and to turn her design work toward causes, grew directly from the experience (The Sunday Times front section, 29 August 2010). Her t-shirt line, lipstick revolution, pays tribute to women fighting for gender freedom and the name refers to the early years of the Islamic revolution in Iran when women wearing red lipstick was considered an insult to Islamic martyrs. That sounds authentic.

Tala Raassi, Photo Credit: Melissa Golden/Redux

In the style section of the same newspaper was an article by a celebrity jewelry designer, Laura Bailey, who tells of her experience creating a line of fair-trade jewelry with the company Made, at their workshops in at the slum Kibera in Kenya. Bailey didn’t seek out the chance to design for Made, rather, it was a challenge to her that came from Made via a mutual celebrity friend. Although Bailey was already active with some charities, responding to this request made an impact on her. She writes, “What I’ve seen today has changed the way I feel about shopping — I want to know that whoever makes my clothes, jewellery or bags has been properly respected and rewarded” (The Sunday Times Style section, 29 August 2010, p 28).

And what does Made accomplish? Made says,
“Established in 2005, the made brand unites designer fashion with the principles of Fair and Ethical Trading, as an alternative approach to conventional trade. Our goods are produced by independent artisans and small communities in Africa. We provide living wages and healthy working conditions along with information and business planning to help workers develop sustainable businesses.” That also sounds authentic.

Laura Bailey, photo Made

I also came across the story of Kate Cross, a deaf audiologist, who teamed up with a jewelry designer to create bejewelled hearing aids in an effort to reduce the stigma associated with them. The “hearrings” dissociate hearing aids from geriatric equipment, giving them potential as fashion accessories similar to eyeglasses. Hearing loss is on the rise yet people wait a very long time before admitting they need a hearing aid. This project addresses a growing health problem–again, it sounds authentic.

image from hearrings

Here we have three different motivations. In the first case, the designer is self-motivated to use her work to fight injustices that she herself suffered. In another case, a celebrity responds to a request to design on behalf of a fair-trade effort. She is motivated by others, by a client, but is then changed by the experience. In the third case, a person who is in a minority, in this case by being deaf, deploys the power of design in order to address the problems she and others in her minority experience. This is the case of a user directing design as activism.

Activist Rinku Sen, in her book “Stir It Up,” describes different types of activist work that might help us make sense of these cases. She characterizes activism in these five categories:

organizing: people doing it for themselves—people suffering from an abuse or injustice taking action themselves to correct it such as fighting for civil rights or access to decent housing, and this often leads to new organizations being formed. Community organizing involves the long term engagement and leadership of those who suffer most in current conditions.

services: providing services to those in need, historically services such as job training, legal aid and so forth.

advocacy: lobbying for and acting on behalf of a group in need, without much involvement from that group. An extreme case would be advocating for the environment where it has no means to advocate for itself, but degrees of advocacy exist for many different groups and issues in society.

mobilization: large scale show of concern, such as petition signing or marches, but without expectation of repeat or continued involvement of the participants.

solidarity: efforts to change the terms of cultural discourse, through opinion pieces, framing of the issues and so forth.

Sen notes that these are all legitimate approaches to social change, even though they have their own methods and, perhaps we might add, motivations. (Sen, Jossey Bass Publishers, 2003, p 25). Here we can see, perhaps, how different circumstances of motivation might lead to different types of change work. In turn we might observe that activists blend and move among these different types of “change” work–perhaps as motivations change. The question of authenticity in activism is much less clear when we consider this range of types, or even “degrees” of activism.

None of these types of work is “wrong” and arguably all accomplish something. Probably they accomplish more when they are working in tandem, across a movement. So I don’t think we can dismiss the efforts of large, successful design firms, for example when they get government contracts that end up allowing them to transform the nature of public buildings. Similarly I don’t think we can say that direct engagement of disadvantaged user groups is the only correct way to work for change. Rather, across the board we probably need to keep the notion of integrated strategy foremost.

If your thing is public engagement, then make sure it is synergistic with advocacy and solidarity efforts, and so on. If you’re an advocate, perhaps through the promotion of eco materials and technology, then mind the benefits you might gain from partnering or learning from organizers and mobilization. Recall that social change is a collective effort and there will always be many players on stage as well as different levels of influence. Authenticity of motivation is perhaps less important than what it leads to in these terms.

I’m interested to learn where your motivation, or interest, in design activism comes from–please comment with a few words about this. For the moment my work sits in the solidarity and perhaps advocacy category with opinion and research pieces like this one, but I have moved around in these categories in the past and hope to keep doing so.

MARC itself is interesting because it combines social sciences with architecture and design to “reveal the connections between built environments and societies.” The group has a number of impressive and ambitious research projects going, for example on climate science and urban design, eco-cities, multifaith spaces, radicalisation in the urban environment, and mapping architectural controversies.

In the case of radicalization (or radicalisation, if you’re in the UK), Ralf Brand’s “The Urban Environment: Mirror or Mediator of Radicalisation” (www.urbanpolarisation.org) took the case study cities of Belfast, Beirut, Berlin, and Amsterdam. The project looked at how the urban environment reflects and influences polarisation processes in cities. The project resulted in a very interesting “Charter for Spaces of Positive Encounters” available for perusal on the website. Elsewhere in the Architecture department at Manchester, the projects group aims to engage student work with life outside the university and an example of their work is “Sharing the City” (www.sharingthecity.org.uk).

Another interesting group that presented at the workshop came from the University of Sheffield. The School of Architecture there has an “Agency Research Centre” that focuses on “transformative research into architectural practice and education.” The group also publishes a journal called “field:” (www.field-journal.org) and volume 3, for example, covered agency and the praxis of activism.

One of the ongoing research projects is called “Spatial Agency” which looks beyond “the building” to consider wider practices of spatial production and how architects are both agents but also able to facilitate the involvement of others. The website contains a database of projects and people through which to explore the negotiation, deliberation, and contention that arises in this field of spatial agency, with examples ranging from community builders to known architect’s studios and from famed neighbourhoods to historical experiments. These examples map out the how-where-why of spatial agency. Although the website navigation is somewhat abstract at this stage, the project and its contents are worth a good look.

Meanwhile over at Loughborough University, the research project “Adaptable Futures” is exploring a different aspect of change in the built environment. The research aims to incorporate the dynamic of time into building design so that buildings can better adapt to change. Although this is in many ways a construction engineering project (it’s based in the Innovative Manufacturing & Construction Research Centre), anyone familiar with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn will find it provocative. This project, more than those mentioned above, is tied into the commercial realm with a focus on non-domestic buildings and partnerships with a number of large companies. This is perhaps why speakers from this project talked more about the politics of public agency negotiation. But it strikes me that the implications of the Adaptable Futures work could be far-reaching in activist terms.

example of Adaptable Futures building components

I stress that this is not a comprehensive summary of work going on in the United Kingdom, rather, it reflects some of the interesting work I encountered at this one workshop–particularly in areas north of London. As always, readers are welcome to add to this review through comments or contacting me directly.

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 )

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

 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.

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).

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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?

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.

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.